The Magnificent Ambersons: The day after I saw a revival of The Magnificent Ambersons, my friend James asked what I thought about it. He was baffled and I was mildly depressed. You have to grade Orson Welles’ second film on a curve because at least 30 minutes of it, the “best 30 minutes” according to Welles, were cut, destroyed, and lost by RKO while he was filming It’s All True in South America. The film as is, at 88 minutes, doesn’t make much sense, but it’s sustained by Welles’ brilliant filmmaking and the ultimate spoiled brat, Mr. Tim Holt. Perhaps best remembered for his appearances in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and My Darling Clementine, Holt plays a spoiled brat like no other, and it’s a shame he was in so many Westerns only because he can’t really play Little Lord Fauntleroy on the prairie.
In Welles’ adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s novel, Holt’s beyond impetuous; in this tale of family rise and ruin, you never once root for Holt, and this antipathy rubs off on other characters, people he loves. He’s fascinating to watch, but repulsive, an open wound of decadence and moral rot. I don’t know that there’s a ruder “protagonist” in 1940s cinema, maybe not even all of Classic Hollywood; when the plot becomes completely incomprehensible about half an hour in, it’s Holt that carries The Magnificent Ambersons and keeps it from descending into the dysfunctional confusion of other Welles features like The Lady from Shanghai and, to a lesser extent, The Stranger.
The Right Stuff: Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of the Tom Wolfe book infamously bombed in 1983, allowing Terms of Endearment to sweep the Oscars and become the iconic movie that it is. Everyone was convinced that The Right Stuff would be the big movie of that winter, and when it failed with the public (critics loved it), John Glenn decided against running for President. Every actor involved—Ed Harris, Veronica Cartwright, Pamela Reed, Mary Jo Deschanel, Dennis Quaid, Scott Glenn—had their careers put on pause, and while some of them made it back into movies, most ended up on television. Deschanel followed her husband (the film’s cinematographer) to Twin Peaks seven years later; Reed is perhaps most fondly remembered for her work with Robert Altman in the 1988 HBO series Tanner ’88.
The Right Stuff is an exemplary “movie for adults,” a piece of popular entertainment that doesn’t condescend, doesn’t pander to children, and, while hilariously literal at times (“Didn’t you hear about the Bay of Pigs? The President’s got enough to deal with” is pretty good, but it doesn’t quite top a scene that takes place in 1947: “But the Russians are our allies!”), exudes a noble patriotism without ever getting into John Wayne territory. The film’s politics are closer to the Democratic Party line of the 1990s and 2000s, with a few jokes thrown in at the expense of anti-feminists. From 2025, it’s not hard to see why this prim and proper and classy American epic fell flat in the rah-rah Reagan 1980s; it also has too many endings, and when you have a story like John Glenn’s, well, there’s only so much drama you can extract from fraught reentries that ultimately succeeded.
Automatic deduction for the presence of Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager, a performance that bookends the film and nearly sent me on my way out. Don’t worry, he’s not in the middle.
River’s Edge: Tim Hunter’s 1986 third film proposes teenage angst and alienation as a way of life—not just for the teens, but the adults and small kids, too. Everyone in the always overcast Pacific Northwest town knows they’re in a make-believe place, a purgatory for deadbeats and stoners who can’t peel themselves off the couch. The discovery of a pristine dead body, a beautiful girl who everyone knew, is just another minor curiosity in a place where the only thing to do is kill time. The killer’s revealed in the second or third shot of the movie, but this is no procedural, nor a pat “the kids are fucked up” drama. River’s Edge anticipates the uneasy tone and many of the key details of Twin Peaks, which premiered four years later; it’s easy to imagine Hunter throwing whatever he had on hand at his television when David Lynch’s pilot aired.
But where Twin Peaks veers more often into tragedy, River’s Edge favors comedy, while always darting between the two. It’s a remarkably hard movie to pin down, one that’s helped immeasurably by seeing it with a crowd. The nervous laughter of certain revival screenings starts at a howl, but then the movie gets everyone in line, and while the laughter continues, it’s in time with a herky-jerky and hard-to-read film. Crispin Glover’s performance ties everything together: by playing a teenager playing a teenager, Glover’s histrionics clarify the film’s murky notions. He’s doing Dean, he’s doing Brando, he’s even doing a bit of Artaud and kabuki—he’s trying very hard. You could follow a single character through River’s Edge and come away with an entirely new experience each time. It’s a film that sticks with you, however loose and flabby it can be at times.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits