How does the magnificent ambersons end

The movie ends the same way except the scene of Eugene and Lucy in the garden was dropped. The second preview audience saw a version that ran about minutes. Twenty minutes of footage was scrapped and the ending went: George and Jack at the railroad station, Fanny's breakdown, Bronson's office, George's walk home, Eugene and Lucy in the garden, George being hit by car, Eugene hearing about the accident, and a shorter version of Eugene visiting Fanny in the boarding house.

When the previews still weren't to the studio's satisfaction, the film was cut over and over, a new ending was filmed not by Welles and the film was finally released at its current run of 88 minutes. Getting Started Contributor Zone ». Edit page. Top Gap. See more gaps ». Create a list ». It was through Friedkin, more or less, that I first learned of the breadth and depth of Ambersons obsession in cinephile circles.

A few years ago, while working on another story, I became acquainted with a film-restoration producer named Michael Arick, who was helping Friedkin restore his film, The Exorcist a big success in re-release last year.

Arick mentioned to me that Friedkin spoke frequently of his desire to find the missing Ambersons footage. If anyone had the pull to gain access to the vaults on the Paramount lot, it was Friedkin; his wife, Sherry Lansing, is C. But when I called him to ask if he wanted to undertake an Ambersons search with me tagging along, he demurred. You just never know. Why anyone thought The Magnificent Ambersons would have bright box-office prospects is a mystery.

Welles, in fact, had not originally intended to make The Magnificent Ambersons his second film—it was a fallback choice. When that project ran aground for a variety of logistical and political reasons, George Schaefer, the RKO studio chief, suggested a less ambitious espionage thriller that he already had in development, Journey into Fear. Welles agreed to this idea, but not for his next film— Journey into Fear was a basic genre picture, an insufficiently grand successor to Kane, and something more dazzling and far-reaching would have to come between the two films.

It was a terrific production which, if you can somehow get your hands on a laser-disc player, you can hear on the special edition of The Magnificent Ambersons released by Voyager , and precisely the kind of low-budget masterstroke that led Schaefer to believe that this East Coast theater and radio prodigy was worth signing to a two-picture deal.

Welles had been just 22 when he, with John Houseman, founded the Mercury Theatre in When Kane was up for all these Academy Awards—in those days they were done on the radio, out of the Biltmore Hotel downtown—every time there was an announcement of the nominees for a category, when it was Citizen Kane , there would be boos from the [industry] audience.

Citizen Kane, despite the ecstatic reviews it received, was not a financial success—it was too ahead of its time to connect with a wide commercial audience, and too technically ambitious to come in at the prescribed budget. At his urging, Welles signed a new contract specifically for Ambersons and Journey into Fear in which he yielded his right of final cut to the studio.

Isabel Dolores Costello , the still-beautiful daughter of the richest man in town, Major Amberson Richard Bennett , is married to a dull nonentity, Wilbur Minafer Don Dillaway , with whom she has raised a holy terror of a son, George Tim Holt. The smug, college-age George, who is inappropriately close to his mother and considers automobiles to be a loathsome fad, takes an instant dislike to Eugene, but falls for his pretty daughter, Lucy Anne Baxter.

When Wilbur Minafer dies, Eugene and Isabel rekindle their old romance. As George faces a life of reduced circumstances in a city where the Amberson name no longer carries any weight, he finally realizes how wrong he was to keep his mother and Eugene apart. Then, while out walking, he suffers a fateful injury when struck by, of all things, an automobile; Lucy and Eugene go to visit him in the hospital, and at last, George and Eugene, both sadder but wiser, bury the hatchet.

Impressed by what he saw, which included the already completed Amberson-ball sequence, now renowned for its virtuosic camerawork and gorgeous mansion interiors, he made encouraging noises to Welles.

Principal photography on the movie wound up on January 22, Even in its current, mutilated state, The Magnificent Ambersons is, in stretches and flashes, the marvelous picture Wise remembers. The magnificence of the Ambersons began in Their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city. The only public conveyance was the streetcar.

Which, perhaps, it might once have been. With the war on, there was concern that the South American countries might ally themselves with Hitler. RKO and the State Department gave this idea their blessing, and it was decided that one segment of the film would be devoted to the annual carnival in Rio de Janeiro.

There was only one problem: the carnival would be taking place in February—precisely when Welles would need to be in The Magnificent Ambersons for the Easter release date that Schaefer was counting on.

So a reshuffling of plans was in order. The reshuffling went as follows: Welles would turn over the directing chores of Journey into Fear to the actor-director Norman Foster, though he would still act in that film in a supporting role; Welles would finish as much editing and postproduction work on Ambersons as possible before departing for Brazil in early February, whereupon he would supervise further work from afar through cables and telephone calls to a designated intermediary, Mercury Theatre business manager Jack Moss; and Wise would be sent down to Brazil to screen Ambersons footage and discuss possible cuts and changes with Welles, and would implement these changes upon his return to Los Angeles.

But Welles was known for keeping several irons in the fire, constantly juggling stage productions, radio shows, lecture tours, and writing projects, and the whole scheme proved, for January at least, to be workable. In early February, Wise hastily assembled a three-hour-long rough cut of The Magnificent Ambersons and took it to Miami, where he and Welles—passing through en route to Brazil from a State Department briefing in Washington, D.

Their work was to continue in Rio, but the U. On March 11, Wise sent a minute composite print a print with picture and soundtrack synchronized to Rio for Welles to review. Curiously enough, the first blow against this version was dealt not by RKO but by Welles himself. Wise complied, and on March 17, , The Magnificent Ambersons, in this form, had its first preview screening, in the Los Angeles suburb of Pomona. Too many plots.

Photography rivaled that of superb Citizen Kane. In my 28 years in the business, I have never been present in a theater where the audience acted in such a manner. Yet Orson Welles so deftly manages rhythm and tone—a complex blend of irony and empathy—and the intertwining of aural and visual effects that, even as time rolls relentlessly on and bitter memories accumulate, we constantly feel the exhilaration of virtuoso storytelling. Though the studio version is arguably a little closer to the brush-with-the-supernatural conclusion of the Booth Tarkington novel.

This moment of unexpected penitence rounds out the drama of the Ambersons —their pride, their selfishness, their loss, but also, for Georgie, a sliver of hope—and in the mixed feelings thus induced in the spectator suggests what is so powerful about the film, even in its truncated form. But before we get into this shadow version of Ambersons, we should look at the film we have, a work of cinematic art that has only grown in reputation over the years and that, despite the loss of some forty-three minutes, still has the epic feel that Welles desired.

The master of ceremonies is, of course, Welles himself. Their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city. A horse-driven streetcar stops to pick up a passenger, waiting patiently as she slowly makes her way out of the house, stopping to give instructions to a servant.

In a few years, the automobile will arrive and change the tempo irreversibly. In the blink of an eye, the seasons usurp one another. In another blink, young Eugene Morgan Joseph Cotten commits a faux pas that will reverberate through the movie. But before the ardent but drunken suitor can even begin warbling, he crashes onto his bass viol, instantly becoming a laughingstock and thereby losing her hand.

So brief is its duration, so breezily light the tone of its telling, that we could almost miss or underestimate the fateful event. Yet it prefigures all the misery and disappointment that follows. Even the women—played by Costello, Moorehead, and Anne Baxter—have an independent interest rare for the director. The tensions within the film are those within Welles himself: Orson, the child prodigy and show-off, doing magic tricks for the grown-ups, desperate to keep them interested.

And the Welles who was an old man the day he was born—always looking backward, at a disappearing world, or anticipating his own irrelevance in a world that has outlived him.

Some of the exhilaration that infects The Magnificent Ambersons comes from this liberating embrace of death. Like Montaigne, Welles preferred not to fear the end but to face it head-on, thus taking away its advantage. Citizen Kane is the prime example of this, but in Ambersons we also feel a sense of death foretold in the elegiac opening, the death not of a great personage but of a way of life, along with the collapse of romantic hope.

Love rarely survives the twistings of fate and character in a Welles film, and this is no exception. But if the film at first seems to follow the contours of Shakespearean tragedy—the decline in fortune of a wealthy family, the observing and lamenting chorus ingeniously transformed by Welles into gossiping townspeople —it soon becomes apparent that the Johnny-come-lately Ambersons are far from those awe-inspiring kings and queens whose downfalls elicit fear and terror. They may excite pity, even awe, but it is heavily laced with schadenfreude.

To make matters worse, there will be only one child, George, a hellion of monumental proportions. The scene appears in the book, but the witty staging is pure Welles. The casting of Holt was a masterstroke, so uncannily does he resemble the director as a young brat, and so superbly does he capture the blindness and arrogance of adolescence.

With it, he became an instant touchstone for filmmakers, even ones whose styles and concerns were utterly alien to his own. It was more about a kind of license: An outsider and only twenty-five! This is what one can do! This is what one can get away with! Kane infected American cinema with what Andrew Sarris called the virus of ambition. The acclaim did not translate into box office, however, and Welles was already on shaky ground at RKO when he started his fateful Ambersons project.