The Magic World of Orson Welles (20 page)

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.

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.

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 projection 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.