These deletions include discussions between Isabel, Lucy, George, Jack, and Fanny as they ride in Eugene’s automobile through the snow on the outskirts of town at Christmas, 1904. Their distance allows a perspective on its changes:
ISABEL: When we get this far out you can see there’s quite a little smoke hanging over town.
JACK: Yes, that’s because the town’s growing.
EUGENE: Yes, and as it grows bigger it seems to get ashamed of itself, so it makes that big cloud and hides in it.
ISABEL: Oh, Eugene.
EUGENE: You know, Isabel, I think it used to be nicer…
As they drive on George notices that “those fences are smeared!”
LUCY: That must be from soot.
FANNY: Yes … there’re so many houses around here now.
GEORGE: Grandfather owns a good many of them, I guess … for renting.
FANNY: He sold most of the lots, George.
GEORGE: He ought to keep things up better. It’s getting all too much built up. Riffraff! He lets … these people take too many liberties. They do anything they want to…
The subplot concerning the gradual subdivision of Major Amberson’s estate was almost entirely cut. Following the surviving scene in the Amberson kitchen, after George and Jack tease Aunt Fanny about Eugene’s intentions, George was to have been startled by a vision through the window. He runs into the rain to examine “excavations under the raging storm, partly erected buildings in the background”. Uncle Jack follows in pursuit.
GEORGE: What is this? Looks like excavations… Looks like the foundations for a lot of houses! Just what does grandfather mean by this? (He rushes toward the building sites, Jack following.)
JACK: My private opinion is he wants to increase his income by building these houses to rent. For gosh sakes, come in … out of the rain…
GEORGE: Can’t he increase his income any other way but this?
JACK: It would appear he couldn’t. I wanted him to put up… (Jack tries to put up an umbrella over both of them.) … an apartment building instead of these houses.
GEORGE (shouting): An apartment building! Here!
JACK (shouting): Yes, that was my idea.
GEORGE (shouting): An apartment house! (George looks to right, shocked, water streaming down his face.) Oh, my gosh!
JACK (off): Don’t worry … your grandfather wouldn’t listen to me, but he’ll wish he had, some day.
GEORGE: But why didn’t he sell something or other, rather than do a thing like this?
JACK: I believe he had sold something or other, from time to time.
George is ignorant of the family’s declining wealth. Major Amberson’s speech on the town “rolling right over” his heart survived in RKO’s version, but a few lines of subsequent conversation with Jack were cut. The Major complains about “those devilish workmen yelling around my house and digging up my lawn”. Jack advises: “When things are a nuisance, it’s a good idea not to keep remembering ’em.” That elected obliviousness proves to be the Amberson style, and it will be their downfall. Also cut: in 1910, during George and Isabel’s absence, Major Amberson and Aunt Fanny sit on the porch of the mansion and observe those houses recently built on Amberson property:
MAJOR: Funny thing – these new houses were built only a year ago. They look old already … cost enough money, though… I guess I should have built those apartments, after all.
FANNY: Housekeeping in a house is harder than in an apartment.
MAJOR: Yes. Where the smoke and dirt are as thick as they are in the Amberson Addition, I guess the women can’t stand it. Well, I’ve got one painful satisfaction – I got my tax lowered.
His satisfaction is painful because the tax reduction merely reflects the decline in the overall value of his properties. Prices are high in the periphery of the growing city where Eugene and Lucy live, and also apparently in the town centre, but not in the declining Amberson Addition.
Dialogue was changed in the sequence where Jack visits Eugene and Lucy in their “Georgian instead of nondescript Romanesque” version of the Amberson Mansion in the upland Indianapolis suburbs. Jack was to have originally commented on the inner-city pollution the Morgans had escaped. George’s last walk home to the mansion through the “strange streets of a strange city” was shortened, and the final sequence was completely rescripted and reshot to eliminate Eugene and Fanny’s talk in the boarding house, and the grim shots of Eugene driving away into the anonymity of the twentieth-century city.
* * *
That small city, the Indianapolis where I was born, exists no more than Carthage existed after the Romans had driven ploughs over the ground where it had stood. Progress swept all the old life away.
– Booth Tarkington16
Tarkington’s Magnificent Ambersons is the middle novel between The Turmoil (1915) and The Midlander (1923) in a trilogy he later republished in a single volume called Growth. Tarkington was born in Indianapolis in 1869. The city began to rapidly transform around the time he reached maturity. His comparison with the razing of Carthage was hyperbole, of course, but of a piece with Tarkington’s conservative myth of Indianapolis’s decline.
The Turmoil begins with a racist and apocalyptic rant against the spirit of ‘Bigness’ that had flooded a midland city with new people: “The negroes came from the South by the thousands and thousands, multiplying by other thousands and thousands faster than they could die.” Immigrants came from across the world; Tarkington itemises twenty-three nationalities or races and adds “every hybrid that these could propagate. And if there were no Eskimos nor Patagonians, what other human strain that earth might furnish failed to swim and bubble in this crucible?” The modernising streets were soon filled with “a cockney type […] a cynical young mongrel barbaric of feature, muscular and cunning”.17
African-Americans, long-time residents of Indianapolis, play no crucial part in the novel of The Magnificent Ambersons. Stereotypical “darkey” servants are mere cheerful period detail, recalled in a narrative voice that consequently excludes a black readership. Ambersons won the Pulitzer Prize and was a bestseller, making its appeal to the nostalgia of a white, middle-class readership for an idealised pre-urban way of life. For most of that initial readership, the 1880s and 1890s were still within living memory. That topicality probably explains the book’s relative obscurity by 1942.18
While Welles remained a great admirer of Tarkington’s fiction, he was aware of the author’s limitations. He admitted in 1970 that Tarkington’s children were “hopelessly dated now” in comparison to the characters of Mark Twain, “who wasn’t writing about children in a middle-class atmosphere […] on Main Street under the shadow of the elms”.19 But Welles claimed on several occasions that his father had been Tarkington’s friend and that it had “long been a family assumption that the author had my father in mind when he created [the character Eugene Morgan]”.20 No evidence has emerged beyond Welles’s anecdotes to support a record of this friendship or inspiration, but Welles clearly found a deeply personal resonance in Tarkington’s novel. On several occasions Welles recalled childhood visits to the town of Grand Detour, Illinois, where his father ran the Sheffield Hotel. It was the “one place” he desired to return:
Where I do see some kind of ‘Rosebud’, perhaps, is in that world of Grand Detour. A childhood there was like a childhood back in the 1870s. No electric light, horse-drawn buggies – a completely anachronistic, old-fashioned, early-Tarkington, rural kind of life […] Grand Detour was one of those lost worlds, one of those Edens that you get thrown out of. It really was kind of invented by my father. He’s the one who kept out the cars and the electric lights. It was one of the ‘Merrie Englands.’ […] I feel as though I’ve had a childhood in the last century from those short summers.21
The Sheffield Hotel in Grand Detour, Illinois owned by Richard Head Welles and destroyed by fire in 1928
Welles probably confounded his followers on the left with this nostalgic, tender, and vastly forg
iving reverie on declining nouveau aristocracy from a firmly bourgeois and, even by 1942, antiquated point of view. It is true that Welles’s narration, judiciously edited from Tarkington’s own third-person text, is given enhanced irony in the early scenes when juxtaposed with comic images of the town’s customs. But except for its conclusion and avoidance of the book’s overt racism, the 131-minute version of Ambersons is a faithful adaptation of Tarkington’s novel. Welles’s film acquiesces to Tarkington’s conservative myth of the midland town’s “spreading and darkening” into a city. It’s an indication of Welles’s priorities in adaptation.
The power of Welles’s drama overcomes a nagging question: why is the passing of the Ambersons’ “magnificence” worth lamenting? The family contribute little to the city apart from symbol, spectacle, and ritual. Uncle Jack Amberson is only a US congressman because “the family always like to have somebody in congress”, according to George. Eugene’s uncritical, decades-long glorification of Isabel Amberson is a mystery. Superficial in her early rejection of him for his drunken serenade, she verges on idiotic in her vague passivity. Aunt Fanny Minafer is emotionally warped by bitterness, vindictiveness, and self-pity. And George is no more than an uncritical vehicle for his class’s prejudices – certainly no tragic hero.
The decline and fall of this short-lived nouveau aristocratic family – three generations and bust – is the surface melodrama pasted onto the story of the transforming midland town. The cause of the Ambersons’ fall is their obliviousness to the coming of modernity. Major Amberson makes some effort to stave off the family’s financial decline when with reluctance he subdivides his estate in the Amberson Addition. Everybody else, except for the sardonic realist Jack, is oblivious to the changes until they hit hard. George’s “come-upance” is merely the vanishing of his wealth and privilege and his alienation from the modern city.
Welles’s lost conclusion wildly departs from Tarkington’s silly fantasy of Eugene contacting the dead Isabel through a medium. The final scene of the film was probably the reason Joseph Cotten negatively assessed the mood of the film as “more Chekhov than Tarkington”.22 Eugene visits Fanny in her run-down boarding house and, as Welles later described it,
There’s just nothing left between them at all. Everything is over – her feelings and her world and his world; everything is buried under the parking lots and the cars. That’s what it was all about – the deterioration of personality, the way people diminish with age, and particularly with impecunious old age. The end of the communication between people, as well as the end of an era.23
This conclusion seems to have left a powerfully bleak impression at the previews – the obliteration of people by the growth of a modern city – and RKO refused to accept it.
* * *
Ambersons is not a western – it might be considered the finest example of a Midwestern – but it adapts a key trope from the genre. The coming of the transcontinental railroad to the frontier had been “the dominant symbol of progress” in westerns such as The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924), The Union Pacific (Cecil B. DeMille, 1939), and Dodge City (Michael Curtiz, 1939).24 In Kane the railway connects the Colorado frontier back east to Chicago and New York, to the moneyed soullessness represented by Thatcher. The coming of the automobile to Indianapolis in Ambersons has the same symbolic function as the herald of modernity.
Welles created Indianapolis’s ‘National Avenue’ at the RKO Ranch in the San Fernando Valley.25 Like the few exterior street sets in Kane, the avenue has the slightly artificial appearance of a Hollywood backlot. Welles enlivens the mise-en-scène by emphasising various period-signifying components of the streetscape. The scenes of the turn of the century employ generic motifs of the western: a wagon wheel, the period costumes of the townsfolk, the town’s bank and hardware store, and one of several horse-drawn carts George drives in the movie.
The town in 1894 (figs 1–2) and 1902 (figs. 3–4)
For the later scenes in 1905 and 1912, National Avenue is modernised with automobile traffic and picture theatres.26 The soundscape was designed to increasingly register the noises of automobiles.27
Tarkington never directly identifies the novel’s setting as Indianapolis, but the fictional midland town is universally regarded as a personal reimagining of his birthplace.28 In his film adaptation, Welles directly identifies the city only once by a brief insert shot of an Indianapolis Inquirer headline. That insert also features a cameo by Kane’s Jedediah Leland, by-lined and pictured above his dramatic column. It is the sole intertextual hinge between Welles’s two American history films.
Indianapolis, 1905
The city by the White River was chosen in 1820 as the state capital in the mistaken belief that the river was navigable for transport. The plan for the capital was conceived around institutions of government, with the governor’s house at its centre. Indianapolis’s emergence as a commercial nexus followed in the middle of the nineteenth century. This has been attributed to the construction of interurban railroads which linked Indianapolis to the Ohio River; it eventually became the ‘hub of the wheel’ and so assumed a dominant commercial role in the state.29
In the middle of the century the population swelled. As of 1860, at least twenty per cent of the population was foreign-born, immigrants mainly from Germany and Ireland.30 The interwar half-century between 1865 and 1917 saw a vast transformation in Indianapolis’s industrial economy, demographics, and physical infrastructure. Booth Tarkington explicitly cites the year 1873 as the beginning of the Amberson family’s “magnificence”, a particularly short social dominance of less than forty years. The novel’s first line describes how in that year “Major Amberson had ‘made a fortune’ when other people were losing fortunes.” Tarkington was referring to the Panic, an international recession that plunged Indianapolis into economic stagnancy for fifteen years and probably contributed to the preservation of its mid-nineteenth-century social hierarchy.31
Economic growth restarted with the discovery of natural gas in north central Indiana in the late 1880s; Indianapolis lurched towards becoming a centre of manufacturing. The city pushed through a recession in the mid-1890s to expand until the end of the century. As the gas supply declined, so did the Indianapolis economy, but the decline was partly stalled by two factors: the city’s centrality to the interurban railway network and the growth of a local automobile industry.32 Indianapolis became a representative Midwestern site of a dynamic historical antagonism: different modes of interurban and intraurban transport would compete for the next century to drag the cityscape towards conflicting material forms.33
In other words, Indianapolis experienced waves of growth and decline, and the periodic realignment of its industrial resources in a changing America. The physical infrastructure of the city changed in response to industry, technologies, and a growing population.
The period just before World War I was the peak of Indianapolis’s railways – an average of four hundred electric interurban trains arriving and departing every day in 1910. But these services dropped away as the Midwest banked its future on the automobile.34 Major automobile firms including Ford, Stutz, and Duesenberg produced cars in Indianapolis.35 The city was for a time the production centre of shock absorbers.36 The world-famous Indy 500 race was established in 1911. Indianapolis’s material cityscape continued to change as the automobile grew in dominance. Electric streetcars replaced horse-drawn cars in the 1890s. A 1913 strike by streetcar workers led to riots, a police mutiny, and the imposition of martial law. The streetcars endured until 1953.37 The increase in private traffic in the early twentieth century had demanded the replacement of gravelled streets with expensive hard surfaces. To protect this municipal investment in roads, the city had to take control of underground utilities.38
City transit had been a background issue in Kane, just one of Kane’s social crusades, but in Ambersons it defines the shape of the city and the economic fortunes of its citizens. Ambersons argues for technology’s transformative power and l
aments its casualties.
* * *
In Welles’s Ambersons Indianapolis is reduced to National Avenue, the Amberson Mansion and its surroundings in the Amberson Addition, the city’s train station, Eugene Morgan’s house and factory, the rural outskirts of town, and finally Fanny’s boarding house.
Welles’s narrator, like Tarkington’s, takes on the retrospective point of view of Indiana’s middle class. The opening shots, however, paradoxically assume the point of view of the Amberson Mansion itself, looking across the street to the less magnificent house of Mrs Johnson, who will years later be censured by George for spreading gossip about his mother (Mrs Johnson appears to be the woman who hollers for the horse-drawn streetcar).
The opening sequence of the 131-minute version maintained this point of view and framing across four successive shots, creating a time lapse of the Johnson house in the dress of different seasons and times of day. This is a variation of the opening of Kane, where Xanadu looms in a succession of progressively closer shots, always with Kane’s lighted window occupying the same pivotal position in the upper right of the frame – a spatial lapse rather than a temporal one. In Ambersons, Eugene’s disastrous serenade intrudes into the summer shot. He rushes into the foreground and the fixed shot pans slightly downwards to take in his spectacular fall backwards through the bass fiddle; the counter-shot representing his point of view up towards Isabel Amberson’s window establishes his location in the Amberson’s front garden. The time lapse depicting the Johnson house was interrupted by RKO’s reordering of the early sequences: the survey of the period’s fashions was interpolated between the Johnson house’s autumn and winter.
At the End of the Street in the Shadow Page 7