Word: kanes
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With much less publicity than usual, Orson Welles presents another of his famous attacks upon the traditional standards of art. After marked victories over both radio and stage conventionality, he has turned upon the moving picture business in a brave attempt to make it into a real art. "Citizen Kane" demonstrated great possibilities for advance in technique and threatened the complacency of the movie industry. Unfortunately "The Magnificent Ambersons" merely repeats that threat...
...cast, in which Orson Welles does not appear, are all good actors with difficult roles to perform. Dolores Costello and Tim Holt, as her spoiled son, present the central conflict of the plot. The son, whose character is strikingly like that of Citizen Kane, lacks the one saving grace of the Ambersons--their charm. His narrow-mindedness and conceit contrast sharply with the polish and warmth of his mother. Yet his stronger traits triumph over her more delicate virtues, destroy her life, and dissipate the family fortune. Once again the main role is that of an unpleasant, cruel man like...
...Magnificent Ambersons (Mercury; RKO-Radio) is a magnificent movie. It is also Round Two of the Orson Welles v. Hollywood set-to. The upstart young (27) producer-director-author-actor won Round One in a walk with his first picture, Citizen Kane (TIME, March 17, 1941), 1941's most provocative and exciting movie. Ambersons is not another Citizen Kane, but it is good enough to remove Director Welles for keeps from the novice or one-picture-prodigy class, and to further the feud...
What distinguished Kane from Hollywood's run-of-the-studio product was its sensational use of new techniques in picturemaking and storytelling-duly observed and variously imitated by Hollywood. Ambersons continues this important exploration with some remarkable piecemeal successes...
...despite these faults, dramatically Ambersons is a great motion picture, adult and demanding. Artistically, it is a textbook of advanced cinema technique. The novel use of sidelighting and exaggerated perspective that made Kane seem unlike any other movie floods Ambersons with the same revealing eloquence, examining faces, bathrooms, streets, the cluttered detail of the Ambersons' magnificence, from a viewpoint so fresh that it creates a visual suspense in the very act of clarification. Once the camera takes a 350-degree turn round the ballroom at George's home-for-the-holidays party, darting in to pick up revealing...