Hacker Cinema
The Magnificent Ambersons
1942 · Film · 88 min
Directed by Orson Welles
The spoiled young heir to the decaying Amberson fortune comes between his widowed mother and the man she has always loved.
4 positive2 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
This article gives more background:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jun/18/magnificent-ambersons-rebirth-for-ruined-orson-welles-masterpiece-that-rivalled-citizen-kane
Meh, I see value in both The Magnificent Ambersons and the French atmospheric cinema of the '60s.
Film, as art, should not be forced into a box.
There's value to film with no plot at all. Consider Koyaanisqatsi.
I’ll play:
The Thin Man (1934), It Happened One Night (1934), Dodworth (1936), Fury (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), Grand Illusion (1937), You Only Live Once (1937), Wizard of Oz (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Great Dictator (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Philadelphia Story (1940), Rebecca (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), A Woman’s Face (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Casablanca (1943), Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Great Expectations (1946), The Big Sleep (1946), The Red Shoes (1948), A Letter to Three Wives (1949), Sunset Boulevard (1950), All About Eve (1950), A Place In The Sun (1951), High Noon (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), The Wages of Fear (1953). (I slipped two French films in.)
Almost anything by Hawks during those years. Or Hitchcock. Almost anything with Bogart. Or Grant. Or by Wilder.
Tons of noir films skirted the rules.
Look, I’m not a fan of the Hays code but some of those movies were to me better because of what they had to imply.
This is after the Hays code but as an example I recently watched the original 3:10 to Yuma and the remake. I hated the remake. What appeals to me about Elmore Leonard stories is that despite being about bad guys, they have a degree of charm to them (Out of Sight, Justified, Jackie Brown, Get Shorty,etc). The remake took all of the charm out of the original and replaced it with graphic violence and cruelty.
It’s a particular point of view that obviously won’t find resonance in this HN audience. Were the author’s view to prevail, you would be out of a job. Vast majority of people here owe their livelihood either directly or indirectly to the democratization of the internet. But that doesn’t mean the author the author is naive. There are certainly (unvoiced) masses largely sympathetic to his point of view.
Take the example you mentioned- cars. The Magnificent Ambersons garnered 4 Oscar nominations debating that very topic - should the automobile have replaced horses, and is it a net positive? Even at that time when the benefits of cars were clear, the audience found the film very compelling.
Similarly, Robert Redford starred as a barnstormer in Great Waldo Pepper, which made a strong case against the Air Commerce Act, the sole reason we even have airplanes carrying passengers & goods in the air. Redford’s character is like Linus, feels airplanes are a hobby for having fun doing stunts. But the government spots the potential for a quick buck, shuts him down for good & soon airplane “industry” becomes a real thing, with mail carriers & passenger planes. Redford has a line in that film where the commerce regulator asks him to stop the stunts & just take a job as a airplane mailman - I’m not a fucking courier, I’m a pilot! William Goldman, who studied that period & wrote the film, felt it was his best work & should have gotten the Oscar.
I am sure a decade down the line you will see a film about scientists harking back to the days when the internet was a curious lab experiment, not the giant teats of FAANGs from which the majority of this audience sucks it’s daily fill of milk while blissfully hawking knickknacks for the masses they would rather do without. Nigerian teaching himself Hindi, indeed.
> his first and only masterpiece, Citizen Kane
Only masterpiece? What about The Magnificent Ambersons? Touch of Evil? Chimes at Midnight? Calling his first film his only masterpiece gives the article a better story arc, but it's not true.
Synchronistically, I just read a brief discussion of the same pair of quotes in Simon Leys's anthology _The Hall of Uselessness_:
'Talking of Orson Welles, I wonder if many people still remember how, soon after the Second World War, his artistic reputation in Europe was nearly wrecked for a while by a blistering attack which Sartre launched against _Citizen Kane_. The profound silliness of this diatribe is startling half a century later:
... [same quote as in op]
The impact of this condemnation was devastating. _The Magnificent Ambersons_ was shown soon afterwards in Paris but failed miserably. The cultivated public always follows the directives of a few propaganda commissars: there is much more conformity among intellectuals than among plumbers or car mechanics. A few years earlier, Jorge Luis Borges (who wrote superb film reviews) had also expressed a critical opinion of _Citizen Kane_, but whereas Sartre’s censure now appears odious and ridiculous in its self-importance and dogmatism (it was actually dictated by a “politically correct” anti-American prejudice), Borges made a point that should retain its validity—even for the admirers of _Citizen Kane_:
"We all know that a feast, a palace, a huge enterprise, a lunch of writers or of journalists, a cordial atmosphere of frank and spontaneous comradeship are all particularly hideous. Citizen Kane is the first film that made conscious use of this reality ... It is not an intelligent film, but it is the work of a genius—in the most nocturnal and Germanic sense of this ugly word."
Sartre had an unquestionable genius (and we just learned what this means)—which may not be enough to reach posterity; in this respect, Borges was perhaps better equipped: he had a sense of humour—which is also the other side of a genuine humility.'