I worked with Robert Wise once. In 1986 I played a small role in Wisdom, on which he served as executive producer and all-round good shepherd for first-time writer-director Emilio Estevez. My scene was a small one, only about 45 seconds on screen, but it meant two twelve-hour days on the set. As I reported for work on my first day, Wise came up to me and introduced himself (as if it were necessary!). There was something I had thought and said about  him more than once in the past, but now, to my amazement, I actually had the chance to say it to him in person: “I have to tell you, Mr. Wise, I think you’re the greatest film editor who ever picked up a pair of scissors.”

 

He looked pleased and surprised in equal measure. “What makes you say that, in particular?” 

 

“In particular,” I said, “The Magnificent Ambersons. You might have ruined that movie, but instead you saved it.”

 

I said this to Robert Wise before I had ever seen Robert L. Carringer’s reconstruction, or even read Booth Tarkington’s novel. Now that I’ve done both, I haven’t changed my mind. But it must be said, mine is not the generally held view on the matter (that’s where the “Minority Opinion” title to these posts comes in). To most critics and historians, Robert Wise is the chief culprit in the mutilation of The Magnificent Ambersons — a judgment planted, watered and grudge-nursed for over 40 years by Orson Welles himself. Because make no mistake, whenever Welles said “they” destroyed the picture, he was talking about one single individual.

 

“They destroyed Ambersons,” Welles said late in life, “and the picture itself destroyed me; I didn’t get a job as a director for years afterwards.” That’s dramatic, but probably not true. Regardless of what Charles Koerner and his minions at RKO might have thought of Ambersons, or of the prospect of ever hiring Welles again, nobody could deny that with Ambersons, there was a picture there. If anything destroyed Orson Welles in Hollywood, it was It’s All True. With that one, he came back from spending six months and half a million dollars in South America with almost nothing to show for it — miles and miles of footage, but no picture.

 

Nowadays, in hindsight, with World War II safely won and South America no longer leaning toward the U.S.’s Axis foes (beyond playing host to the occasional Nazi fugitive), we can see that flying down to Rio to make It’s All True was probably the biggest mistake Orson Welles ever made; it cut short (like a brick wall) the momentum of his rocketing career, and he never really got it rolling again. Welles no doubt came to see it that way himself, judging from the way he distanced himself from the decision. “I was sent to South America by Nelson Rockefeller and Jock Whitney,” he said. “I was told that it was my patriotic duty to go and spend a million dollars shooting the Carnival in Rio.” Sounds almost as if he was drafted, doesn’t it? Uncle Sam walked up out of the blue, poked a finger in his chest and growled “I want you!” Actually, when Whitney and Rockefeller made their proposal, Welles took little persuading; he deliberated barely 24 hours before agreeing to go.

Orson Welles was, let’s admit it, a man of prodigious, even titanic gifts — the kind of artist who comes along not once in a lifetime, or once in a century, but once in history. Three major media of the first half of the 20th century — radio, the stage and motion pictures — had never seen anything like him. He was a unique phenomenon, like Joan of Arc (meaning no other comparisons, of course). But he wasn’t omniscient, omnipotent or infallible. If I seem to be hard on him in these posts, it’s because I think he blundered badly on both It’s All True and The Magnificent Ambersons, and because I think that in his public remarks about Robert Wise he was often shabby and small; Wise — at least in his conversations with me — showed far more sympathy for Welles’s situation than Welles ever showed for his. (Welles, for his part, called Wise an idiot.) The fact is, Welles walked into his situation with his eyes wide open; Wise’s situation was thrust upon him willy-nilly by Orson Welles.

In 1984, complaining to Barbara Leaming about Joseph Cotten’s “Judas” letter, Welles said Cotten had become “an active collaborator with Wise, and the janitor of RKO, and whoever else was busy screwing it up.” This is frankly disgraceful. For the record, the men who were wrestling with The Magnificent Ambersons — while Welles was in Rio lecturing cultural groups, hatching grandiose plans for It’s All True, tossing furniture out his apartment window, and screwing chorus girls — wrestling with Ambersons were Robert Wise, whose authority was not to be questioned (until Welles chose to question it); Jack Moss, who had Welles’s full confidence (until he didn’t); and Joseph Cotten, who was probably Welles’s best friend (until, in Welles’s eyes, he wasn’t). 

In This Is Orson Welles Peter Bogdanovich expands on that “janitor at RKO” crack. He asserts that RKO “approached several directors — among them William Wyler” — to recut Ambersons, but all refused out of respect for Welles. (Prof. Carringer’s history of the editing makes no mention of this.) Bogdanovich also says that producer Bryan Foy of Warner Bros.’ B-picture unit was called in. Foy’s verdict: “Too fuckin’ long. Ya gotta take out forty minutes.” Asked what to cut, he said to “just throw all the footage up in the air and grab everything but forty minutes — it don’t matter what the fuck you cut. Just lose forty minutes.” Bogdanovich cites Jack Moss as the source of this story, but I’ve been unable to find it corroborated anywhere else. I tend to suspect that the real source was Welles himself, as in “Jack Moss told me…” (If I’m mistaken about this, I’ll be happy to post an update when I know better.)

Easier to corroborate is David O. Selznick’s reaction to the editing of Ambersons. Selznick biographer David Thomson says Selznick, an admirer of Welles who had loaned the services of Stanley Cortez to photograph the picture, tried to have “the original version” deposited at the Museum of Modern Art. A worthy suggestion, Mr. Selznick, but just what is the original version? The 132-minute answer print that Wise prepared after Miami and shipped to Welles in Rio? The 110-minute version prepared at Welles’s instruction and previewed in Pomona? It couldn’t be the 148-minute version Welles mentioned to Bogdanovich because Ambersons never existed at that length. 

This brings us to the central fallacy in the Magnificent Ambersons legend: the idea that Welles created a masterpiece that was slashed and mangled afterwards to what we have now. In fact, there really was no “original version” of Ambersons because Welles never finished the picture. He left for Brazil while Ambersons was in its final stages — before music and visual effects had been added, transitions (fades, dissolves, etc.) put in place, even before the order of scenes had been settled. Then, from Rio, before even seeing the 132-minute version, Welles ordered extensive changes: making the “big cut” (everything from Eugene’s letter to Isabel’s death) and removing the “Indian legend” scene and George’s auto accident; this trimmed a total of 22 minutes. If anything, that should be considered Welles’s “original version”, even though he never actually saw it, since it was ordered by him before the first preview (and before any studio panic had set in). When Orson Welles went to Rio, The Magnificent Ambersons was an unfinished work. Welles’s partisans cry that Ambersons was taken out of his hands, and they’re right. What they will never say is that he abandoned it — but in effect (if not in intention) that’s exactly what happened.

In “Oedipus in Indianapolis” Robert L. Carringer theorizes that leaving for Rio with Ambersons incomplete was Welles’s way of distancing himself from it, a process that began with his choosing not to play George Minafer himself. This distancing, Prof. Carringer thinks, rose out of Welles’s unresolved feelings about his parents — his imperious mother and feckless father — and his discomfort with the Oedipal subtext in Tarkington’s novel. Prof. Carringer’s theory is forcefully argued, but I don’t find it entirely persuasive; if that’s how Welles felt about it, why would he have filmed Ambersons at all, or done it on the radio (when he did play George) in the first place? 

I think it may have been something simpler: that Orson Welles, for all his mastery of moviemaking so manifest in Citizen Kane, didn’t fully grasp the nuances of the editing process — not as early as 1942, anyhow. Certainly his first edits from Rio must have looked capricious and arbitrary, so much so that Wise and Moss immediately reversed them after they played so badly in Pomona. Then when Welles doubled down on the “big cut”, wanted to eliminate the end of the Amberson ball and the iris-out in the snow scene, and capped it all with a bizarre idea for a cheery curtain call “to leave audience happy”, how could it not look as if Welles had lost his train of thought on Ambersons, or simply didn’t understand how these changes would play?

Simon Callow is firmly in the mutilation-and-destruction camp regarding The Magnificent Ambersons (he calls Wise, Moss and George Schaefer “partners in crime”), but even he admits that there was never a time when anyone connected with it could honestly say, “It’s perfect; don’t change a thing.” Welles’s new contract entitled him to edit the picture through its first preview, which had been a disaster. After that came the changes — and like it or not, the farther Wise and Moss took the picture from Welles’s last edit, the better the previews were received. Callow relates an unconfirmed anecdote about pages and pages of Welles’s telegrams going straight into the wastebasket, the phone from Brazil ringing on and on with no one bothering to answer. Enough has survived in RKO archives to suggest that sort of thing wasn’t common, but it does seem that Welles’s demands were looking more irrelevant and less helpful to those back home. Moss later said, “If only Orson could communicate his genius by telephone”; Robert Wise expressed similar sentiments to me. He and Moss and Mark Robson wanted to follow Welles’s wishes, but the bottom line was Orson wasn’t there — in Pomona or in Hollywood.

Robert Wise was under a threefold mandate: (1) from himself, preserve the spirit (and as much of the letter as possible) of Welles’s (and Tarkington’s) Ambersons; (2) from George Schaefer, get the picture into releasable form; and (3) from Charles Koerner, keep it to no more than 90 minutes. In the end, Wise had to do more than simply assemble the picture. He had to edit it — in the literary, Maxwell-Perkins-to-Thomas-Wolfe sense of the word. In later years, as the auteur theory took hold, this would be considered the crowning effrontery.

And yet. A comparison of Prof. Carringer’s reconstruction with the release version gives the lie to the notion so snidely implied in Peter Bogdanovich’s Bryan Foy anecdote — the idea that 40 minutes were cut thoughtlessly, at random. The cutting may seem drastic in places — especially to Welles, seeing the hard-won ball sequence, which he (mis)remembered as “one reel without a single cut”, shortened from 12 minutes 25 seconds to 6 minutes 56 seconds — but it’s not random. Wise followed the compromise plan worked out in late March with Jack Moss and Joseph Cotten, with a few differences. He kept in the kitchen scene but ended it before George (and Tim Holt) began raving in the rain about the new construction; and he retained the bathroom scene between George and Jack but trimmed George’s melodramatic overreaction (“unspeakable”, “monstrous”, “horrible”). Both of these moves, if they didn’t exactly create sympathy for George, at least helped keep Tim Holt’s performance from going over the top.

And Wise replaced the boarding house scene with the new one between Eugene and Fanny in the hospital corridor. Admittedly, this scene is hard to defend. It’s frankly so awkward — with its shallow-focus photography, Joseph Cotten’s line readings a little too chipper, Agnes Moorehead’s expression a little too blissful — that I tend to believe it was directed by Jack Moss. Wise and Freddie Fleck did better with the added scenes they directed. But at least the new scene was more faithful to Tarkington, albeit an over-compensation for Welles’s somber, downbeat ending.

To be sure, there are lines, passages and scenes whose loss is regrettable; Robert Wise admitted that the 132-min. cut was superior to what was finally released. But running much over 90 minutes simply was not an option. In 1984, Welles complained to Barbara Leaming: “The plot of course was really what they took out. Using the argument of not central to the plot, what they took out was the plot…” Excuse me, but that is rich coming from the man who wanted to take out the end of the Amberson ball, the “big cut”, the Indian legend, and George’s auto accident, all to protect his long ballroom sequence and boarding house scene. If anyone tried to cut “plot” out of The Magnificent Ambersons, it was Orson Welles (Robert Wise is roundly denounced for what he cut, but never gets any credit for what Welles wanted to cut that he left in). In fact, with two exceptions, nothing essential in Booth Tarkington’s novel is left out of the picture as it was finally released.

The first exception is the ruinous investment in the headlight company by Major Amberson, Uncle Jack and Fanny. In the release version there are only two rather cryptic references to it, with no explanation. But the only other mention in the cutting continuity is in the second porch scene, which not even Welles ever wanted to keep (possibly because of Richard Bennett’s struggle with the lines), so that would surely have been a problem no matter how long the release version ran. (Welles wanted to add some voice-over references in the closeup of the dying Major Amberson, but this was deemed too much information for that short, simple scene.)

The second exception is the portrayal of George’s “comeuppance”. In the finished film, Welles reads Tarkington’s narration in voice-over (“George Amberson Minafer had got his comeuppance…three times filled and running over…but the people who had so long for it were not there to see it…Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him.”) But the scene is Isabel’s bedroom in the abandoned Amberson mansion, with George praying, “Mother, forgive me! God, forgive me!” In Tarkington’s novel, the comeuppance comes later, in his and Fanny’s new boarding house, when George consults the book of the city’s 500 most important families and finds nothing between “Allen” and “Ambrose”. That is Prince George’s comeuppance: the sudden knowledge that he and his whole family are, in the great scheme of things, not worth mentioning. It would have been a simple matter to include it, but Welles never shot it, never even wrote it into his screenplay.

An instructive (and nearly simultaneous) comparison is to look at what happened over at Paramount to the picture Preston Sturges wrote and shot with the title Triumph over Pain, but which finally went out as The Great Moment. (I wrote about that one in detail here.) To be sure, The Great Moment was never going to be as good as The Magnificent Ambersons, but it was going to be a lot better than it turned out, and contrasting it with Sturges’s published script shows clearly that the men who took it away and cut it didn’t know what they were doing — and didn’t care. The same comparison with Ambersons shows that Robert Wise et al. did care, and did know what they were doing.

Anyone willing to shell out 60 bucks for Prof. Carringer’s reconstruction can see that there’s really no “aha!” moment in the reconstructed version, no scene that clearly says “This absolutely should have been left in.” But the fact that the reconstruction is “a print-on-demand volume” testifies that there’s no great demand for it. Most people instead fall in with Orson Welles’s 43-year tantrum over being ignored, and they call Wise’s editing of Ambersons a mutilation instead of what I think it truly is: one of the most heroic feats of film editing — against unique, almost overwhelming odds — in the history of Hollywood. The picture’s high esteem to this day (though often qualified with “even in its present form…”) testifies to how well Wise preserved the picture Orson Welles left in his hands on February 6, 1942.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: Robert Wise — besides being an Oscar-winning producer and director, National Medal of Arts and AFI Life Achievement Award recipient, and past president of the Academy and the Directors Guild — was the greatest film editor who ever picked up a pair of scissors. 

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“Who knows what happened?” Orson Welles asked Barbara Leaming in 1984. “I was all covered in confetti trying to pretend I like carnivals, you know. I hate carnivals…” Welles may have been indulging in a little rueful hindsight 40 years after the fact. Simon Callow’s magisterial biography of Welles (two volumes so far, a third and fourth to come), draws on contemporary letters, telegrams, memos and news stories to present a very different picture of Orson Welles in Rio from the one he drew for Leaming.

For one thing, this wasn’t any old “carnival”, some smattering of rides set up in a pasture somewhere with booths for the locals to shoot pellets at plywood ducks and toss dimes into glass candy dishes. This was Carnival, a four-day samba-flavored bacchanal leading up to Ash Wednesday that made Mardi Gras in New Orleans look like a Methodist ice cream social, with a history stretching back to 1723. It’s clear from the record that Welles waded into Carnival with both feet — literally, grabbing one of his crew’s 16mm cameras and venturing out among the millions of revelers to get close shots, emerging drenched with sweat like a man coming out of the sea, all while his Technicolor cameras stood back to get the big picture, lit by the carbon-arc glare of anti-aircraft searchlights. Moreover, his notes and directives to his on-scene staff show that he saw the social and historical roots of Carnival as the core of the Brazilian section of It’s All True — a picture that was growing in scope and ambition by the day, even as Welles remained sketchy about the nuts and bolts of precisely how to get it made.

I don’t want to get sidetracked onto It’s All True, that landmark fiasco from which Welles’s career never recovered. That’s a whole other can of worms. What concerns me here is its effect on Ambersons. When Welles told Barbara Leaming about hating carnivals, he was burnishing the legend of Ambersons being snatched from his loving hands while his back was turned. In fact, at the time, he was reveling in his Brazilian adventure; the movie he was planning appealed to his experimental impulse to let a project find its own shape without conforming to a script, and he reveled as well in immersing himself in this exotic foreign culture. To say nothing of the patriotic duty he was discharging in the cause of inter-American relations.

Welles was fully engaged in shooting Carnival, in recreating sections of it afterward to shoot details his crew had been unable to capture during the crush and riot of the real thing, in mapping out (however vaguely) the other episodes of It’s All True, and in being feted and celebrated as the U.S.’s goodwill cultural ambassador. Fully engaged, but not, it must be said, to the exclusion of all other things; he was still in frequent contact with Robert Wise about Ambersons and with Jack Moss about both Ambersons and Journey into Fear. His ambitious ideas for It’s All True even spilled over into the two pictures he’d left behind: He wanted to shoot some new scenes for himself in Journey, which would mean sending his costume and makeup as Col. Haki to Rio. He wanted to hold the world premiere of Ambersons in Buenos Aires (“resultant international publicity will be enormous”, he wired Schaefer), and to record the picture’s narration in both Spanish and Portuguese. For his part, Schaefer didn’t relish the thought of Welles venturing another 1,200 miles farther from home; a Rio premiere maybe — maybe — but Buenos Aires was out of the question. On February 27, he politely reminded Welles that they still needed to get Ambersons ready for its Easter Week opening in New York (Easter Sunday that year would be April 5); time and tide, Orson, time and tide.

In response, Welles put the Ambersons crew in Hollywood on triple shifts editing and shooting new footage; Wise’s assistant Mark Robson later remembered the two of them moving into a motel near the studio and working as much as 120 hours a week. Even before Welles received Wise’s 132-minute cut, he had ordered the “big cut” and other changes, which Wise made in time for the first preview in Pomona. 

The Pomona preview was — there’s no other word for it — a disaster.

 

The regular feature at the Fox Theatre that night was The Fleet’s In, a rousing musical with Dorothy Lamour, Betty Hutton and the Jimmy Dorsey Band. Simon Callow sneers at The Fleet’s In as yokel-bait, with songs like “Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry” and “Conga from Honga”. That’s a cheap shot; the score also included the standards “I Remember You” and “Tangerine”. Still, Ambersons was an unhappy match that night, facing what Robert L. Carringer calls “a raucous, largely teenage audience”.  Pomona is also close by what later became the Claremont Colleges, whose students were no doubt regular patrons of the Fox. Anybody who’s ever sat through a screening of a vintage movie with a smartass college audience knows what that can be like, and the boys from RKO got it with both barrels that night. (Not to mention the fact that the preview was on St. Patrick’s Day; the audience may have been well-oiled by the time they got to the theater.) As Ambersons unspooled, the audience  — those who didn’t walk out — laughed, jeered, talked back at the screen, and generally carried on like the robots on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. At the conclusion, when Welles the narrator said, “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the end of the story,” there was sarcastic applause and an audible sigh of relief.

 

The reaction wasn’t unanimously negative. Forty-two percent of the response cards praised the picture, some in glowing terms, and a few even apologized for the behavior of other patrons. But that “42 percent” can be misleading. Only 125 cards were filled out, in a theater that seated 1,750. More important was the hostile reaction, and the fact that some cards even mentioned it was telling; it proved that the men from RKO weren’t overreacting or imagining things. The people who didn’t like this picture absolutely loathed it.

 

That Pomona audience of 70 years ago has earned the scorn and contempt of critics and historians for years — from Callow and Prof. Carringer to Peter Bogdanovich and, well, Orson Welles himself. But let’s remember what they saw. This wasn’t the 132-minute cut, which everyone agreed needed some fine tuning. This was the 110-minute cut made according to Welles’s instructions from Rio, including the “big cut”. You can see in Part 3 of this post what the “big cut” entailed; on the screen that night in Pomona it meant that the dramatic center of The Magnificent Ambersons played as follows:

 

1. George tells Eugene that he’s not welcome at Amberson Mansion, slamming the door on him; then —

2. Eugene writes to Isabel, begging her to be strong; then —

3. Isabel reads Eugene’s letter and drops dead (or at least dying) on the spot.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, it would take a heart of stone not to weep with laughter at a turn of events like that.

There were other things the Pomona audience didn’t care for. Most of all, they didn’t like Tim Holt. Or more to the point, they didn’t like George Amberson Minafer; Wise reported to Welles that Holt got “a reaction that said: ‘Oh, God, here he is again.'” Indeed, it’s hard to deny that the protagonist of The Magnificent Ambersons is an arrogant, destructive little bastard. In the novel, Tarkington had built sympathy for George despite the awful things he does, giving readers his inner thoughts (however misguided), and sugar-coating this pill much the way Margaret Mitchell finessed the fact that Scarlett O’Hara is a cruel, selfish, conniving bitch. Tyrone Power might have created more sympathy in an audience, as Vivien Leigh did for Scarlett (Prof. Carringer says the same about Welles himself), but Holt had a tougher time hoeing that row. The second half of the so-called “kitchen scene”, where George and Uncle Jack tease Fanny until she runs from the room in tears, originally continued with George spotting the Major’s new houses under construction through the window and running out into the rain to shout his outrage over the roar of the storm — and, in Pomona, over the screams of laughter from the audience.

George Schaefer was in the house that night, and he was rattled to his very bones. RKO had $1 million in Ambersons, and his position at the studio was on the line. Schaefer was Orson Welles’s best friend at RKO, but Schaefer himself had enemies who had been biding their time, ready to pounce. His support for Welles was a large part of it, but not all.  Besides the uproar over Citizen Kane and its under-performance at the box office, there had been other expensive losses on Schaefer’s watch. Two of his closest lieutenants had already been sent packing; the tigers were at the gate.

The next day a panicky Schaefer queried RKO’s lawyers about the possibility of — if need be — taking Ambersons out of Welles’s hands. Their answer: Welles’s new contract relinquished his unprecedented right of final cut. He now had the right to cut the picture up to and including the first sneak preview; after that he was subject to the studio’s behest. Reassured, Schaefer waited to see what would happen.