The Magnificent Ambersons

Orson Welles came to Hollywood  with a glittering reputation flowing behind him like a sorcerer's cloak. He cast his spell over RKO president George Schaefer and managed to secure an unprecedented level of control over his first feature. By the time it came to his second picture, Welles's reputation was beginning to look a little threadbare. Citizen Kane had provoked the wrath of newspaper tycoon W.R. Hearst, who famously tried to have the negatives destroyed and used the not inconsiderable power of his media empire to sabotage the marketing efforts of the studio that had backed the film. Confident in his own ambition, Welles shot his second masterpiece (based on a 1918 novel by Booth Tarkington) and then made the mistake of flying down to Rio to make another picture before delivering a final cut.

The 131 minute first cut of The Magnificent Ambersons was poorly received in test screenings and, in Welles's absence, the studio took the picture away from him, ordered forty minutes to be taken out and called for new scenes to be shot and inserted. Not surprisingly, Herrmann's music suffered in this process: thirty-one minutes of his fifty-eight minute score were excised, and, to add insult to injury, workmanlike studio composer Roy Webb was drafted in to write new music for the film's now more uplifting finale. Herrmann asked for his name to be removed from the credits.

The Magnificent Ambersons was finally released in an eighty-eight minute version. Welles dismissed it - "They let the studio janitor cut it in my absence," was his standard response when asked about it - as he often was - in his late-career persona as chat-show guest extraodinaire. His editing notes for the picture survived, but the film negatives did not (tossed, possibly, like the sled Rosebud, into a studio furnace). Herrmann's score has been reconstructed and re-recorded. I don't own the disc myself, so I have been listening to the Welles Raises Kane suite that incorporates some of its themes. It made sense for Herrmann to combine the Kane and Amberson scores into a single suite as both use the waltz form to evoke a sense of loss and nostalgia.