#souls and ended their careers in a couple of sentences but i knew i shouldn't so i didn't but it was so hard to contain that espeically wit

[avatardoggo]

🪴

#today the stress of working 6 days for almost 2 months straight while doing 2 3 jobs at once finally caught up with me #i was hosting today which i hate bc customers succ!! soemtimes and this group of 8 ppl wanted to sit by the water at 2 tables of 4 but for #big groups we have the picnic tables out back that are shaded and outside just not by the water and i was them o no you cant sit by the #water bc if a group of 4 comes i can't seat them at the picnic table bc duh it's for big groups and one of the guys was so rude straight up #just says 'no idc that makes no sense im sitting by the water' walks past me without menus tO A DIRTY TABLE STANDING LIKE THE BELOW ZERO #BRAIN CELLS ZREO MANNERS MAN HE IS and the other 2 ladies kept saying 'we don't want the picnic table we don't want it' so i can feel my #heart burning bc what im NOT going to do is argue with a customer when im following the rules my manager has told me and i can feel myself #about to angry cry bc i don't want to be rude but the next thing to say is leave if you don't want to be seated where i put you #so i go get my manager and he sees my face and i tell him everything and he just seats them where they want to bc he didn't want to deal #with their nonsense like they were Those ppl that act entitled and irritating just bc their customers so i go to clean one of the tables #they wanted to sit at and they're talking smack and they KNOW IM RIGHT THERE and theyre going on sayng how i make no sense how i should've #just let them do whatever they want blah blah blah and it took 4 tries for me to carry the plates bc my hands were shaking and i was trying #not to cry and when i was finally able to pick up the plates i dropped them in the kitchen then went to ask my manager for my break and #before i could say anything he was just like 'go take your break' and even one of the chefs gave me food without me asking i think bc he #saw my about-to-cry face which was so kind of him #so i went on a walk and sat on a bench to calm down and then i ate something and calmed down bc honestly i couldve flamed their lives and #souls and ended their careers in a couple of sentences but i knew i shouldn't so i didn't but it was so hard to contain that espeically wit #how they were mistreating me and i was teling my dad and he was like ''🤔 racism??'' bc surprise! they were white but idk some ppl are just #horrible to all ppl not just a particular kind yk? so idk honestly #but ya that's how my week has been going #pray for me yall i need more patience with this silly goose (derogatory) customers #vk overshares in the tags

[wittypenguin]

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

This is a broken film which was supposed to be the amazing follow-up to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. People who saw the rough version of 2½ hours thought it was a much better film than Citizen Kane in every way possibles with the final scene being a sad but incredible moment in movie-making history, and a scene which Mr Welles never equalled in his career. That version will never be seen. This post is as uneven as the film, but I can’t blame Studio Executives for that.

Brilliant. Simply brilliant. 

George Minafer (played by Tim Holt) is a first class shit head of an asshole. He treats everyone so badly I’m surprised he came back from College with all of his limbs.

Eugene: [0:42:00] I'm not sure George is wrong about automobiles. With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization. May be that they won't add to the beauty of the world or the life of the men's souls, I'm not sure. But automobiles have come and almost all outwards things will be different because of what they bring. They're going to alter war and they're going to alter peace. And I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles. And it may be that George is right. May be that in ten to twenty years from now that if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine but agree with George - that automobiles had no business to be invented.

Set in the very earliest of days of the horseless carriage’s development, this is so very prescient. 

After 30 minutes of film setting the circumstances of the world in place, we arrive at George’s Life Changing Event: the death of his father, Wilbur Minafer, who we’ve only heard speak two sentences, I believe (he had more, but they were cut, much to the consternation of a thus-uncredited Don Dillaway, probably). 

Right around the sixty minute mark, however, things get pretty compressed. Isabel Amberson Minafer and George are off to travel the world and never return, go to Paris, then Isabel’s health fails, they do return to town, and then she dies. All in about 10 minutes. That’s a lot of material in so little screen time, and most of it is delivered by people who explain what they saw happen, not us actually seeing it ourselves. 

There are a couple of huge jumps in the time-line which are each covered with about 10 seconds of film and perhaps 20 words of dialogue. Stuff like ‘gosh, isn’t it sad that Billy fell down the well?’ are fine to set up an episode of Lassie, but when you use something akin to that in order to replace five years or more of character development, the viewer certainly feels cheated. Well, I did, anyway. 

Then, at 1:22:00, we see George praying at his mother’s bed, and the VO says he has his comeuppance. Right there, at 1:23:30, this should be the end. 

George Minafer gets hit by an automobile — the infernal thing he said he despised. He now has no income to support his Aunt at all. 

And — Goddamn — the final scene is the purplest thing you’ve ever seen. 

Agnes Moorehead [above] and Tim Holt [below] in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) — — — —

See, originally, the thing was a good 50 minutes longer, but Mr Welles left the film in the hands of his editor, Robert Wise, while he zoomed off to the next project, shooting his ⅔ of a portmanteau documentary film in Brazil called It’s All True, which was to be his 3rd film as stipulated in his contract for RKO. When the studio looked at The Magnificent Ambersons in its rough working length of 50% more than they bargained for, they told Mr Wise to get cutting. So, Mr Wise consulted with Mr Welles just before he left the country, making those few cuts he knew about. The deal was that the studio would pack a Moviola (a film viewer thing used for editing purposes that looks like part of one of the old ‘watch a movie inside a wooden box!’ things at penny arcades and so on), a working print of the film in its extant form, and some editing people, onto a ship or an æroplane to Mr Welles in Brazil. That didn’t happen, because by this point the US had entered WWII and it was nearly impossible for either Mr Wise or an editing assistant (a ‘cutter,’ in cinema parlance) to fly to Mr Welles, or vice versa, owing to travel rationing. A telephone line was set up specifically to aid in consulting with the director (this was 80 years ago, after all), but the story goes that the studio supervisor told to liaise with Mr Welles avoided answering the phone when it rang, specifically to avoid the input, plus a series of written communiques were crumpled up and thrown away without even being read. So, Mr Wise, in consultation with the studio as well as star Joseph Cotten, were forced to start guessing as to how to proceed. He cut a bunch of stuff, then shot some quick coverage to paper over the gaps in the story. The end result is that Mr Welles didn’t speak to Mr Wise for decades, was angry at his long-time friend Mr Cotton for a bit, and this episode probably cemented in the director his life-long distrust of Studio Big-Wigs as nothing but a bunch of meddling bean counters who wouldn’t know a good movie if they got their dicks caught in the sprocket holes of it. 

I like to think that last sentence would have made him laugh. 

The performances of everyone are incredible. Tim Holt shows that he’s not just the western star which he was known as at the time; he’s capable of nuanced and sophisticated characters as well. Agnes Moorehead, as Geiorge’s Aunt Fanny Minafer, is an example of how an actor can make bold, large choices and be entirely believable in a film setting; her ‘mad scene’ is riveting. This film really is the story of these two characters, and how they cope with a changing landscape of financial challenge and circumstances. =Had the film not been gutted, we would have been able to see more of them, and that is the greatest loss to my mind.

On its original release, the film was shown on at least one occasion as a second feature on a double bill with Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost (1942). The second feature. Brother!

Sadly, a reconstruction of the film as it was intended isn’t possible in the way other films of his have been — eg: Touch of Evil — because the footage excised was either destroyed or thrown away. 

[left to right] Richard Bennett, Agnes Moorehead, Tim Holt, and Ray Collins in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) — — — —

To add insult to injury, the Brazilian ‘good will’ documentary aimed at welcoming the South American neighbour into the arms of the US & Allied forces, It’s All True, was never completed: only about ⅓ of its footage survived (probably 200,000ft of Technicolor® nitrate was tossed into the Pacific in the 1960s or ‘70s, and there was much more than that originally), and the stuff that has survived was mostly repurposed in the DesiLu Productions stock film library. So there’s two films in a row that didn’t happen correctly, the second of which didn’t happen at all. There’s a documentary about It’s All True available and it’s worth your attention, as the last ⅓ or so is a reconstruction of the story of 4 guys who sailed on a raft thousands of kilometres to lobby the Brazilian government for basic rights to be extended to people in the outer reaches of the country. It’s only got some sound effects and music, but unlike ‘silent films,’ there are no inter-titles for dialogue. Mr Welles essentially invented a whole new filmmaking technique. 

[left to right] Tim Holt and Agnes Moorehead in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) — — — —

The films of Mr Welles are basically a list of ‘things which didn’t get made at all,’ punctuated by ‘things which weren’t finished’ and ‘things which others messed around with.’ Thankfully there’s a few works which he made and have his vision properly realized. Those are cherished. 

Watching the first hour of this film is the last sort… and then it becomes someone else’s picture. Alas. 

★★★★☆

#The Magnificent Ambersons #orson welles #Criterion Collection #masterpieces ruined #review #film #cinema