The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

I could spend most of this blog about The Magnificent Ambersons discussing Agnes Moorehead's performance. She is a marvel here, as she was in almost every one of her movies. What a pity that so few people have seen her film work and only know her from her performance as Endora on Bewitched. If you watch The Magnificent Ambersons, nominated for Best Picture of 1942, you'll see her in one of the most amazing performances ever captured on film, and it isn't even one of the lead roles. It's a relatively small supporting part.

Moorehead plays Fanny, the sister of Wilbur Minafer. Wilbur has married Isabel Amberson (silent screen star Dolores Costello), daughter of an upper class family. Isabel had wanted to marry the dashing and impulsive Eugene Morgan, played by Joseph Cotton, but her father objected to such an arrangement and she chose Wilbur instead because he would provide stability. Years later, after Wilbur's death, Eugene returns after having made a fortune as an automobile manufacturer and begins courting Isabel again, only to have her son intercede this time. George Minafer has fallen in love with Eugene's daughter, Lucy Morgan (Anne Baxter). Through the assistance of his aunt Fanny, who was obviously in love with Eugene herself, George manages to scuttle the romance between his mother and Eugene.

What makes Moorehead stand out among a stellar cast is the range of emotions she puts on display. You can easily sense the desire she has for Eugene when he returns. Watch her face light up when she realizes that he is downstairs in the Amberson home or when she is in his company on the automobile ride in the snow. Yet she also has the capacity to be vengeful, spiteful. Her temper seems to be triggered with ease. And when she confronts the death of her sister-in-law, you can see how all of the mixture of feelings she has felt come rushing back to her. She was a remarkable actress, and few ever achieved her level of greatness, in my opinion.

I haven't mentioned yet that this was the film Orson Welles directed after Citizen Kane. There is much already written about how the studio, facing unfavorable comments from preview audiences, chopped out almost a third of the film and destroyed the portions that had been edited out. We will likely never see the film the way that Welles intended, a fate that he would have to encounter time and time again throughout this career, but what remains demonstrates a clear sense of the power he wielded as a director. He doesn't act in this film, but he does provide the voice-over narration, using typical Welles-ian humor in the introduction of the cast that occurs at the end of the film.

I'd still recommend seeing The Magnificent Ambersons even if it is a flawed masterpiece. Certainly, the happy ending that the studio tacked on doesn't fit the rest of the film, which is very bleak and somewhat depressing in its themes and tone. However, you won't soon forget the performances or the real sense of how one family can destroy itself through its greed and hunger for power.