Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) is justly considered one of America's greatest movies. The film, Welles's second, was based on Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1918 novel of the same name, which shed considerable light on the socioeconomic transformation of the Midwest in the early twentieth century by charting the linked trajectories of two central Indiana families-the Ambersons and the Morgans-representing declining and emerging elites. Despite the cuts forced upon Welles by anxious producers-according to one of the stars, Joseph Cotton, the producers feared that Welles's original (much darker) version of the film was more Chekhov than Tarkington-the film is still well worth watching, not least because of Welles's role as narrator. A case in point: Late in the film, Welles, in appropriately magnificent voice, clues in the audience about the fate that would befall one of the key characters, the spoiled princeling, George Amberson Minafor (played by Tim Holt): "Something had happened, a thing which years ago had been the eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the town. And now it came at last: George Amberson Minafor had got his comeuppance. He'd got it three times filled and running over." And Welles, if anything, was putting it mildly.
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