And yet certainly the political and even the personal significance of the film was not lost on the man who was the other chief model for Kane. For all of its rich poetic sentiment and its mixing of Hollywood convention with iconoclastic social commentary, the most important fact about Welles’s first film is that it proved to be a fundamentally dangerous project. Unlike films of the previous decade, it was at least loosely based on a live and kicking subject, a proto-fascist demagogue whose power in Hollywood was second only to his power over a newspaper empire. The dimensions of that power can be assessed by simply glancing through Variety for the ten years or so before Kane was produced. In November 1928, for example, one reads that “any time the Hearst paper gets in back of a picture it is a box office natural. . . . They did it last week on Marion Davies (Show People) and the gross jumped to $33,000.” In February 1932 one finds a note on Hearst’s interest in movie content: “To avoid trouble with the Hearst papers as in the case of ‘Five Star Final,’ Warners sent a script of its new newspaper story, ‘The Ferguson Case,’ to William Randolph Hearst.”
In this atmosphere Kane was remarkable, and the results were about what could have been expected. Hearst was rumored to have taken it lightly, but the reprisals taken by his press are a matter of record; he even sent a personal note to columnist John Chapman suggesting that anyone who admired the film unreservedly was a “treasonable Communist” and not a “loyal American.” No doubt prompted by Hearst, J. Edgar Hoover’s decade-long FBI investigation of Welles began when Kane was released. The critical response was mostly favorable and sometimes adulatory, but RKO had difficulty finding bookings. If L. B. Mayer had been successful in buying the rights, the film would never have been shown at all. Kane received sensational publicity from Hearst’s rivals (probably this was part of Welles’s strategy), but not enough to calm the fears of distributors, who began to grumble ominously that Welles was more interested in courting critics than in selling the picture where it counted. In 1941 Motion Picture Herald wrote, “Mr. Welles is showing the picture to almost anyone who might be interested except the showmen who might have to deal with it. . . . It is possible that he has not yet, in his preoccupations, heard about the exhibitor.” The condescension in these remarks does not conceal the fact that theater managers were concerned about Hearst’s wrath, to say nothing of what they regarded as the potential artiness of the film. Ultimately, Citizen Kane was recognized by the reviewers, by certain Hollywood professionals, and even, somewhat reluctantly, by the Motion Picture Academy. It established Welles as a major talent, but at the same time it made his future in American movies problematic.
The paradox—and one of the biggest contradictions of them all—is that Welles had no desire to wreck the motion picture industry. He was a devoted worker who had studied the Hollywood masters and whose film, despite its complexity, was in the best tradition of American popular entertainment. As he himself put it, he was never inclined to “joke with other people’s money.” Kane was held to a relatively modest budget ($749,000) and was praised by journals like the Hollywood Reporter for its frugality. Nevertheless, various Hollywood bosses had perceived Welles as an “artist” and a left-wing ideologue who might bring trouble. Citizen Kane may not have been a thoroughgoing anticapitalist attack, but it was close enough to ensure that Welles would never again be allowed such freedom at RKO.
4
The Magnificent Ambersons
As Citizen Kane was about to appear, the Hearst press made a number of heavy-handed threats, at one point claiming they intended to expose Hollywood’s practice of hiring “refugees to the exclusion of native Americans.” Whatever anxiety this sort of publicity may have created at RKO, it certainly had an effect upon exhibitors. On September 7, 1941, for example, the New York Times reported that Kane had been sold to the Fox West Coast theater chain but that it would “not be displayed by any of the circuit’s 515 theaters on the Pacific Coast, Mountain States, and Midwest”—this despite the fact that the picture had outgrossed RKO’s other new releases when it was shown in San Francisco, Denver, and Omaha. Welles declared that he would sue, but his film had already been kept away from circuit bookings for too long.
Effective as the Hearst vendetta was, the decline of the Mercury group came about for more complex reasons. From the beginning, Welles had been disliked in Hollywood, and his problems were compounded by the management at RKO. A month after Kane he was given a “producer-director” contract under which he would bring out three pictures a year. Meanwhile the studio’s profits were falling and Floyd Odlum’s Atlas Company was gaining a controlling interest. Odlum applied pressure to George Schaefer, who in turn made life difficult for Welles. By early 1942 Atlas was in total control and had replaced Schaefer with their own man; in the process Welles’s next three films were sabotaged and his Mercury organization ordered from the lot.
Before the end came, Welles had expressed interest in various projects. The “Mexican Melodrama” described in chapter 1 was announced and then abandoned; according to press releases, Harnett Kane’s Louisiana Hayride, a biography of Huey Long, was considered and soon dropped, as was Zoe Atkins’s Starvation on Red River. At some point Welles persuaded George Schaefer to approve Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, which the Mercury had done on radio; indeed Welles even played a recording of the radio broadcast to Schaefer in order to convince him. Welles in turn agreed to produce Journey into Fear at Schaefer’s request. Soon the war began, and Welles immediately involved himself in a noncommercial project sponsored jointly by RKO and the Rockefeller interests within the US government—an ambitious Latin American documentary composed of several interrelated stories and shot in color and black-and-white, titled It’s All True. For this undertaking Welles agreed to waive payment and work in Rio de Janeiro, handling his other film and radio commitments at long distance.
Partly because of RKO’s growing desire to be rid of Welles, the documentary turned into a nightmare. RKO had promised to have Robert Wise deliver the rough cut of Ambersons to Rio, but Welles never saw it. The film received some bad preview notices in Pomona (where it was shown following a Dorothy Lamour musical called The Fleet’s In), but it also received some excellent notices. The studio’s response was to reduce it in length by about forty-five minutes and add new material without the director’s approval. The Welles–Norman Foster film Journey into Fear, scripted by Joseph Cotten and various others (including, according to press reports, Ben Hecht), was also recut by the studio. Meanwhile the new management began circulating rumors that Welles’s Rio footage was chaotic and extravagant. With It’s All True nearly complete, Welles was ordered home; RKO collected its guaranteed money from the government, printed about 13,000 feet of Welles’s work (which was never shown), and supposedly destroyed the rest. As for Ambersons—a less sensational and less inherently popular work than Kane—it was first widely advertised and then downgraded by the studio. In a few big city markets audiences were reported to have laughed at the dramatic moments, and even though the film did respectably at the box office when it was first released, it was soon playing at the bottom end of double-feature programs. Kane had been a succès de scandale, It’s All True had become a victim of studio politics, and Ambersons had shown no profit. In combination the three films put an end to Welles’s power in Hollywood.
It was the saddest chapter in Welles’s career, and it remains a subject of controversy. Charles Higham, for example, has said that Welles “ran out” on Ambersons and made It’s All True a needlessly expensive film, partly because of what Higham calls “a fear of completion.” But Welles and virtually everyone else involved with the making of the two movies claimed otherwise. In the mid-1980s, at about the time of Welles’s death, almost two-thirds of the material he had shot on and near the coast of Fortaleza for It’s All True was discovered in Brazil. Richard Wilson made a short documentary, Four Men on a Raft, from some of this material, and more was used in a 1993 feature, It’s All True, supervised by Wilson, Bi
ll Krohn, and others. Wilson, Robert Stam, and Catherine Benamou had already written important essays about Welles’s film, pointing out the explicit, sometimes unconscious racism that determined RKO’s attitude toward it. In 2007 Benamou published It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey, which is a definitive historical reconstruction. For this reason I have not attempted to write about the film, nor about Journey into Fear, which was directed partly by Norman Foster. Instead I have concentrated upon The Magnificent Ambersons, a film RKO seems to have resented from the start but that survives in something relatively close to its original form.
I
Throughout his early career Welles had been fascinated with literature of and about the 1890s. In 1938 alone his radio broadcasts included adaptations of The Man Who Was Thursday, Sherlock Holmes, Around the World in Eighty Days, Heart of Darkness, The Gift of the Magi, Life with Father, Seventeen, and Clarence. The Mercury stage performances alternated between the Elizabethans and turn-of-the-century dramatists like William Gillette, William Archer, and George Bernard Shaw; the early sections of Citizen Kane were filled with an exuberant recreation of nineties Americana; and when Welles tried to revive the Mercury in 1945, Around the World was his first project.
Among all of these properties, however, The Magnificent Ambersons exuded a special appeal. The novel, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1918, is virtually ignored today, perhaps because Tarkington clung to an antimacassar style and opted for a popular, sentimental conclusion. The old-fashioned plot conventions, the painfully obvious symbolism, the continually “regional” quality of his work pale compared to the works of the following generation of American writers, yet Ambersons remains intelligent and more readable than many other books with greater reputations. It tells the story of the members of a faintly absurd Midwestern aristocratic family who are blind to the coming of the industrial age. Pathetically out of date, living side by side in their grand houses, the Ambersons are destroyed by a new economy that eats away at the foundations of their property. Their decline parallels the rise of Eugene Morgan, an automobile inventor who becomes a power in the growing city. (The novel gives the town no name, but in the film it is identified by an insert showing the front page of the Indianapolis Inquirer.) Ironically, Morgan has always loved Major Amberson’s daughter, but the two are unable to marry because of the Amberson pride. At first Morgan is rejected because he seems a wastrel; Isabel Amberson marries the passionless Wilbur Minafer, but when Wilbur dies, Morgan is kept away by Isabel’s spoiled son, George. Only at the end, in a projected marriage between George and Morgan’s daughter, Lucy, does the old wealth promise to join with the new. The Amberson era, however, has completely passed, and their houses are bought and divided up by the growing city.
Booth Tarkington had been a friend of Welles’s father, and the novel’s portrait of a “midland town” passing into the twentieth century was surely reminiscent of Welles’s experience as a boy in the quasi-Victorian atmosphere of Kenosha and Woodstock. The book was written at about the time of Welles’s birth, so certain of its characterizations struck quite close to home. The inventor Morgan and the beautiful Isabel Amberson are not unlike Welles’s own parents, and Isabel’s son George strongly resembles the insufferable young George Orson himself. An overprotected youth, George Amberson Minafer is universally hated by the townspeople, who describe him as a “fool boy with the pride of Satan” and a “highhanded Lucifer.” When Isabel dies, leaving this son to become reconciled with a father figure he has treated as a rival, the possible affinities with Welles’s life become even more intimate. In fact it is interesting that the oedipal triangle in the novel should be represented in the film by three players who have relatively weak personalities, as if they were simultaneously hinting at autobiographical parallels and defending against them. Eugene Morgan as portrayed by Joseph Cotten is more of a dandy than the Morgan in the book and therefore presumably bears a greater resemblance to Welles’s father; yet Cotten is an actor who seems to have been born middle-aged and is less sexually threatening to George than he should be. Dolores Costello, an agelessly beautiful silent movie actress who had come out of retirement, makes Isabel into a golden-haired Madonna, a woman so abstracted into a complacently sweet and self-sacrificing role that she becomes almost invisible (although in the original version, before RKO revised a scene between her and her son, she was a stronger character). Tim Holt, as George, has dark, baby-fat looks that make him a double for the director, but he lacks the appropriate neurotic energy that Welles himself would have brought to the part.
Despite the relative blandness of these actors, the film manages to evoke far more sexual anxiety than the novel, chiefly because of Agnes Moorehead’s performance as the spinster Aunt Fanny and Welles’s own handling of the mise-en-scène. After making only a few changes in the ending of the story, Welles used the full weight of a gothic style to transform Tarkington’s bittersweet, undisturbing book into a dark, almost nervous film. The potential mania of George and the hysteria of Fanny are heightened by grotesque visuals, as in the shot shown in figure 4.1, where the shadow of an angry peacock echoes Moorehead’s profile. The Amberson mansion itself differs considerably from Tarkington’s descriptions of a reasonably pleasant, if ostentatious, manor and sometimes resembles the house of Frankenstein, as, for example, when the mansion is shown in a thunderstorm after the death of Wilbur (see fig. 4.2).
Figure 4.1: George (Tim Holt) and Aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead).
Everywhere Welles has emphasized the pessimistic qualities of his source, giving the film a sharper satiric edge, a greater degree of sexual frustration and madness. These slight changes of tone, however, are in keeping with Tarkington’s underlying social despair. Throughout the film the inability of the characters to overcome psychological divisions is linked to the split within the society. At the beginning we see Eugene Morgan returning to town after a twenty-years absence; a widower with a grown daughter, he longs for the beautiful Amberson woman almost in the way Jay Gatsby longs for Daisy. When Isabel’s husband dies, Morgan seems to have been given a second chance, but history only repeats itself through the intervention of George. In still another repetition, George is parted from Lucy (Anne Baxter), who cannot accept him until his illusions of grandeur have been destroyed. Even the supporting characters are sexually isolated, though not necessarily because of social impediments: Major Amberson is a widower, Mrs. Johnson lives alone in the house across the way, and neither Fanny nor Uncle Jack Amberson has been able to find a mate. The only marriage we see is the companionate union of Isabel and Wilbur, and the web of unrequited loves that make up the plot suggests that loneliness pervades the entire world. Everyone has become a prisoner of class or sex, a citizen of a town Lucy whimsically names “They-Couldn’t-Help-It.”
Figure 4.2: The Amberson mansion in a storm.
Clearly The Magnificent Ambersons had permitted Welles to return to the autobiographical material that was one of his obsessions in Citizen Kane and to create the same deterministic universe. Although the film covered a shorter time span (1885–1912), it also gave rise to the same notions about the movement of history. Among other things, Kane had been devoted to America’s passage from one kind of economic organization to another; Charles Foster Kane was a late product of the Gilded Age, a tycoon whose breed was slowly replaced by corporate organizations and faceless newsmen. Because Kane was shown at various stages of his life, we can see his character echoed by all the generations in Ambersons: like the elderly major, Kane becomes an anachronism; like Eugene Morgan, he is the progenitor of a new world, an inventor who creates a monster; like George Minafer, he is an overgrown child with a demonic will. In the purely economic and historical sense, Kane might be said to resemble Morgan most of all, his childlike infatuation with his newspaper being very like Morgan’s delight in the quaint little horseless carriages at the beginning of Ambersons. Hence, just as the newsrooms in Kane underwent a transformation from the oak-grained offices of the Inquirer to the
darkened, smoky theater of “News on the March,” so the midland streets of Ambersons are transformed into grimy highways.
Like Kane, Ambersons is a lament, even though it regards the passing of the old order as necessary. It sympathizes strongly with the point of view of Morgan, who is at once a progressive, a philosopher, and a would-be poet—a man who seems compelled to invent the automobile despite the fact that he is almost grimly aware of the changes it might bring. Also like Kane, Ambersons tries to offer consolation by shifting its focus from pessimism over the material world to a saddened, idealistic fascination with the passing of time. There is a speech in the novel—reproduced in the original film but cut by RKO—that both announces this theme and reminds us of the final images of Kane. Isabel is speaking to George (in the film it was Eugene who spoke the lines to Isabel):
“The things that we have and that we think are so solid—they’re like smoke, and time is like the sky that the smoke disappears into. You know how a wreath of smoke goes up from a chimney, and seems all thick and black and busy against the sky, as if it were going to do such important things and last forever, and you see it getting thinner and thinner—and then, in a little while, it isn’t there at all.”
George does not understand his mother, but at the end of the novel he comes to believe that “nothing stays or holds or keeps. . . . Great Caesar dead and turned to clay stopped no hole to keep the wind away.” This knowledge is revealed only indirectly in the film, though George does become more mature and sympathetic; in its place we are shown—in some of the most striking imagery Welles ever produced—an unremitting movement, an almost ruthless picture of time being lost, like smoke in the air. As Michael Wood has said, it is this sense “of historical change as tangled and relentless, of the passage of personal time and time of the city, of the intransigence of desire and the uselessness of hindsight,” that makes The Magnificent Ambersons such a remarkable movie.
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 14