Великолепные Эмберсоны: История упадка семьи

1942 film by Orson Welles, Robert Wise
the 2002 television version

The Magnificent Ambersons is a 1942 American period drama written, produced, and directed by Orson Welles. Welles adapted Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1918 novel about the declining fortunes of a wealthy Midwestern family and the social changes brought by the automobile age. The film stars Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins, with Welles providing the narration. Welles lost control of the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons to RKO, and the final version released to audiences differed significantly from his rough cut of the film. More than an hour of footage was cut by the studio, which also shot and substituted a happier ending. Although Welles's extensive notes for how he wished the film to be cut have survived, the excised footage was destroyed. Composer Bernard Herrmann insisted his credit be removed when, like the film itself, his score was heavily edited by the studio. Even in the released version, The Magnificent Ambersons is often regarded as among the greatest films of all time, a distinction it shares with Welles's first film, Citizen Kane. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and it was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1991.

The Ambersons are by far the wealthiest family in their Midwestern city in the last few decades of the 19th century. As a young man, Eugene Morgan courts Isabel Amberson, but she rejects him after he publicly embarrasses her. She instead marries Wilbur Minafer, a passionless man she does not love, and spoils their child, George. The townspeople long to see George get his "comeuppance." In the early 20th century, Major Amberson gives a large party at the Amberson Mansion for George, who is home from college for the holidays. Eugene, now a widower who has just returned to town after 20 years, attends. George dislikes Eugene, whom he sees as a social climber, and ridicules Eugene's investment in the automobile. He instantly takes to Eugene's daughter Lucy. The next day, George and Lucy take a sleigh ride. They pass Eugene, George's aunt Fanny, Isabel, and Isabel's brother, Jack. Eugene's "horseless carriage" has gotten stuck in the snow, and George jeers at them to "get a horse." The Amberson sleigh then overturns, and Eugene, after his vehicle is mobile again, gives everyone a ride back home. George is humiliated by the incident and angered by Eugene's attentions toward Isabel and his mother's obvious affection for Eugene. Wilbur Minafer loses a substantial amount of money on bad investments and soon dies. George is largely unmoved by his father's death. The night after the funeral, George teases Fanny, who is besotted with Eugene. Time passes, and Eugene becomes very wealthy manufacturing automobiles, and again courts Isabel, who refuses to risk George's disapproval by telling him about their love. Lucy rejects George's marriage proposal by saying that he has no ambition in life other than to be wealthy and keep things as they are, and she leaves town. The Ambersons invite the lonely Eugene to dinner, where George, blaming him for turning Lucy against him, criticizes automobiles. The Ambersons are shocked by his rudeness, but Eugene says that George may turn out to be right. That evening, George learns from Aunt Fanny that Eugene has been courting Isabel. Enraged, he rudely confronts a neighbor for spreading gossip about his mother. The next day, George refuses to let Eugene see his mother. Jack tells Isabel about George's terrible behavior, but she declines to do anything that might upset her son. Eugene writes to Isabel and asks her to choose between her son and his love. Isabel chooses George. Lucy returns home to find that George is taking his mother to Europe on an extended trip. George talks to Lucy in an attempt to discover if she loves him. She feigns indifference, and they part. Lucy is heartbroken, however, and faints. Months pass, and Isabel is seriously ill, but George will not allow her to come home for fear that she will renew her relationship with Eugene. He relents only when she starts to die. George refuses to let Eugene go upstairs to visit Isabel on her deathbed although she begs to see Eugene one last time. After Isabel's death, Major Amberson sinks into senility and dies. His estate is worthless. Jack leaves town to take a job in another city. George intends to live on Fanny's income while he trains to be a lawyer, but she reveals that she lost everything in bad investments, and they are left with only a few hundred dollars to live on for the rest of the year. Eugene asks Lucy if she will reconcile with George. Lucy instead tells her father a story about an American Indian chief who was "pushed out on a canoe into the sea" when he became too obnoxious, which Eugene understands to be an analogy for George. Penniless, George gives up his job as a law clerk and finds higher paying work in a chemical factory, which gives him enough money for himself and Fanny to live on. George wanders the city and is dazed by the modern factories and slums, which have grown up around him. In his last night in the Amberson mansion before it is sold, George prays by his dead mother's bed. The narrator says that no one is around to see him receive his comeuppance. George is seriously injured by an automobile. Lucy and Eugene go to see him at the hospital and reconcile with him. In a hospital corridor, Eugene tells Fanny that Isabel's spirit had inspired Eugene to bring George "under shelter again," which implies that his and Fanny's financial security was assured.

Welles first adapted The Magnificent Ambersons for a one hour radio drama performed October 29, 1939, by his Mercury Players on The Campbell Playhouse, with Orson Welles portraying George Minafer, and providing narration. While Welles supplied narration to the film adaptation, Ray Collins was the only actor from the radio production to appear in the film.

The budget for The Magnificent Ambersons was set at $853,950, roughly the final cost of Citizen Kane. During shooting the film went over budget by 19 percent ($159,810), bringing the cost of the Welles cut to $1,013,760. RKO's subsequent changes cost $104,164. The total cost of the motion picture was $1,117,924.

The Magnificent Ambersons is one of the earliest films in movie history in which nearly all the credits are spoken by an off screen voice and not shown printed onscreen (a technique used before only by the French director and player Sacha Guitry for his 1936 film Confessions of a Cheat). The only credits shown onscreen are the RKO logo, "A Mercury Production by Orson Welles", and the film's title, shown at the beginning of the picture. At the end of the film, Welles's voice announces all the main credits. Each actor in the film is shown as Welles announces his or her name. As he speaks each technical credit, a machine is shown performing that function. "I got a lot of hell because of that," Welles later said of his verbal sign off. "People think it's egotistic. The truth is, I was just speaking to a public who knew me from the radio in a way they were used to hearing on our shows. In those days we had an enormous public — in the millions — who heard us every week, so it didn't seem pompous to end a movie in our radio style."

Thomas M. Pryor of The New York Times praised The Magnificent Ambersons as "an exceptionally well made film, dealing with a subject scarcely worth the attention which has been lavished upon it." He further praised the performances from the cast highlighting Dolores Costello as being "too beautiful and capable an actress to remain inactive for such long periods. Agnes Moorehead, playing the role of a romantically frustrated aunt, is splendid. Other fine performances are contributed by Ray Collins, Anne Baxter and the veteran Richard Bennett as the grandfather." Time heralded the film as "a great motion picture, adult and demanding. Artistically, it is a textbook of advanced cinema technique. The novel use of sidelighting and exaggerated perspective that made Kane seem unlike any other movie floods Ambersons with the same revealing eloquence, examining faces, bathrooms, streets, the cluttered detail of the Ambersons magnificence, from a viewpoint so fresh that it creates a visual suspense in the very act of clarification." Harrison's Reports positively wrote the film "is an artistic achievement, excelling in every department—that of direction, acting, production, and photography." Herm Schoenfeld of Variety unfavorably compared the film to The Little Foxes (1941), writing that it is "without the same dynamic power of story, acting, and social preachment. Also unlike 'Foxes,' this film hasn't a single moment of contrast; it piles on and on a tale of woe, but without once striking at least a true chord of sentimentality." Mae Tinée of the Chicago Tribune wrote "All the acting is commendable, but somehow for me, the characters seldom 'came alive.' And I guess I wasn't alone in that action, because people sitting near me exhibited a baffled restlessness." Manny Farber, reviewing for The New Republic, criticized Welles's radio style approach writing: " at the times when something is on the screen and Welles tells you what for. Meanwhile, for something to do, you count the shadows. Theater like is the inability to get the actors or story moving, which gives you a desire to push with your hands. There is really no living, moving or seeing to the movie; it is a series of static episodes connected by narration, as though someone sat you down and said "Here!" and gave you some postcards of the 1890s."