Lost Copy of Welles's Classic Found at Fenwick
"The Magnificent Ambersons"
Visiting Research Professor Jamieson de Quincey, who teaches film studies at the University and has published extensively on the history of American cinema, is currently working on an article for a special issue of a high impact peer reviewed journal and, as a part of her research, decided to rewatch Orson Welles's best known film F for Fake. Naturally, she wanted to view it on the original 35mm - today's digital projection is, if the website editors may be permitted to use an uncouth expression, a worthless steaming pile of cow dung, figuratively speaking - and so she let herself into the archives to retrieve the copy she knew to be residing therein.
While rummaging around, she stumbled upon a magnificent treasure: An original cut of Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, which has long been considered to be lost in the dustbin of history. (So desperate have those unbearably annoying persons who consider themselves cultured because they spend all their time watching movies - ahem, cinema - been to see the complete version of Welles' classic that some have decided to commit the blasphemy of attempting to use technology to remedy the situation and have AI "finish" the film that already sits whole and unadulterated in Fenwick's archives (What could possibly go wrong?)).
Lucky for all of us, then, that de Quincey deployed the Young Fenwickians (YFs) to view the film and offer a write up (read on).
The Young Fenwickians Watched a Movie
And Here is What They Saw . . .
Perhaps history may come to view the closing of Fenwick University with the same bittersweetness as the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79. While the cities of Pompeii and Herculanaeum and their inhabitants were buried under ash and volcanic debris, cemented into their ashy tombs above which laid nothing by which future generations of men could even remember them, the tragedy inadvertently preserved the city, its scrolls, villas, and even people in a pristine state. We moderns have the pleasure of enjoying a Roman city essentially frozen as it was in the first century. Indeed, the eruption has been a boon to our knowledge of the Roman world, O Felix Culpa! More recently, scholars have been able to digitally scan and read the carbonized scrolls preserved by the eruption, unearthing texts that were thought to be lost for nearly two millennia. Such too is the case of Fenwick University’s hallowed archives, in which lie preserved innumerable artifacts of historic value. Recently, Fenwick faculty member Jamieson de Quincy happened to be digging around the Fenwick Archives and came across the original cut of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. Much of what is contained in the original cut was thought to be no longer extant and indeed does not survive in any copies of the film, except, of course, in the Fenwick University Archives. De Quincy tasked us young Fenwickians with watching the film and writing a brief report. It would, of course, have been a disservice to this review not to watch both the original cut as preserved in the Fenwick Archives and the considerably shorter normative version that survives outside the verdant fields of Fenwick’s campus.
The film depicts a well-to-do American family living in prosperous midwestern suburbia as they slowly confront the rapidly changing world around them that thrusts technological conveniences onto them, which they must learn to grapple with. In this brief review, we will discuss one of the scenes extant only in the original version of the film preserved in our archives.
One of the more interesting scenes in the original cut that is notably absent from the surviving film is of George Minafer as a student in prep school. It's the second scene depicting him as the obnoxious and rambunctious student he is, who rather explicitly gets himself in trouble. The first of these scenes with George as a schoolboy is still preserved in the surviving film. In this newly unearthed scene, George pranks his teacher when he is called up to the board to solve a math problem. Rather than solving the problem like a normal student, George instead eats the chalk that his teacher handed to him. He awkwardly waits for his peers’ laughter, but it never comes, and instead, he’s sent to the headmaster’s office. While in the headmaster’s office, George is informed of his expulsion from the school, and the expulsion crushes his parents’ dreams of sending George to the newly founded prestigious Fenwick University on the East Coast. The reference to F.U. in the film may be a reason for our institution’s interest in the film’s preservation. The scene here posits an image of George Minafer that is reminiscent of him throughout the rest of the film, especially the cringeworthy scene when the young, spoiled George beats another child. As a character, George really does represent the worst of the hoi-polloi-wannabe-hoi-kaloi who unsuccessfully seek, but never find, the great Fenwick University.
