The Importance of the Olives:
Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons

April 10, 2006

The only version of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) now available is the VHS version put out by Turner Classics. The man who introduces the movie.. in that old VHS format which you have to either sit through or fast forward.. describes the way RKO Studios cut 40 minutes to get it down to 88 minutes total. Then he has the nerve to suggest that maybe it was an improvement.

Watching the truncated version, it is easy to feel the movie stretching toward something more expansive. The movie needs time because it is not simply the story about a family's decline, but a story about the passing of a particular world. This theme is set out from the first words of the film, narrated by Orson Welles:

The magnificence of the Ambersons began in 1873. Their splendor lived throughout all the years that saw their midland town spread and darken into a city.

Then at the very end of the film, this theme is taken up again by the narrator:

George Amberson Minifer walked homeward slowly through what seemed to be the strange streets of a strange city. For the town was growing, changing. It was heaving up in the middle incredibly. It was spreading incredibly. And as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself and darkened its sky.

So by its own self-definition, The Magnificent Ambersons is about a period in our national history, beginning with 1873 and continuing until the dominance of the automobile was well established.

The characters in the drama Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), Isabel Amberson Minifer (Dolores Costello), and George Minifer (Tim Holt) are strong, but stripped of the lush period background, they seem to be floating. I don't get the feeling that the characters were ever meant to carry all the weight of the film.. But let me explain, as I would hate to come across as saying that Welles was not interested in character. Take the sled scene, with George Minifer racing along in the snow with airy tinkling bells in the background. The sled is interspersed with scenes of Eugene Morgan trying to start his newfangled and decidedly noisy "horseless carriage." As George passes he pronounces: "Get a horse!" The scene is about character, but it is also about a time and its social realities. The characters in Ambersons need space to breathe.. they need a background.

I still need to read the original script to learn what exactly was changed (besides the obviously tacked-on ending), but I will guess that a major part of the cuts were scenes that allowed those characters to inhabit a particular background. The movie was pared down to an essential familial drama. Something like this appears to be the subject of this bit of dialogue between Peter Bogdanovich and Orson Welles:

PB: Probably the silliest cut I know of comes in the middle of a long sustained shot during the ball when two characters make some comment about olives, which were evidently new to America at the turn of the century.
OW: Yes. You didn't get to see the little joke about the olives, because some lamebrain said, "What's olives got to do with it?" One of those things. They cut twenty seconds' playing time and cut into two pieces out crane shot that would have played for a whole reel without a cut. Too bad. I like digressions, don't you? [126]

The olives were minor, but they represented the strange world in which these characters lived. To make quite sure that this world emerged full-blown in its oddity was the work of hundreds of details, from the coughing hot-water pipes that filled the bathtub for the uncle Jack Amberson, to the wistful introduction which explained some details about period fashion.

I thought about Gone with the Wind (1939) after watching Ambersons.. an odd comparison, perhaps, but Ambersons has a bit of the same broad historical ambition. Only Welles delivers a much darker American story. The colors seem to go darker as the film progresses, and the music too seems more and more haunting. Instead of a film that celebrates a myth about the past in faux historical detail, Welles actually dares to present a complicated view of our past, fleshed out through the drama of the Ambersons, that should haunt Americans who care about the worlds that could have been.. and who want to imagine a world not made by automobiles and their never ceasing demand for more fuel.