Ekleticgoodies

The Magnificent Ambersons

Walter Huston

PLOT SUMMARY:

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) is the legendary Orson Welles' second film - another audacious masterpiece. It was produced, directed, and scripted (but not acted in) by Welles, a follow-up film one year after his masterful classic Citizen Kane
This film's screenplay was written by Welles in only nine days. He had first adapted the story for a CBS-radio broadcast (Campbell's Playhouse) with his Mercury Theatre in the fall of 1939, featuring Walter Huston as Eugene Morgan and Welles himself as George Minafer. He used his regulars from Mercury Theatre within this production: Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins

The film is centered on the ill-fated, middle-aged romance between a struggling (and ultimately prosperous) horseless carriage inventor/manufacturer  and a beautiful, self-less, widowed Amberson matriarch-heiress . Her selfish, buggy-driving young son impedes their pairing and denies her mother's death-bed longing to see him again. A sub-plot chronicles the way in which the insufferable son courts and falls in love with Eugene's daughter Lucy, but when she insists that he choose a productive career, he breaks off the relationship. Ultimately, he receives his "come-uppance."

 The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman. In its brief run, it featured an impressive array of talents, including Agnes Moorehead, Bernard Herrmann, and George Coulouris. The show is famous for its notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, but the other shows in the series are relatively unknown.The show first broadcast on CBS and CBC in July 1938. It ran without a sponsor until December of that year, when it was picked up by Campbell’s Soup and renamed The Campbell Playhouse.

Approximate play time of 1 hour