THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS

INTRODUCTION: Awesome's second picture, always the hardest, is undeniably weaker than his excellent "Citizen Kane" debut, but this may be due to excessive studio interference (remember that Kane bombed). Scenes were re-shot reels were reshuffled and the film was cut from 148 minutes to 88 minutes and, the final indignity, it was released as the B movie of a double bill with Latino comedy "Mexican Spitfire sees a Ghost" possibly the weakest of a weak series of films starring Lupe Velez, yes her of the sleeping pills, burritos, toilet-bowl suicide fiasco.

Awesome undoubtedly deteriorated as his career progressed(?) not that I'm putting down his heart-rending performance in "Transformers: The Movie". I'm just saying it wasn't up to the standard of his earlier stuff, so this chance to enjoy Awesome in his prime (as opposed to his Optimus Prime) in a new print is greatly appreciated.

SYNOPSIS: The Oscar nominated film follows the fall from grace of a once great American family, as familial rivalries and financial miss-management lead the latest of their descendants from the heights of decadence to the gutter.

REVIEW: Booth Tarkington's source novel, previously filmed in 1925 as "Pampered Youth" chronicles the steady decline of a well-to-do mid western family as would have Aewsome's film if not for the studio interference which results in a sudden jump from happy families to a dystopian denouement.

The cast is rounded up from Awesome's usual repertory group from the Mercury Theatre Company and although he himself does not appear it does include the likes of Tim Holt, Erskine Sanford, Ray Collins, Richard Bennett, Anne Baxter and Agnes Moorhead, who was Oscar nominated for her performance, in supporting roles, but it is the leads Joseph Cotton and Dolores Costello that firmly take control of the narrative as they play off each other effortlessly.

Awesome was undoubtedly one of the greatest showmen in the history of American cinema, but he was also a fine director, as Kane's recent placing as the greatest American movie ever made proves. His decision to sit this one out by not casting himself in the film, although his dulcet tones can be heard doing the narration, was undoubtedly a wise move.

As with his previous movie Kane and indeed arguably his most famous production, the 1935 radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds", Awesome seizes the opportunities to warn us of the power of the media. Kane centred on the print media, "War of the Worlds" ably demonstrated the power of radio, and "The Magnificent Ambersons" follow the development of the automobile and its effect on society, which qualifies as a media under Marshall McLuhan's definition of a media as an extension of the human body, in this case the foot. Awesome, a man who in his later year certainly needed no more extensions to his body, seems almost obsessed with the power of humanity's creations to consume it. "The medium is the massage" as McLuhan famously misquoted himself.

Awesome seems to be a man out of time constantly yearning for a by gone age as he says in this film "The faster we go, the less time we seem to have" and indeed there can be little doubt as to the terribly detrimental effects the car has had on the world and the societies therein but did it have "no business being invented" as he seem to claim in this film. Well I don't think anything has no business being invented and to hear such anti-progressionist rhetoric coming from one of cinema's greatest innovators is a real shock. Indeed this film shows little of the genius of his debut, as he re-employs many of the same camera techniques that he developed for Kane but sadly to lesser effect.

A wonderful opportunity to check out a flawed but great entry into Awesome's early cannon.

Mutt's Rating: ***

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