The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction

I loved reading the original script and being able to visualize how the film looked before it was shattered into pieces. Absolutely essential for anyone who loves the film. I gained a lot from it.

At first glance, this looks like a book no Welles fans would want to be without. One has to be cautioned however regarding Carringer's oddly contradictory attitudes towards Welles. He does seem to admire the work, and his article "The scripts of Citizen Kane" did much to counter Pauline Kael's charge that Welles misappropriated writing credits on that film. Whereas she was working from spite, Carringer was working from facts and scholarship. (It can be found in the Citizen Kane Casebook edited by James Naremore.)But in this and in his book The Making of Citizen Kane, Carringer seems to adopt an antagonistic attitude towards Welles, as if he is trying to transform himself into Kael's heir. He writes from the point of view that if anything good or great is achieved in these two movies, it was in spite of Welles. Furthermore, in every instance of disagreement between Welles and the studio, Carringer systematically argues that RKO was invariably right and Welles wrong. The director may not have been perfect and did make some career and artistic blunders along the way, but Carringer's position is too extreme.And of course, every critic who disagrees with him is viewed as over-indulgent or a Welles sycophant.Which is too bad considering this book is the only source to offer the continuity script in its entirety; this material alone is sufficient to completely discredit Carringer's thesis and to make one deplore even more sharply what we are missing in the butchered version that survives of the film. And as for his 5-cent psychoanalysis of Welles' family relationships and their impact on his professional work, I think we should observe a generous silence about its ludicrousness.Other critics have proven it's possible to write balanced judgments on Welles, warts and all; Jonathan Rosenbaum, François Thomas and James Naremore among them (although in Naremore's case, the publisher did slap on his first essay the totally ridiculous title of The Magic World of Orson Welles.)All in all, this book can be appreciated as making available source material unavailable elsewhere, a feat that will probably not be duplicated because of the dispersal of RKO's archives. The critical contents however must be taken with a kilogram of salt. I you can find it cheap, do not hesitate.

I should probably give Carringer's book four stars--the introduction is nothing if not problematic re Welles' psychic make-up--but the bulk of the book--the 'continuity script'--is essential for anyone who loves the film. To give Carringer his due he has done a superb job of editing, making it a simple matter to recoup--imaginatively--altered and deleted scenes, thereby giving us as near as possible Welles' intentions before the hack job by the studio system (which in his introduction Carringer blames entirely on Welles' rather than the commercial mentality of the studio system.) Along with the script I would recommend an audio Vimeo production at https://vimeo.com/80798028. It gives the listener a good notion of what film lovers lost with the studio interference plus an excellent description of the sombre final scene, so in keeping with what went before, and unlike the ludicrous one tacked on by RKO.

Fabulous.