Reception
The film recorded a loss of $620,000.
The film has been very well received by critics. Rotten Tomatoes, the review aggregator, reports that 96% of the critics gave the film a positive review with only one negative. While not as acclaimed as Citizen Kane, it is considered one of Welles's best works. It and Citizen Kane were the only films of Welles to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
A dissenting view came from Manny Farber, reviewing the film in August 1942. While crediting Welles for his drive toward three-dimensional characters and his desire for realism, Farber wrote:
- "The movie runs from burdensome through heavy and dull to bad. It stutters and stumbles as Welles submerges Tarkington's story in a mess of radio and stage technique. The radio comes in those stretches of blank screen when the only thing present is Welles's off-screen voice mellifluously setting the period and coyly reminiscing, talking and drooling, while you sit there muttering let's get on. And at the times when something is on the screen and Welles tells you what for.
- Theatre-like is the inability to get the actors or story moving, which gives you a desire to push with your hands. There is really no living, moving or seeing to the movie; it is a series of static episodes connected by narration, as though someone sat you down and said "Here!" and gave you some postcards of the 1890's."
Read more about this topic: The Magnificent Ambersons (film)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)