The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) on Netflix
Eugene Morgan loves Isabel Amberson, but she chooses Wilbur Minafer instead. Years later, her grown son George resents the attentions the widowed Eugene pays to his mother.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.6/1029,006 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
The Ambersons are the leading family of their Midwestern town, and have been since 1873; they live in its grandest mansion. Eugene Morgan courts Isabel Amberson and she loves him, but after he publicly embarrasses her she marries Wilbur Minafer instead. Isabel spoils their only child, George, who grows up with a sense of his own superiority. George comes home from college for a party that Major Amberson gives in his honor. Eugene, back in town after twenty years and now a widower, also attends, along with his grown daughter Lucy. George mocks Eugene's horseless carriage, dislikes him as a social climber, and at the same time falls for Lucy. His aunt Fanny Minafer secretly hopes Eugene will court her.
Cast
- Harry A. Baileyas Citizen
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Welles lost control of the editing to RKO, which cut more than an hour of footage and shot and substituted a happier ending; his notes for the cut he wanted survived, but the excised footage was destroyed.
- More than half of Bernard Herrmann's score was cut by RKO, so the composer severed his ties with the film and threatened legal action unless his name was removed from the credits.
- Welles could not stop RKO's cuts because he was in Brazil shooting It's All True, a Latin American film Nelson Rockefeller had personally asked him to make for the wartime Good Neighbor policy.
- The Magnificent Ambersons is one of the earliest films in movie history to speak nearly all its credits aloud rather than print them, a device used before only by French director and actor Sacha Guitry in his 1936 film Confessions of a Cheat.
- Welles put Agnes Moorehead, still a novice to film acting, through a rehearsal gauntlet for her climactic scene: play it "like a little girl," then "like an insane woman," then "like she's absolutely inebriated," and last with "an absolutely vacuous mind."
- The Amberson mansion set was built like a real house but with walls that could be rolled back, raised or lowered, so the camera could appear to pass through them in one continuous take.
- In the 2020s, Edward Saatchi's studio Fable began an experimental, noncommercial project to reconstruct the roughly forty-three minutes RKO cut and destroyed in 1942, using artificial intelligence trained on surviving scripts, production materials and the existing film.
- Snow scenes were shot inside the Union Ice Company ice house in downtown L.A., one of several Los Angeles-area locations that also included Big Bear Lake and the San Bernardino National Forest.
