silver nitrate notes

The Magnificent Ambersons and the Film RKO Destroyed

14 dec 2012

Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) is, in its released form, not the film Welles made. Welles shot, cut, and scored a 131-minute version that he was happy with. He was then called to Brazil by the State Department to make a goodwill documentary, It's All True. While he was out of the country, RKO re-cut Ambersons to 88 minutes, replaced most of the ending, and had the removed material destroyed. What survives is the studio cut. The Welles cut is lost.

The cinematographer was Stanley Cortez (1908-1997), whom we have met later on The Night of the Hunter. What Cortez and Welles did with the Amberson mansion is a technical achievement that the studio cut only partially preserves. The mansion is photographed in long takes that move through multiple rooms without cutting. Welles had built the Amberson set with removable walls, partially transparent ceilings, and tracks for the camera. Cortez could move the camera from the ballroom to the stairs to an upstairs bedroom without a cut.

The ball sequence is the best-preserved example. The camera follows multiple characters through a party at the mansion in a single extended take. Cortez had to plan the lighting for the entire route in advance, because he could not add light during the shot. He used the chandelier and wall-mounted sconces as motivated sources and supplemented with off-camera instruments positioned at each point on the track. The shot is more than three minutes long. The studio did not cut it. They could not; it was a single take.

What the studio did cut was the ending. Welles's film ended on Joseph Cotten visiting an old woman in a boarding house, a sequence that is entirely lost. The RKO cut replaced it with a short, reconciliatory ending shot by another director. Welles saw the release cut years later and said nothing publicly. Privately he called it the ruin of his best work.

Cortez was not nominated for the Academy Award. The cinematography Oscar that year went to Joseph Ruttenberg for Mrs. Miniver. Mrs. Miniver is a capable piece of patriotic cinema. It is not what Cortez did in the mansion.

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sources
[1] Carringer, Robert L. The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction. University of California Press, 1993.
[2] Callow, Simon. Orson Welles: Hello Americans. Viking, 2006.
[3] Naremore, James. The Magic World of Orson Welles. Southern Methodist UP, rev. ed. 1989.
[4] McBride, Joseph. Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?. University Press of Kentucky, 2006.