Why did they hate the Magnificent Ambersons so much?

Eighty years ago, in March 1942, Orson Welles was two months away from turning 27. He had received little except applause throughout his remarkable life.

Born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Welles was judged a genius from an early age. “I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child because everybody told me from the moment I was able to hear that I was absolutely marvelous,” he said in a 1982 interview with the BBC. As his career as America’s most talented writer-director-actor got under way, he did his best to confirm their predictions.

First Welles oversaw a pair of dazzlingly fresh adaptations of Shakespeare for the Federal Theatre Project and then for his own Mercury Theatre–his Macbeth in 1936 featured an all-black cast, and his Caesar in 1937 contained provocative allusions to Nazism and fascism. For Mercury Theatre on the Air, Welles performed a radio rendition of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds was so convincing that many listeners believed the Martians were actually here. In 1941 came Citizen Kane, which Welles co-wrote, directed, and starred in. Although it wasn’t as well-received in those days as it is today, the film was still considered a significant advance in cinematic art.

” I haven’t heard of a disconcerting word in years,” Welles told the BBC.

In fact Welles was on the verge of his downfall. During that fateful spring of 1942, Welles’s second film, The Magnificent Ambersons–his brilliant, funereal, unflinching adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1918 novel about an aristocratic Midwestern family whose downfall is told in parallel with the rise of the “horseless carriage”–was tried out with preview audiences. This was the first time Welles heard “disappointing words” in his entire life.

At the first preview, held on March 17 in Pomona, California, the response was mixed, with 53 positive audience reactions versus 72 negative ones, according to figures from Peter Bogdanovich’s collection of interviews with Welles in the posthumously published This Is Orson Welles. “Too many wierd [sic] camera shots,” read one of the negative cards. It should be put on hold as it’s a crime to steal peoples hard-earned cash for such trash as Mr. Welles thinks. . . You better get back on the radio Mr. Welles, I hope .”

This alarm was sufficient to alert officials at RKO Radio Pictures. RKO Radio Pictures officials used the Pomona preview’s negative reaction as an excuse to cut the film and conduct substantial reshoots without Welles (who was at the time working on a Brazilian nonfiction film). At Pomona, the film had a running time of about two hours, but the release version that was settled on following subsequent previews, which is the only one in circulation today, unfolds over the course of a mere 88 minutes.

” When we showed it to previews it did well in certain spots but was terrible in others. It had bad laughs in it,” the film’s editor, Robert Wise, told me when I interviewed him in 2004 for my book Orson Welles Remembered. Yet the question remains: Why did those who disliked The Magnificent Ambersons dislike it so emphatically? Maybe the preview audience couldn’t express their disgust, hence the references to Welles’s “weird”, visual style and “artistic pretensions. But we are able to make some assumptions.

Much is made of the elegiac tone of The Magnificent Ambersons–its evocation of the way Midwesterners once lived, dressed, and played–but one would expect this sort of wistful nostalgia to have played well with moviegoers who, just a few years later, made a hit out of Vincente Minnelli’s equally plaintive Meet Me in St. Louis. Welles was not above getting sentimental about the Midwest of his youth, as when, in a plangent autobiographical essay in Paris Vogue in the early 1980s, he described boyhood visits to Dixon, Illinois, the hometown of Ronald Reagan.

” I believe that it was Dixon where our President created his vision of the peculiarly innocent America to whom he wanted us to all return,” Welles stated. “Dixon was the main street that we remember from Hollywood, complete with barber poles, hitching posts and an Indian standing in front of the cigar shop .”

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At first, The Magnificent Ambersons seems like it was born from the same nostalgia impulse. We see the iconic opening sequence. It starts with a shot showing a horse-driven streetcar. Welles says that this is “The only public conveyance.” Then we get shots of Joseph Cotten in passing dresses. Welles adds, “In those days they had time to do everything.” Time for sleigh rides, balls and assemblies, cotillions, open houses on New Year’s Eve and all-day picnics at the woods. And even the most beautiful of all lost customs: serenade. . .”

But as soon as Welles sets this peoplesy tone, he makes it more complicated. Welles makes it clear that the Ambersons are far removed from Norman Rockwell’s utopia. Welles states, “Against such homespun a backdrop, the magnificence Ambersons was as conspicuous at a funeral brass band,” Welles explains, setting up an informal vignette with ordinary people sharing gossip about the Ambersons’ conspicuous wealth. One man mentions the house as “Sixty-thousand dollars for the woodwork only,” while another woman adds, “Upstairs or down,” and the third continues.

Townspeople wish for George Amberson Minafer’s “comeuppance”. (played by Bobby Cooper as a child and by Tim Holt as an adult), the unapologetically snobbish, undisciplined son of Isabel Amberson Minafer, Dolores Costello, and Wilbur Minafer, her milksop husband (Don Dillaway). After a fight with another boy, young George doesn’t make excuses. George said, “I’m sure if he wants to see us all, he would have to go around the side door.” This prompted a warm laugh from Major Amberson (Richard Bennett), his grandfather and family patriarch. George, now fully grown and a patronizing man towards Eugene Morgan (Cotten), the automobile inventor who he snubs about his invention is nothing short of pathetic.

What we have, then, is not simply an affectionate portrait of days gone by–a project that most moviegoers in the 1940s would have gotten behind–but a study of class differences and social upheaval: The town in the film goes from being dominated by bluebloods like the Ambersons to being run by a class of inventors, entrepreneurs, and businessmen exemplified by Eugene.

What is most likely to have induced discomfort in the preview audience 80 years ago is that Welles comes down on the side of the Ambersons, whose moneyed idleness is seen to carry fewer social costs than the striving industriousness of Eugene. This is a film about automobiles made without any of the glamor or excitement of the classic car films of the 1960s and ’70s and instead portrays them as dirty, ugly, and noisy, lumbering contraptions that pollute the air and crowd the road.

Welles certainly has fun at the expense of the Ambersons, as when George scoffs at prospective professions–“Lawyers, bankers, politicians, what do they ever get out of life, I’d like to know”–and insists that his goal, to the extent he has one at all, is to become a yachtsman. Watch how he captured their lives so tenderly and graciously. The camera glides in front of the Ambersons’ doors at Christmastime and then the film cuts to George and Lucy (Baxter’s daughter) riding a sleigh down a snowy road past Eugene and his momentarily stuck automobile. To the sounds of the sleigh bells.

Following Welles’s portrayal of Eugene, who is outwardly friendly, Welles suggests that Eugene can be used as a conduit for horrors. He also shows Welles to be a courtly, convivial man whose creation will nevertheless “change the landscape,” Major Amberson said. Eugene admits that it may not be possible for them to add beauty and life to the world. Automobiles are here, and nearly all things outwardly will be better because they have arrived. They will alter the wars and their peace.”

And so it is. The film ends with Isabel stating that her hometown has been “changed”, introducing a lengthy sequence where Welles depicts the destruction and industrialization of what was once a small, quaint town. Over shots of rising buildings and low-cost apartments, Welles states, “The town was changing, growing.” It was “heaving up” in the middle, spreading incredible. This aspect was evidently more dramatic and richer in the final version that was shown to the first preview audience. The film’s release version gets lost in all the drama between the Ambersons and forgets the main metaphor about the slide of the family and its rise.

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Welles was clear in his message that modernity has a cost. This is a very provocative sentiment. Welles, a staunch liberal Democrat was also strikingly antimodern in many aspects. Welles described his love for Shakespeare and made three films from his works.

He was skeptical about technological advancements that he came down against the moon landing. He explained this in an unfinished documentary on the making of the film of Franz Kafka’s The Trial :, “I’m extremely serious about the moon.” Robert Graves is correct to say that landing on the Moon was the most outrageous thing since Alexander made the Gordian knot.

Who but Welles, an artist so daring, would doubt the wisdom of democracy and the moon landings? In rah rah World War II America, audiences didn’t know how to deal with a movie that addressed material progress and capitalism’s fruits. We may be able to finally share Welles’s appreciation for the Ambersons’ beauty.