Interestingly, Tarkington’s vision of everything passing, coupled with his notion of eternal return, seems confirmed by the history of literature, which has always lamented the advent of new societies. In the American novel alone, the middle classes are always rising while the cities are always growing, and in English literature, as Raymond Williams has pointed out, writers mourned the death of an organic, agricultural society as far back as the medieval period. The theme is at least as old as the pastoral, and Ambersons is in part a pastoral, an expression of grief not over the loss of a whole and perfect world, but over the change of country into city. And as with any pastoral, it is less interesting as a recreation of historical truth than as a projection of political and psychological attitudes back upon an imaginary past. We know for a fact that industry created cities at the turn of the century, but the serene world described by the narrator at the beginning of Ambersons never existed. It is a sentimental memory, and Welles is intelligent enough to acknowledge this fact by the somewhat arch and ironic technique he adopts in the opening montage of the film. He avoids showing what the nineteenth-century town might have been like for ordinary people, depicting it instead as a picturesque village without dirt or poverty. But the falseness, or at least partiality, of this view is not a defect; as Eugene Morgan says in his quiet speech at the dinner table, the coming of the automobile will “change men’s minds”; once technology has altered consciousness, we can never fully know the past. The real intensity of the film therefore lies in its autobiographical relevance, in the poignancy with which Welles depicts a scene that partly represents his own childhood, brooding over the way everything passed, turning to chaos. It is a personal theme that has universal application, but it also has a more specifically political meaning: at a deep, unstated level, it expresses apprehensiveness over uncontrolled capitalism, that wave of Babbittry that destroyed the old autocratic rule only to replace it with an infernal city.
A similar malaise can be found running throughout American movies of the forties, though it is subtly, almost unconsciously buried beneath the surface. A few contemporary reviewers suggested that Welles’s preoccupation with small-town Midwestern aristocracy was inappropriate to wartime, but Warner Brothers had released Kings Row in the same year; profitable Selznick productions like Gone with the Wind and Rebecca had been concerned with the passing of great houses; and even that most successful of propaganda films, Casablanca, was filled with nostalgia for times gone by. In 1946 Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life used parts of leftover sets from The Magnificent Ambersons to create a drafty old mansion at the center of a town called Bedford Falls, where James Stewart and Donna Reed set up housekeeping. Stewart plays a character who devotes his life to building clean suburbs for the working class, but the place where he lives reveals the film’s unconscious ambivalence toward progress. It is a decaying nineteenth-century home for a man of property, more in keeping with the style of the Dickensian villain of the film, a banker played by Lionel Barrymore. Although Capra is clearly on the side of modernity and democratization, he acknowledges implicitly the nostalgic charm of this house, which belongs to another age and another social order.
The major difference between Welles’s movie and these others was in its sophistication, its consciousness of its purpose. At the same time, it was filled with nearly as many emotional contradictions as Kane. Like all gothic artists, Welles had identified with the very plutocracy whose decadence he shows; a true Roosevelt liberal, he remained aristocratic in his tastes and implicitly contemptuous of laissez-faire economics. He intended to show that the tragedy was not limited to the Ambersons alone; at the end, Eugene Morgan would be ironically confronted with the dead world he helped create.
But here a general description needs to give way to a treatment of specific details, for the meaning of Welles’s film—to say nothing of its dramatic power—has been muffled by RKO’s alterations. It is possible to construct an idea of the original film by consulting three sources: (1) Robert L. Carringers’s commentary for an excellent Voyager laser disc of Ambersons; (2) Carringers’s book The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction; and (3) Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “The Original Ambersons,” which can be found in the useful appendix to Bogdanovich and Welles’s This Is Orson Welles. I prefer the third of these sources because I agree with Rosenbaum’s judgment of the original film and the effects of the cuts and alterations. I have been content to describe the studio revisions in very general terms, trying to recover the integrity of Welles’s work mainly from the local qualities of the film that has survived.
II
The Magnificent Ambersons is a less self-reflexive, less spectacular film than Citizen Kane. In form it resembles Welles’s radio shows, taking dialogue directly from the novel and using Welles’s offscreen voice in place of Tarkington’s authorial commentary. But the introductory montage leading up to the Amberson ball is a highly sophisticated example of movie editing, dense with meaning and serving a function rather like the Kane newsreel. In less than ten minutes of screen time (slightly longer in the original version), Welles presents the same material that Tarkington had taken three chapters to get through; the town is pictured, the major characters are introduced, and several motifs are established. At the same time, a number of purely visual ironies have been added so that while this section is true to the novel it is also one of the most self-consciously “cinematic” moments in the film.
The story begins with a dark screen, Welles’s voice remarking that the magnificence of the Ambersons began in 1873 and lasted “through all the years that saw their midland town spread and darken into a city.” The screen lightens as Welles says, “In that town in those days, all the women who wore silk and velvet knew all the other women who wore silk and velvet,” and the first image is taken from a description of a horse-drawn trolley in the opening pages of the book: we see a charming brick house, framed as if for a portrait, photographed through a Vaseline-edged lens; a trolley has momentarily slipped from its tracks at the front gates, and several passengers have stepped off to try to set it right. Faintly on the soundtrack we hear Bernard Herrmann’s variations on Émile Waldteufel’s “Toujours ou jamais,” a wistful, fragile theme that was a particular favorite of Welles’s.
Most viewers and not a few critics have assumed that the house belongs to the Ambersons. In fact it is the home of the gossip Mrs. Johnson and is located precisely across the street from the big Amberson mansion. Although it has no exact equivalent in the novel, it corresponds roughly to a place Tarkington describes as Lucy Morgan’s dream house, a bourgeois home at the edge of town that George sneers at because it is “meant for a street in the city.” Welles begins with this image partly in order to seduce his viewers into a nostalgic reverie but also to establish a slightly busy background against which the Amberson magnificence may be placed. Tarkington had given the Ambersons two baronial country estates, one for the major and one for Isabel, and had made them “as conspicuous as a brass band at a funeral.” Welles not only condenses these estates into a single, grotesque example of nineteenth-century eclecticism, but he also suggests from the moment we meet them that the city has begun to encroach upon the Ambersons. A road passes their front door, they have neighbors, and we see vehicles passing in every shot—first the horse-drawn trolley and then Eugene with his experimental autos. When the estate is ultimately shown, it looks like a genteel Xanadu, surrounded by walls and hedges, its relatively narrow grounds crowded with shrubbery and ornamental sculpture.
Even before we see the real Amberson mansion, however, a montage of hats reveals the family’s standing in the community: first a shot of top-hatted gentlemen crowded into a bar; then a top-hatted, frock-coated young man trying to row a pretty girl in a boat; then Major Amberson’s hat being struck by a snowball. (Incidentally, the young man in the boat is recognizable as Tim Holt and the girl is Dolores Costello—a deliberate flaunting of verisimilitude that is comparable to the way Welles used major players as “extras” in the pr
ojection room sequence of Kane.) In three shots we have been informed that Amberson fashion influences the fashion of the town, and we have also seen time passing from summer into winter. During his commentary Welles remarks that “in those days, people had time for everything,” but on the screen he makes time go by with incredible speed. At first the imagery seems merely a collection of photographs from an old album, yet the more one studies the photographs, the more one becomes aware of seasons, sometimes generations, passing with every cut or dissolve, establishing an almost sinister counterpoint to the notion of a slow, easy life. Things vanish almost as soon as they register upon the audience’s consciousness; “those days” are glimpsed and then are gone before we know them. The top hats, for example, immediately give way to a newer and slightly more democratic bowler, worn by Eugene Morgan as he studies himself in an oval mirror. As Welles speaks of styles changing, we see a rapid and comic montage of Morgan trying on various boots, pants, and jackets, the calendar turned into a fashion show. Beneath this humor there are still more ironies: Morgan may be foppish and somewhat ludicrous, but he is also a man in touch with new, less conservative times; every change of his costume makes the Amberson top hats recede further into the past.
The montage of clothes ends as Morgan exits from his front door bearing a gift for a lady. Welles returns us to the house pictured in the opening shots—a wintertime view showing a snow-covered roof and a sleigh passing the front gates. As we watch, the seasons change again, moving from a winter day to a spring twilight, then to a summer night in one lovely dissolve. Morgan now enters the frame from a distant point at the lower right corner, running into the foreground and falling unceremoniously into a viola da gamba he has intended to use for a serenade. A close-up shows Isabel Amberson frowning and turning away from her window. Her rejection of Morgan is repeated in subsequent images, where we see the young man coming twice to the Amberson front door and being turned away by a black servant. These scenes will be echoed still later, when George sends Morgan away from the same door, for as time passes inexorably in this film, events also repeat themselves. Eugene Morgan courts Isabel Amberson throughout his life, becoming more prosperous but always being turned away, each dismissal hurting him more than the last. His rival George, on the other hand, is shown first as a child riding madly through the town streets in a cart; in successive stages of the film he journeys down the same streets, first in a carriage and then on foot, becoming more humiliated with each trip. At one point, in a line of dialogue RKO cut from the completed film, Uncle Jack was to comment on this theme: “I wonder, Lucy,” he says, “if history’s going on forever repeating itself. I wonder if this town’s going on building up things and rolling them over.”
As the introductory survey of the town and its manners develops, Welles’s commentary alternates with remarks by a chorus of anonymous citizens (among them Agnes Moorehead), who discuss the fancy Amberson dwelling, the courtship between Eugene and Isabel, the subsequent marriage of Isabel and Wilbur, and the arrogance of young George. Like the nineteenth-century narrative tradition upon which Tarkington’s novel is based, these scenes contain elements of deliberate artificiality; the settings, costumes, and faces work to persuade the audience that the Amberson world is “real,” but the technique is deliberately sentimental, meant to establish a distance between us and the drama. Many of the early shots are fringed with mist, and the actors are posed in rigid tableaux, as in the example shown here, where the Amberson family is arranged on the grounds of their estate, positioned according to their influence and backed by studio artwork that makes them look like figures in an old painting. Welles’s gentle, amused voice seems to call these pictures out of a void—manipulating time and the speeches of characters as easily as Tarkington does in the novel. The dissolves and associative editing belong to the illusionist charms of movies, but the pleasure is also that of listening to a raconteur who nudges us gently into a fictional world.
Figure 4.3: The Amberson family posed in rigid tableaux.
Some viewers (Manny Farber, for example) have found all of this a bit too coy; to me it seems perfectly in keeping with the rhetoric of the pre-Jamesian novel, a “once upon a time” story that unfolds at the behest of a narrating personality. Welles has caught the tone of this voice exactly, and now and then in the opening sections he adds to the distancing effect by having the actors face the camera and address the audience. Thus Ray Collins turns around in a barber’s chair (as Uncle Jack, the bachelor in the Amberson family, he is usually dressed in dapper fashions, surrounded by toilet articles) and looks us in the eye. “Wilbur may be no Apollo,” he says, “but he’s a good sound businessman.” In a similar vein, the actors talk back at Welles, thus enforcing the notion from Heart of Darkness that camera = narrator = audience: the narrator remarks that several people wished George might receive his “comeuppance.” “His what?” a woman asks her husband. “His comeuppance!” Erskine Sanford replies, looking into the camera, his words punctuated by Bernard Herrmann’s music.
If the opening section is designed to amuse us, it also establishes the dynamics of character that will shape the plot. We are given a complete picture of the Amberson family, and we learn that within this group young George is as sheltered as a hothouse plant. The village gossips announce that his mother, Isabel, has made a marriage of convenience with Wilbur, bestowing all of her passion on her one son. The boy we see is not only spoiled, he is a perfect model of aristocratic hauteur, and Eugene Morgan will become his rival both philosophically and emotionally. We are therefore prepared for the beginning of the story proper. With George’s return from college, the Amberson ball is announced—“the last of the great, long-remembered dances that everybody talked about”; the camera tracks through the front doors of the mansion, following Eugene Morgan and his now grown daughter, satisfying at last our curiosity about the interior of the house.
At this point the film begins a new stage. From now until much later the narrator remains silent and the audience enters what appears to be a real world, where time is no longer drastically condensed, where the camera style is less obtrusive, and where the actors behave in naturalistic fashion. The entry into the party is beautifully achieved, a gust of winter wind blowing past Morgan and Lucy while two sets of doors open, warm light and music spilling out into the darkness, the camera tracking forward. Near the beginning of the ball, George encounters Lucy in the reception line; he takes her arm and walks with her across the entrance hall, up a grand oak stairway backed with stained-glass windows, then along the corridors of the second story; in three shots, each a long, fluid tracking movement, we are introduced to the Amberson home—a setting filled with the ornate, highly polished elegance of Edwardian craftsmanship.
As every critic has recognized, the ball is the technical high point of the film; no scenes in Kane involve such complexities of blocking and camera movement, and the results are all the more impressive when one considers that Welles was working with Stanley Cortez, a young photographer whose experience could not compare with Toland’s. (The RKO logbooks of daily shooting reveal that Cortez was accompanied by other cameramen, among them Richard MacKenzie, Russell Metty, and Harry Wild. Of this group, Wild was the most important. Cortez had been hired from a B movie unit because Welles wanted fast, high-quality work, but once he was promoted, Cortez became one of the most beautifully meticulous craftsmen in Hollywood. Rather than stop him, Welles and Richard Wilson hired Wild, who began working on a second unit.)
According to the press book issued for the film by the RKO publicity department, the Amberson mansion covered three sound stages and was dressed with more than nine thousand items; Cortez’s camera traveled past seven rooms, with more than forty technicians handling the lights and sound equipment. In a later contrasting sequence—tragically cut from the completed film—Cortez made a complete tour of the decayed house, rising up and down stairways, executing 360-degree pans to show all four walls of some rooms. Such expertise is fascinating to contemp
late, like the extravagant naturalism of Erich Von Stroheim, but The Magnificent Ambersons was not an especially elaborate or costly film, and there were good reasons for Welles’s decision to shoot the interiors of the mansion in traveling shots. The point was to make the audience feel the spacious innards of the place, to make them experience as directly as possible the grand solidity of the Amberson wealth—an effect that cannot be achieved by cutting back and forth between relatively static compositions. At the end of Kane, for example, it is important that the camera track over the assembled possessions rather than simply cutting from one objet d’art to another; hence nearly everything at the Amberson party is photographed in wide-angle, deep-focus perspective, with the camera rolling down broad hallways and drifting across ballrooms, traversing along as if the house were the belly of a whale. Actually it is a splendidly convivial home, but the bright party atmosphere cannot hide suggestions of death; the Christmas wreaths decorating the hallways look vaguely funereal, and now and then the camera passes a scalloped archway reminiscent of Xanadu.
The camera movement and the compositions in depth also contribute to the waltzing rhythms of the party; the players move in and out of the frame, sometimes arranging themselves in patterns like the figures in a formal dance, rarely becoming isolated in close-up. (There are two brief exchanges of conventional “head shots”: once at the beginning when Eugene Morgan meets Isabel in the reception line, and once at the end of the party when George and Lucy sit on the stairs and watch their parents dance.) The spectator’s eye is kept busy, for, as with nearly every film by Welles, the characters are seen in relation to the architecture of the house and in relation to other groups of figures. The contrasting details within a given frame are determined by the story itself, establishing subtle dramatic tensions and a sense of conflict between present and past. The shot shown in figure 4.4, for example, is typical of the way Welles matches a couple in one generation with a couple in another. Obviously the technique has a good deal in common with the technique in Kane; we see two sets of figures, one in the foreground and one in the distance, youth being contrasted with age. But there is an important stylistic difference in this film—a far greater degree of movement and instability in any given shot. At the beginning of this scene, George and Lucy sit talking on the stairway, while below, Eugene Morgan and Fanny Minafer are walking forward. George has been making derisive comments about the stranger Morgan, unaware that he is talking to the man’s daughter. He is about to be rudely surprised, because Morgan is stepping up to claim Lucy for a dance; at the same moment Fanny moves away and Isabel enters the frame to ask, “George, dear, are you enjoying the party?” In a general sense such instability is perfectly in keeping with the theme of the film; later, Lucy will tell George that they cannot marry because things are “so unsettled.”
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 15