The Magic World of Orson Welles

by James Naremore

  Despite such moments, however, the film as a whole becomes less effective as it goes along. Although Welles’s associates—including Joseph Cotten and Robert Wise—tried in the director’s absence to remain true to the original intent, studio revisions have damaged the film in several ways. First of all, the rearrangement of several sequences and the deletion of others have destroyed the carefully planned dramatic rhythm. The first third of the movie, as we have seen, alternates brilliantly between montage and tracking shots, between light and dark, between comedy and a sense of doom. The rest was intended to be more grim and was shot chiefly in long takes, but the surviving version becomes nothing more than a series of unedited sequences punctuated by slow fades, each segment of the narrative becoming more morose than the last. As Joseph McBride has shown, Welles’s original plan for the final third of the film would have maintained a more “fluid” continuity. For example, Jack’s farewell to George at the railroad station (where we were supposed to see Jack borrowing a hundred dollars from his nephew) was shot with an unmoving camera and was to have been followed by an elaborate montage showing George walking down National Avenue, where he tours the decrepit Amberson mansion for the last time. George’s prayer at his dead mother’s bed was to have been followed by the violent scene with Fanny in the empty kitchen. In the film as it now stands, George’s long walk and his final visit to the house have been cut almost entirely, and the slowly paced conversation between Eugene and Lucy in their garden, which was intended to follow Fanny’s hysteria, has been moved to the place just after Jack’s farewell at the station. Thus at this point, one static scene follows another; the careful contrast between the Ambersons’ tragedy and the success of the Morgans has been obscured, and the movie becomes monotonous.

  In shortening the film the studio also cut all sections having to do with economics, preserving only the romance plot. As a result we have very little sense of why the Amberson fortune collapses, and the impoverishment of the family seems precipitous. In the novel, and in Welles’s final version of the script, the economic situation is described in detail. In a line that was cut from the opening montage, Welles spoke of the “sons and grandsons of early settlers,” whose “thrift was next to their religion.” He had intended to illustrate two economic ideas that were in sharp conflict in the late nineteenth century—on the one hand was a Midwestern and Southern agricultural society, based on conservative values of labor, thrift, and landed wealth, and on the other was the new, Eastern notion of money that makes money. Morgan clearly represents the new wave, not only because he is an inventor and an industrialist but also because he makes shrewd investments; significantly, he has spent twenty years in the East before returning to the last of the Amberson balls.

  Both Tarkington and Welles had wanted to show that the Ambersons were pitifully naïve about the new industrial economy. In the surviving version of the film we learn that Wilbur Minafer has made bad investments in “rolling mills,” but we were also supposed to see Major Amberson selling off his property in bits and pieces, hoping to maintain his wealth. This property in turn is subdivided and sold by new owners, and the new houses become dirty and dilapidated as the outer boundaries of the city spread. Ultimately the major dies, leaving no deeds to his remaining property, and the Amberson mansion itself is sold off and subdivided into a rooming house. Meanwhile we were to see Eugene Morgan established in a twentieth-century home, described in Welles’s script as “a great Georgian picture in brick with four acres of hedged land between it and its next neighbor.”

  In both novel and original film, George Minafer’s discovery of the eroding family fortune coincided exactly with the death of his father and his own return from college. At the end of the kitchen dinner scene in Welles’s movie, George was supposed to look out the back window and shout “Holy Cats!” and then rush into the rainy night to discover the grounds of the mansion being excavated for houses. Other scenes had been filmed, taken more or less directly from the novel, showing the Amberson family sitting on their veranda during summer evenings, watching motorized traffic go by as they discussed their money problems. As a result of one of these conversations, Fanny Minafer invests the small inheritance from her brother in an auto headlight factory, which collapses; as we see in the surviving film, she is left penniless, sitting on the floor of an empty kitchen.

  Tarkington’s explanation of the Amberson decline was still more elaborate and had even taken a racist turn. He had spoken of a great change in the citizenry itself, describing a “new American” who came from the European emigrations of the eighties and nineties “in search not so directly of freedom and democracy as of more money.” This bizarre argument suggests that the Ambersons were more interested in pure spirituality than their successors, and happily Welles ignored it. He did, however, intend to show the city as Tarkington had described it, run by “downtown businessmen” who believed in “hustling and honesty, because both paid.” According to Tarkington “the city came to be like the body of a great dirty man, skinned, to show his busy works, yet wearing a few barbaric ornaments; and such a figure carved, colored, and discolored, and set up in the marketplace, would have done well enough as the god of the new people.” Welles had also wanted to preserve the fine historical ironies of the story, in which things like land, livestock, and houses become less substantial than paper money and in which nature is subdued by commerce. But these ironies are lost almost completely in the final version of the film, which RKO tried to sell as a spicy love story.

  By removing the economic sections, the studio sacrificed a series of impressive images. Gone completely, like the house in the story, are the long documentary-style scenes of modern city streets, followed by cameraman Stanley Cortez’s elaborate tour of the empty mansion. George’s last entry into his dead mother’s room, which he has kept perfectly preserved, was to be accompanied by Welles reading from Tarkington—a description of how everything in the house is about to be divided into “kitchenettes,” with only the ghosts of the Ambersons left behind. George’s prayer was originally followed by shots of the exterior of the mansion, its stonework vandalized and smeared with what the script calls “idiot salacity.”

  Then, too, a number of scenes were reshot, including George’s argument with his mother about Eugene (the present version is banal, underscored with sentimental music that was not written by Bernard Herrmann). The most offensive of these revisions is the closing of the film, in which we see Eugene reading about George’s accident and then visiting the hospital with Fanny. Charles Higham has defended this conclusion as being more in the spirit of Tarkington’s novel, which does indeed end with a reconciliation between George, Lucy, and Eugene at the hospital (Fanny is not present). But Welles’s original version was tougher, more imaginative, and far more true to the tone of the film as a whole. I have reproduced below Bernard Herrmann’s recollection of how it went. He has confused the names of two characters, and I have taken the liberty of correcting his mistake. Otherwise his memory is to be trusted:

  The studio got frightened and wanted a more optimistic ending. Some director whom I do not really know and another composer concocted the ending of the film. . . . I’ll try to relate what really happened [in the original version]. After the car accident and George’s injury, the picture then goes to what we don’t really realize until the end has been once the home of the Ambersons. It is now a home for aged gentlefolk. Eugene comes back from the hospital to visit Aunt Fanny. I must describe the room they’re in. An old gramophone, a wind-up, is playing a record which was very popular in America at that time, called “The Two Black Crows.” . . . through the doorway you can hear the inmates listening to this old record.

  Eugene pleads with Fanny to come look after him, to live with him. And she says, “No, I’m very happy here.” Remember this in context with the picture. She takes Eugene to the door and opens it, and that’s when you realize this has been the Amberson house. He kisses her good-bye, he stands at the doorway on the porch, and he loo
ks all around him. Where before in the film it was all surrounded by beautiful country, we see the city. . . . And in every direction the Ambersons are being swallowed. He walks down the stairs, into the city, and in the background we hear “Two Black Crows” getting smaller and smaller, and the sound of traffic getting bigger and bigger, until it finally smothers the whole screen as the film comes to an end.

  The “Two Black Crows” recording was actually part of a series of comedy records made in the late twenties by Moran and Mack, a popular vaudeville team (in 1930 they appeared in a movie called Why Bring That Up?). A sort of early version of an Amos and Andy routine, their act consisted of a dialogue between a stereotyped, shiftless black named Amos and a straight man named Willie. I have not been able to locate the specific recording that was used in The Magnificent Ambersons, but like all the others in the series it was probably played off against the dimly heard sounds of a blues piano. Amos and Willie encounter each other after a long separation and discuss events back home. It seems a faithful dog has died, and in recounting how the dog’s death came about, Amos describes a widening chain reaction of disasters, leading up to the destruction of an entire town. The scene inside the boardinghouse was therefore unusually complex, containing several layers of sound, including the gramophone, the monotonous squeak of Fanny’s rocking chair, and the noise of boarders. The “inmates,” some of whom are eating a meal, could be seen reflected in a typically Wellesian series of mirrors. During their conversation, Eugene tells Fanny that George and Lucy will probably get married, but the mood of the scene is despairing in the extreme.

  By any standard this ending to the film would have been superior to the one we now have, in which Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead are seen walking down a hospital corridor wearing silly, beatific grins. As Cotten remarks that he has reconciled with George and has been “true at last” to his “one true love,” the wretched music swells and the camera closes in on Moorehead, who is looking blissfully up to heaven. The revised scene (directed by Freddie Fleck and scored by Roy Webb) is not only sentimentalized, but it is also radically untrue to Welles’s intentions. Welles had wanted to emphasize social as well as personal issues, showing Eugene Morgan as a lonely figure against an urban skyline. The Magnificent Ambersons would therefore have been far closer to the classic definition of tragedy than Citizen Kane, its emotional power arising from both the theme of unrequited love and the imagery of society in decay. Perhaps it is significant that most of the scenes RKO cut from the film were concerned not with the love story nor the midland town, but with the filthy city. By this means they attempted to simplify one of the most sophisticated and morally complex visions of American history the movies have given us.

  5

  The Radicalization of Style

  The Mercury Theatre had grown logically out of the New Deal, and as we have seen, all of its undertakings were attempts to keep the performing arts reasonably responsive to Popular Front idealism. But whereas the Mercury had tried to remain independent of wealthy communications interests and the studio system, it was in fact tied to these things—at the mercy of reviews, sponsors, box office receipts, and Hollywood producers. Partly as a result of this dependence, it ultimately dissolved, and for Welles and his associates things were never the same again. Even as Citizen Kane was being filmed, history seemed to be working against such organizations. Here is John Houseman commenting on the period:

  Beginning with Panic, through my two years on the Federal Theatre and during the rise and fall of Mercury, I had become accustomed to relating my theatrical activity to the historical movements of the time. On WPA this participation had been immediate and inescapable. . . . Some of this sense of involvement was carried over into the Mercury, where it directly affected our choice of subjects and our methods of operation. Then, gradually, as the Depression receded and international events replaced domestic crises on the front pages of our newspapers, this participation became less satisfying. Germany’s persecution of the Jews, the Moscow trials, the Spanish Civil War, the successive threats against Austria and Czechoslovakia culminating in the enervating suspense of Munich-these formed a mounting tide of tension to which no positive creative response was possible and to which our theatrical activity could no longer be related.

  Houseman became disillusioned early, but after the 1930s Welles himself continued to act as a show business maverick and a social activist, even though he was now a loner rather than the dynamic center of a group activity. In the middle and late forties he directed a couple of fairly topical thrillers (The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai, the latter obtained partly because of his marriage to Rita Hayworth) and managed to produce a low-budget version of Macbeth. He also remained busy as an actor and radio performer. In between Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, he rejoined Houseman for a celebrated stage production of Native Son, and a few years later, together with his old associate Richard Wilson, he made an abortive, badly calculated attempt to resuscitate the Mercury Theatre in New York, an attempt that will be discussed later. During this time his political activity was as lively as ever. He campaigned vigorously for FDR’s fourth term, lecturing widely and appearing on platforms with Henry Wallace. In 1944 he actually stood in for Roosevelt in a debate with Thomas Dewey at the Hotel Astor. Even more interesting is that he briefly became an editorial columnist for the New York Post—a job that paid him fairly little but gave him a platform and allowed him to speak like a man with political ambitions of his own. His daily columns began immediately after FDR’s inauguration, on January 22, 1945 (the birth date, Welles observed, of Byron and of D. W. Griffith), and continued until June of the same year, just before the atomic bombs ended the war. These columns are a rich source of his opinions about literature, art, and the movies and are especially valuable as a record of his preoccupation with world affairs—a preoccupation that bears upon some of the films he would make.

  “I’m convinced everybody should be interested in politics,” Welles declared at the outset. “The disaster of America in the 1920s was that everybody left the practice of politics to the politicians.” Even so, he approached the topic somewhat cautiously. His Post columns began under the title “Orson Welles’s Almanac,” borrowing their name and format from Welles’s radio show of that season, and were at first characterized by a cheerful, homey tone. Random, chatty observations on the day’s news were interspersed with playful astrological forecasts. (“We are glad to report that planetary aspects today favor thoughts which can be turned into money”), household hints (“Cut string beans with scissors”), and notes on the books Welles had been reading. The columns also contained items about celebrities: Welles attacked Westbrook Pegler, “whom Mr. Hearst pays to seek for the truth or something,” and defended Frank Sinatra against Pegler’s innuendoes; he wrote an open letter to Jack Benny, who had been unable to take Eddie Anderson along on troop shows because of segregation in the army; and he spoke disparagingly of Noel Coward, whom he accused of perpetuating an anachronistic, British public school snobbery. Within a few months, however, Welles had become less discursive, more like a straightforward editorialist. His style remained fairly witty and ironic, but there was an urgency in his voice. On April 13 FDR died, and the title of the columns changed immediately to “Orson Welles Today,” in keeping with a growing seriousness of purpose.

  After Roosevelt’s death, Welles announced to his readers that the president had written him a personal note only a few weeks before, saying, “April will be a critical month in the history of human freedom.” Indeed signs of the Cold War were appearing everywhere. The battle against Germany and Japan, which Welles portrayed as the common man’s struggle against fascism, was in danger of betraying its ostensible ideals; VE Day left Welles uneasy because he felt that the spirit of Hitler was only dormant, surviving through the old device of the Red Scare. (Aspects of this theme were, of course, explored in The Stranger, the film Welles was making at the time, where he plays a Nazi criminal hiding in a New England
town. Only when the criminal is discovered and killed does a real VE Day come to the fictional Harpur, Connecticut.) “We’ve been on the move for quite a time now,” he wrote, “along a road that’s taken us from North Africa . . . to Yalta. The next objective is San Francisco [and the United Nations conference]—and we’d better continue along the same road without a stop. Otherwise we’ll find out to our everlasting sorrow that we didn’t take the ride at all. We were taken for it.”

  Welles’s columns provided documentary evidence, if any were needed, of his essential liberalism and his intense concern with political affairs. His chief themes were the need to perpetuate New Deal social legislation and the necessity of translating the Allied victory over Germany into a world democracy. He argued for a fair working relationship between labor and capital but believed government price regulations should continue after the war; he inveighed against a “certain sort of businessman” who “openly favors a certain percentage of postwar unemployment,” saying that such types “don’t want any percentage of government control over their affairs. They want to be free as buccaneers, free to encourage a little convenient joblessness.” He supported the basic structure of American government and encouraged the two-party system, but at the time he hoped aloud that Henry Wallace would be the next president. When Truman entered the White House, Welles was cautious: “We must reconcile ourselves that the new President will, at least temporarily, do no more than consolidate the social gains of the past twelve years. . . . Harry Truman prides himself in knowing what the little fellow’s thinking about. . . . Okay. But if the little fellows of America want to press forward for a better world in the century of the common man, they’ll have to let our new Chief Executive know about it again, again, and again.”