The Magnificent Ambersons is a 1942 American period drama written, produced, and directed by Orson Welles. Welles adapted Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1918 novel about the declining fortunes of a wealthy Midwestern family and the social changes brought by the automobile age. The film stars Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins, with Welles providing the narration.

Welles lost control of the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons to RKO, and the final version released to audiences differed significantly from his rough cut of the film. More than an hour of footage was cut by the studio, which also shot and substituted a happier ending. Although Welles's extensive notes for how he wished the film to be cut have survived, the excised footage was destroyed. Composer Bernard Herrmann insisted his credit be removed when, like the film itself, his score was heavily edited by the studio.

Even in the released version, The Magnificent Ambersons is often regarded as among the greatest films of all time, a distinction it shares with Welles's first film, Citizen Kane. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1991.

Plot

The Ambersons are by far the wealthiest family in their Midwestern city in the last few decades of the 19th century. As a young man, Eugene Morgan courts Isabel Amberson, but she rejects him after he publicly embarrasses her. She instead marries Wilbur Minafer, a passionless man she does not love, and spoils their child, George. The townspeople long to see George get his "comeuppance."

In the early 20th century, Major Amberson gives a large party at the Amberson Mansion for George, who is home from college for the holidays. Eugene, now a widower who has just returned to town after 20 years, attends. George dislikes Eugene, whom he sees as a social climber, and ridicules Eugene's investment in the automobile. He instantly takes to Eugene's daughter Lucy.

The next day, George and Lucy take a sleigh ride. They pass Eugene, George's aunt Fanny, Isabel, and Isabel's brother, Jack. Eugene's "horseless carriage" has gotten stuck in the snow, and George jeers at them to "get a horse." The Amberson sleigh then overturns, and Eugene, after his vehicle is mobile again, gives everyone a ride back home. George is humiliated by the incident and angered by Eugene's attentions toward Isabel and his mother's obvious affection for Eugene.

Wilbur Minafer loses a substantial amount of money on bad investments and soon dies. George is largely unmoved by his father's death. The night after the funeral, George teases Fanny, who is besotted with Eugene.

Time passes, and Eugene becomes very wealthy manufacturing automobiles, and again courts Isabel, who refuses to risk George's disapproval by telling him about their love. Lucy rejects George's marriage proposal by saying that he has no ambition in life other than to be wealthy and keep things as they are, and she leaves town. The Ambersons invite the lonely Eugene to dinner, where George, blaming him for turning Lucy against him, criticizes automobiles. The Ambersons are shocked by his rudeness, but Eugene says that George may turn out to be right.

That evening, George learns from Aunt Fanny that Eugene has been courting Isabel. Enraged, he rudely confronts a neighbor for spreading gossip about his mother. The next day, George refuses to let Eugene see his mother. Jack tells Isabel about George's terrible behavior, but she declines to do anything that might upset her son. Eugene writes to Isabel and asks her to choose between her son and his love. Heartbroken due to her son's selfishness, Isabel nevertheless chooses George, thus destroying her chance for happiness.

Lucy returns home to find that George is taking his mother to Europe on an extended trip. George talks to Lucy in an attempt to discover if she loves him. She feigns indifference, and they part. Lucy is heartbroken, however, and faints.

Months pass, and Isabel is seriously ill, but George will not allow her to come home for fear that she will renew her relationship with Eugene. He relents only when she starts to die. George refuses to let Eugene go upstairs to visit Isabel on her deathbed although she begs to see Eugene one last time.

After Isabel's death, Major Amberson sinks into senility and dies. His estate is worthless. Jack leaves town to take a job in another city. George intends to live on Fanny's income while he trains to be a lawyer, but she reveals that she lost everything in bad investments, and they are left with only a few hundred dollars to live on for the rest of the year.

Eugene asks Lucy if she will reconcile with George. Lucy instead tells her father a story about an American Indian chief who was "pushed out on a canoe into the sea" when he became too obnoxious, which Eugene understands to be an analogy for George.

Penniless, George gives up his job as a law clerk and finds higher paying work in a chemical factory, which gives him enough money for himself and Fanny to live on. George wanders the city and is dazed by the modern factories and slums, which have grown up around him. In his last night in the Amberson mansion before it is sold, George prays by his dead mother's bed. The narrator says that no one is around to see him receive his comeuppance.

George is seriously injured by an automobile. Lucy and Eugene go to see him at the hospital and reconcile with him. In a hospital corridor, Eugene tells Fanny that Isabel's spirit had inspired Eugene to bring George "under shelter again," which implies that his and Fanny's financial security was assured.

Cast

Production

Adaptation history Welles first adapted The Magnificent Ambersons for a one-hour radio drama performed October 29, 1939, by his Mercury Players on The Campbell Playhouse, with Orson Welles portraying George Minafer, and providing narration. While Welles supplied narration to the film adaptation, Ray Collins was the only actor from the radio production to appear in the film.

Production history

The Magnificent Ambersons was in production October 28, 1941 – January 22, 1942, at RKO's Gower Street studios in Los Angeles. The set for the Amberson mansion was constructed like a real house, but it had walls that could be rolled back, raised, or lowered to allow the camera to appear to pass through them in a continuous take. RKO later used many of the film's sets for its low-budget films, including a series of horror films produced by Val Lewton.

Location shooting took place at various places around the Los Angeles area, including Big Bear Lake, the San Bernardino National Forest, and East Los Angeles. Snow scenes were shot in the Union Ice Company ice house in downtown L.A.IMDb Filming Locations for The Magnificent Ambersons The film was budgeted at $853,950 but this went over during the shoot and ultimately exceeded $1 million.

In a 1973 interview with Dick Cavett, Moorehead recalled the arduous work involved before filming her climactic scene where she sinks against the unheated boiler. In rehearsal, Welles told Moorehead (who was still a novice to film acting) to "play it like a little girl," a characterization which went against what Moorehead had prepared. Then Welles told her to play "like an insane woman." Following that, Welles told her to play it "like she's absolutely inebriated." Then he said to play with "an absolutely vacuous mind." Moorehead was thinking to herself, "What in the world does he want?" She did the scene 11 times, each with a different characterization. For the twelfth time, Welles told Moorehead: "Now play it." After those rehearsals, her playing the scene had "a little bit of the hysteria, it had a little bit of the insanity, it had a little bit of the little girl…. [H]e had mixed it all up in my mind so that the characterization that I played had a little bit of all of these; and it was terribly exciting." Moorehead continued reflecting on Welles's directorial abilities: "He never directed obviously; he always directed in some strange oblique way where you thought 'Well, that isn't right at all.' But if you put your career or the role in his hands he loved to mold you the way he wanted and it was always much better than you could do yourself. He was the most exciting director that you could possibly imagine."

The original rough cut of the film was 131 minutes in length. Welles felt that the film needed to be shortened and, after receiving a mixed response from a March 17 preview audience in Pomona, film editor Robert Wise removed several minutes from it. The film was previewed again, but the audience's response did not improve.

Because Welles had conceded his original contractual right to the final cut (in a negotiation with RKO over a film which he was obliged to direct but never did), RKO took over editing once Welles had delivered a first cut. RKO deleted more than 40 additional minutes and reshot the ending in late April and early May, in changes directed by assistant director Fred Fleck, Robert Wise, and Jack Moss, the business manager of Welles's Mercury Theatre. The retakes replaced Welles's original ending with a happier one that broke significantly with the film's elegiac tone. The reshot ending is the same as in the novel.

Welles did not approve of the cuts, but because he was simultaneously working in Brazil on It's All True for RKO—Nelson Rockefeller had personally asked him to make a film in Latin America as part of the wartime Good Neighbor policy—his attempts to protect his version ultimately failed. Details of Welles's conflict over the editing are included in the 1993 documentary about It's All True.

"Of course I expected that there would be an uproar about a picture which, by any ordinary American standards, was much darker than anybody was making pictures," Welles told biographer Barbara Leaming:

There was just a built-in dread of the downbeat movie, and I knew I'd have that to face, but I thought I had a movie so good—I was absolutely certain of its value, much more than of Kane… It's a tremendous preparation for the boardinghouse… and the terrible walk of George Minafer when he gets his comeuppance. And without that, there wasn't any plot. It's all about some rich people fighting in their house. Welles said he would not have gone to South America without the studio's guarantee that he could finish editing The Magnificent Ambersons there. "And they absolutely betrayed me and never gave me a shot at it. You know, all I could do was send wires… But I couldn't walk out on a job which had diplomatic overtones. I was representing America in Brazil, you see. I was a prisoner of the Good Neighbor Policy. That's what made it such a nightmare. I couldn't walk out on Mr. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy with the biggest single thing that they'd done on the cultural level, and simply walk away. And I couldn't get my film in my hands."

The negatives for the excised portions of The Magnificent Ambersons were later destroyed in order to free vault space. A print of the rough cut sent to Welles in Brazil has yet to be found and is generally considered to be lost, along with the prints from the previews. A documentary team led by Joshua Grossberg and backed by Turner Classic Movies planned a search for the rough cut in September 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, their arrival in Brazil was postponed until 2022. As of April 2024, Grossberg continued to search for the film. Filmmaker Brian Rose revealed in January 2021 he hoped to restore the original version of the film by use of animation, but his plan did not have the backing of the rights holder.