The Johnson house
In the novel the Amberson Mansion is the residence of Major Amberson. Isabel and Wilbur live in a nearby house. Welles relocates the whole family inside the same impressive residence, a dramatically efficient change. The exteriors of the mansion on Amberson Boulevard were shot at the RKO Ranch with a false front and a matte painting. The mansion also appears in several back projections.39
As in Kane, much of the action of Ambersons centres on a house that is a symbolic expression of personality. The interior designs of the mansion were based on photographs in a publication called Artistic Houses; Being a Series of Interior Views of a Number of the Most Beautiful and Celebrated Homes in the United States (1883–1884).40 The set was constructed at the RKO-Pathé Studio in Culver City. Welles would never again have such large financial resources to build sets. That limitation led to creative solutions and helped determine his later aesthetics.
The Amberson mansion embellished by a matte painting; and with back projection
Welles’s long sequence at George’s Christmastide ball, comprising several elaborate tracking shots, would have taken the audience from the mansion’s front door and upstairs through all three storeys. The many interwoven conversations and asides establish the leading characters and set in action both Eugene and Isabel’s renewed fascination and George’s courtship of Lucy. RKO’s cuts to this sequence diminish the mansion’s spatial coherence.
Welles assigned Stanley Cortez to film another long and difficult tracking shot that would have represented George’s subjective point of view as he entered the mansion after his ‘last walk home’ from the train station. On this occasion Welles seems to have rejected the shot from the outset, because it does not appear in the continuity of the 131-minute version.
* * *
Around 1800 [sic] Major Amberson had bought two hundred acres of land at the end of National Avenue; through this tract he had built broad streets and cross-streets, paved them with cedar block, and curbed them with stone. He set up fountains, here and there and at symmetrical intervals placed castiron statues, painted white. And all this Art showed a profit from the start. The lots had sold well and there was a rush to build in the new Addition. Its main thoroughfare was called Amberson Boulevard, and here, now stood the new Amberson Mansion which was the pride of the town.
– Orson Welles’s narration for his Campbell Playhouse production
Welles’s 1939 radio production quickly establishes the neighbourhood surrounding the Amberson Mansion as the Amberson Addition. That name, taken from the novel, is first mentioned in the 131-minute version of the film by Major Amberson when he speaks to Aunt Fanny on the mansion porch in 1910. The RKO version only mentions the Amberson Addition during George’s ‘last walk home’.
As of 1890, the dominant form of dwelling across all social classes in Indianapolis was the single family house.41 The wealthiest of Indianapolis lived in Woodruff Place, an early suburb established a mile and a half from the city centre, a proto-gated community and the widely acknowledged inspiration for Tarkington’s Amberson Addition. The Amberson Mansion itself was said to be inspired by the Knights of Columbus Headquarters on Delaware Street.42
A postcard representing Woodruff Place in the early twentieth century
The planning and construction of Woodruff Place was a typical Midwestern development in America’s Gilded Age, the parcelling of urban space into pockets of socio-economic distinction. In that significant year of 1873, James O. Woodruff bought eighty acres east of the city centre to create a park neighbourhood for the well-to-do. Woodruff’s prosperity was short-lived and the development of his suburban enclave was slowed by his bankruptcy. He died outside Indianapolis in 1879, aged only thirty-nine.43 The plan of Woodruff Place ostentatiously insisted on its residents’ wealth and status by the installation of fountains and statuary (which were quickly vandalised). Its boulevards were thirty feet wider than the streets of some of Indianapolis’s contemporary middle-class suburbs. Woodruff Place’s founding covenant established its exclusivity and aloofness from the rest of the city: fenced-off, its private streets and alleys, to be maintained by the owners of the houses, would not permit use by non-residents. It was said to have forbidden cows and chickens.44
Woodruff Place kept its political independence from Indianapolis while contracting its municipal services. It was not incorporated into the city itself until 1962.45 Its population grew from twenty inhabitants in 1880 to almost five hundred at the turn of the century. There were no streetcars to or from the Indianapolis city centre, but the wealthy inhabitants of Woodruff Place could probably afford private carriages.46 Tarkington’s novel does not locate a streetcar line outside the Amberson Mansion; by including one in the cinematic Amberson Addition, Welles was able to compress the diverse activities of the city to a manageable zone.
Woodruff’s exclusive zone of pretentious splendour was short-lived. In the twentieth century many of the stately homes were transformed into apartment houses.47 Tarkington’s Amberson Addition accurately anticipated this decline.
In the film, following Jack Amberson’s departure by rail to Washington in search of a consulship, George walks home to spend his final night at the Amberson Mansion. On the way he confronts the much-changed Indianapolis of 1911 as if for the first time. For the first time in his career, Welles was able to realise the subjective camera technique he had planned for the entirety of Heart of Darkness. The shooting script has the camera following George as he walks up a street “until it is so close that his body creates a dark screen for a DISSOLVE” to a new shot in which the camera “is now George”. The 131-minute version as assembled did not include that dissolve but instead transitioned from the railway station immediately to George’s point of view in the street.
Welles’s narration in this sequence is very carefully adapted from two different sections of Tarkington’s novel. It explains George’s alienation from modern Indianapolis:
George Amberson Minafer walked homeward slowly through what seemed to be the strange streets of a strange city; for the town was growing and changing as it had never grown and changed before. It was heaving up in the middle incredibly; it was spreading incredibly; and as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself and darkened its sky.48
The narration was to have itemised a few of George’s childhood memories of the neighbourhood, closely adapted from the novel (this part of the narration was cut by Wise). The scripted images are also taken directly from the novel: shots of a ‘Stag hotel’, boarding houses, a dry cleaner, a funeral home, and a benevolent society (the novel reveals this to be the former house of George’s father’s family). This sequence was ultimately filmed from George’s point of view as a series of upwards-looking shots tracking along empty streets: the camera takes in telegraph wires, streetcar cables, grain elevators, an electrical generator, a factory, steel scaffolding, and grimy apartment houses.49 In the RKO version, the shots slowly dissolve into each other. Welles claimed he shot this sequence himself with a handheld camera in downtown Los Angeles, using found spaces rather than the drastically transformed locations he would use in later films.50
In Tarkington’s novel, George’s moment of urban alienation comes as a negative reaction to the racial diversity of the city. Welles’s adaptation is delicate. He took the sentence on the “befouled” city from chapter 28, which is not actually from George’s point of view at all, but occurs during George and Isabel’s long absence abroad. Tarkington immediately follows the passage with the observation:
Los Angeles doubling as Indianapolis
But the great change was in the citizenry itself. What was left of the patriotic old-stock generation that had fought the Civil War, and subsequently controlled politics, had become venerable and was little heeded. The descendants of the pioneers and early settlers were merging into the new crowd, becoming part of it, little to be distinguished from it. What happened to Boston and to Broadway happened in degree to the Midland city; the old stock became l
ess and less typical, and of the grown people who called the place home, less than a third had been born in it. There was a German quarter; there was a Jewish quarter; there was a negro quarter – square miles of it – called ‘Bucktown’; there were many Irish neighbourhoods; and there were large settlements of Italians, and of Hungarians, and of Rumanians, and of Servians and other Balkan peoples. But not the emigrants, themselves, were the almost dominant type on the streets downtown. That type was the emigrant’s prosperous offspring: descendant of the emigrations of the Seventies and Eighties and Nineties, those great folk-journeyings in search not so directly of freedom and democracy as of more money for the same labour. A new Midlander – in fact, a new American – was beginning dimly to emerge.51
And in chapter 31, the actual scene of the ‘last walk home’, from which Welles took the line about the “strange streets of a strange city”, the strangeness is actually related to the faces George encounters among the “begrimed crowds of hurrying strangers”:
Great numbers of the faces were even of a kind he did not remember ever to have seen; they were partly like the old type that his boyhood knew, and partly like types he knew abroad. German eyes with American wrinkles at their corners; he saw Irish eyes and Neapolitan eyes, Roman eyes, Tuscan eyes, eyes of Lombardy, of Savoy, Hungarian eyes, Balkan eyes, Scandinavian eyes – all with a queer American look in them. He saw Jews who had been German Jews, Jews who had been Russian Jews, Jews who had been Polish Jews but were no longer German or Russian or Polish Jews. All the people were soiled by the smoke-mist through which they hurried, under the heavy sky that hung close upon the new skyscrapers; and nearly all seemed harried by something impending…52
Next, from Welles’s narration, again closely adapted from the novel: “this was the last walk home [George] was ever to take up National Avenue to Amberson Addition and the big old house at the foot of Amberson Boulevard”. In the script – but not the 131-minute version – the boulevard has already been renamed 10th Street. In the novel the stone pillars that marked the entrance to the Amberson Addition have vanished, although a fountain of Neptune remains. Welles’s narrator:
The city had rolled over his heart and buried it under as it rolled over the Major’s and the Ambersons’ and buried them under to the last vestige. Tonight would be the last night that he and Fanny were to spend in the house which the Major had forgotten to deed to Isabel. Tomorrow they were to ‘move out’.
Welles’s plan was to continue with another subjective tracking shot that moved through the interior of the Amberson Mansion. It was shot but not included in the 131-minute version, which cuts from the walk home to George kneeling before Isabel’s bed. The following narration, cut from RKO’s version and closely adapted from Tarkington, accompanied that shot in his mother’s bedroom:
The very space in which tonight was still Isabel’s room would be cut into new shapes by new walls and floors and ceilings. And if space itself can be haunted as memory is haunted, then it may be that some impressionable, overworked woman in a ‘kitchenette’, after turning out the light, will seem to see a young man kneeling in the darkness, with arms outstretched through the wall, clutching at the covers of a shadowy bed. It may seem to her that she hears the faint cry, over and over, of George crying, “Mother, forgive me! God, forgive me!”
This is a powerful projection into the city’s future working-class space. Welles’s narrator now announces that George had received his “come-upance”, “three times filled and running over. But those who had so longed for it were not there to see it, and they never knew it. Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him.”53
The reshaping of the spaces of the modern city provided new opportunities for interaction between the classes, and this found expression in literature. Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem ‘Eyes of the Poor’ (from Paris Spleen, published posthumously in 1868) focuses on a wealthy couple in a luxurious new café who differ profoundly in their reactions to a poor family looking through the window. Marshall Berman wrote of how Baudelaire announced that Baron Haussmann’s Paris boulevards had “opened up the whole of the city, for the first time in its history, to all its inhabitants”; the city had become “a unified physical and human space”.54
George’s alienating encounter with the Indianapolis of 1911, as it was presented in Tarkington’s novel, is one such confrontation with the open modern city; George, with the probable sympathy of the author, reacts like Baudelaire’s snob, who wishes the poor to disappear from her sight. Welles’s adaptation of the ‘last walk home’ in the 131-minute version delivers the same alienating effect on George – for the better, it turns out, because it shocks him into admitting the irrevocable mistake of his treatment of his mother and Eugene. He attempts to redeem himself by working to support Aunt Fanny. But in Welles’s version George’s alienation is a reaction to the grim material condition of the empty cityscape rather than to the crowd. The narrator’s projection of some future “impressionable, overworked woman in a ‘kitchenette’” where there was once Isabel’s bedroom is another abstraction of the poor. In Welles’s script George had a brief encounter outside the mansion with some apparently well-to-do “riff-raff” in an automobile; by the time of the 131-minute version, George’s experience of urban alienation is stripped entirely of human interaction. The streets are eerily empty. The subjective point of view of the camera only makes the Indianapolis inner city appear more of an abandoned wasteland.
It’s a big change from Tarkington’s description of George moving through “thunderous streets” and “begrimed crowds of hurrying strangers”, but a necessary one for Welles to avoid carrying over the sympathetically presented racism of the original scene. But that moment in Tarkington’s novel was typical of the widespread bigotry of contemporary Indianapolis. Once a nexus of immigration, the proportion of foreign-born residents had declined to only nine per cent by 1910.55 City life was persistently segregated, particularly in the 1920s. Soon after the publication of The Magnificent Ambersons, Indiana would claim the largest Ku Klux Klan organisation in the country – an estimated 300,000 members at its peak in the early 1920s. The Klan dominated the city’s municipal election of 1925, and one of its members, Edward L. Jackson, ruled as a corrupt state governor from 1925 to 1929.56
Orson Welles’s solution as an adaptor was to be modest rather than critical: he simply eliminated the racism that was a key part of Tarkington’s provincial myth of decline. But Welles’s political radicalism was only beginning to stir and seek expression in film. Just days after recording his tender Ambersons narration, his lament for an idealised middle-class Eden, Welles was in Rio de Janeiro improvising a Technicolor documentary film about the city’s Carnaval. In Portuguese Welles found the word that best defined his sweet ache for the imagined past – saudade. ‘Carnaval’ quickly developed into a radical celebratory project that attempted to directly interrogate the racial politics of urban space and present a utopian vision of joyous racial mixing in the streets of a modern city.
NOTES
1 ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’, The Campbell Playhouse (Orson Welles, 1939). Original broadcast: 29 October (CBS Radio Network)
2 Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 125.
3 Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 130.
4 Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 165; Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 97.
5 Benamou, It’s All True, 36.
6 Benamou, It’s All True, 41–2.
7 These details are drawn from Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Welles’ Career: A Chronology’, in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 365–70; and Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work.
8 Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 126.
9 Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Original Ambersons’, in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 456.
10 This synopsis of the 131-minute version has drawn on the readable summary by Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Original Ambersons’, in Welles and
Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 454–90; and the full textual reconstruction in Carringer, The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction.
11 Clinton Heylin, Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005), 116–7; Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans, 86.
12 Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 127.
13 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 92.
14 David Kamp, ‘Magnificent Obsession’, Vanity Fair, April 2000, at http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2010/04/magnificent-obsession-200201 (accessed 17 June 2015).
15 The following dialogue and description of sequences here are taken from Rosenbaum, ‘The Original Ambersons’, 465–7 (I have edited out most of Rosenbaum’s shot-by-shot notations).
16 Booth Tarkington (n.d.) quoted in Frederick D. Kershner Jr, ‘From Country Town to Industrial City: The Urban Pattern in Indianapolis’, Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 45, No. 4, December 1949, 330.
17 Booth Tarkington, The Turmoil (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1915), 3–4.
18 Carringer remarks on Tarkington’s obscurity by 1942 in The Making of Citizen Kane, 124.
19 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 96.
20 Welles, ‘My Father Wore Black Spats’.
21 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 93.
22 Joseph Cotten, letter to Orson Welles, 28 March 1942, in Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans, 90.
At the End of the Street in the Shadow Page 8