Written by Geoffrey O'Brien
Translator: Issac
Proofreader: Onegin
来源：《The New York Review》
Peter Bogdanovich's interview with Orson Wells, published under the title "This Is Orson Wells," recalls nostalgic memories of his time with his father in a quiet enclave in Illinois in the 1920s, which he likens to his childhood in the 1870s.
At the 1982 César Awards ceremony, Orson Wells and the new Caesar film queen Isabelle Adjani
There were no electric lights, no carriages—a completely outdated, old-school, early Tarkingtonian country life. The term "obsolete" could not be more appropriate. While Wells was still infant, Booth Tarkington had already commemorated the disappearance of this old-school world in his 1918 novel The Great Ambason, which Wells later brilliantly adapted in 1942, as well— a heated debate against industry forces and the greed that tarnished the world he grew up in.
In 1918, Tarkington became nearly America's preeminent writer, a prolific novelist and playwright, as well as a beloved entertainer and respected national figure.
The Great Ambason
Bad Boy Penrod (1914) is a nostalgic sketch of his boyhood in Indiana that soon became part of the culture. In Pulitzer Prize-winning Ambason the Great, his tone is even more sad and contradictory. The power of The Great Ambason is contradictory. Tarkington must admit that Ambason's decline was as inextricably linked to their arrogance and short-sightedness as it was to an economic situation beyond their control, but he was sympathetic to the Ambassons as he described their privileged areas of the city center as contaminated with industrial mud, air pollution, and, indeed, by the values of interlopers and immigrants.
At the heart of the novel, the spoiled young heir, George Minaf, succeeds in preventing his mother Isabelle from remarrying the industrialist Eugene Morgan, whose young self-esteem struggles in a self-destructive way to protect the vanished world and that set of values.
Tarkington argues that George's influence on his own actions was blind due to his upbringing; he eventually fell prey to the splendor he adored. While the novelist regrets the changes that have befallen the family, he also acknowledges that these changes are inevitable.
Most striking was Wells's fidelity to the novel's language. The peculiarity of Tarkington's way of talking, and the all-knowing third-person narrator's inhibition, is clearly crucial to Wells' understanding of the film. He retains some somewhat outdated phrases such as: the past, the cute re-made furniture, the fashion, the necessary signs of entertainment and the priceless luster.
The film is first and foremost admirable with its visual audacity – the evolving nuances and the surprising way it presents things to us, the retro-style accents, the changing formats and textures, the constant complex camera movements and abrupt close-ups, but even so, it was its language that was placed in the foreground from the beginning.
Wells's unforgettable, loud opening narration features a black screen in the background: "The splendor of the Ambason family began in 1873. Over the years, their splendor has continued, witnessing the gradual expansion of their central towns and their gradual transformation into a city." We see American Gothic houses, carriages passing in front of the door, which may be a tin plate photography album, with copywriting under the pictures, and the whole movie is like an illustrated storybook, and only after this, the vision seems to be in a secondary position.
How powerful this movie is, it can't be overestimated. In the memory, those voices linger in the mind. After reading enough, you'll begin to feel like this is part of your own family history: Joseph Cotton musing about the effects of cars ("They probably won't make the world, or the life of a man's soul, more beautiful"), Agnes Moorehead leaning back against a cold boiler ("I don't mind it burning—I wouldn't mind it burning me, George!"). Uncle Jack, played by Ray Collins, informs him of his sister's health ("I find Isabel as usual." It's just that I'm worried she's not always going to be good"), richard Bennett," richard Bennett plays as the dying Major Ambasson mutters to himself some eternal questions ("The earth comes from the sun, and we come from the earth").
There's no doubt that these lines remain in people's memories in part because of the sharp and beautiful vocal performances of this extraordinary ensemble band, but almost every word we hear in the film comes from Tarkington's hand.
Of course, much of the content may have been lost in Raidenhua's editing, but even in its preserved form, the film is an amazing display of Wells's talent for pinpointing the most expressive moments in the original text while leaving people to ignore others.
Tarkington is a very good storyteller, but his portrayal of the character is somewhat prosaic in the drama; Wells's deletion of the character makes the character more mysterious and more real. If the novel is already a meditation on a vanishing era, the film stands farther away, exploring the surface that Tarkington has rescued to uncover any further truths hidden there.
Despite Wells' strong nostalgia, his work is full of questions and conflicts. He told the same story and used the same language as Tarkington, but he ended it in a completely different place—or would have ended there, if he could have controlled the film at the time.
Wells's version of Ambason ends with a melancholy ending—Cotton will be skeptical that it was "more like Chekhov's hand than Tarkington"—and he thinks one of the best things in the film is eugene visiting Fanny's boarding house.
Eugene tells Fanny that she visited George, and what Eugene says in the original book is roughly in line with the narrative in the release version of the film, but the film clearly presents a completely different mood, the other boarders in the film walking in the background, the Victor phonograph with a noisy comedy, Fanny looking away, lost her mind in her own thoughts, and Eugene notices that he can't communicate with it, leaves alone, and then drives into the dim, now watertight city: this is very different from Tarkington's half-hearted redemption posture.