The Magic World of Orson Welles

4 The Magnificent Ambersons

As Citizen Kane was about to appear, the Hearst press made a number of heavy-handed threats, at one point claiming they intended to expose Hollywood’s practice of hiring “refugees to the exclusion of native Americans.” Whatever anxiety this sort of publicity may have created at RKO, it certainly had an effect upon exhibitors. On September 7, 1941, for example, the New York Times reported that Kane had been sold to the Fox West Coast theater chain but that it would “not be displayed by any of the circuit’s 515 theaters on the Pacific Coast, Mountain States, and Midwest”—this despite the fact that the picture had outgrossed RKO’s other new releases when it was shown in San Francisco, Denver, and Omaha. Welles declared that he would sue, but his film had already been kept away from circuit bookings for too long.

Effective as the Hearst vendetta was, the decline of the Mercury group came about for more complex reasons. From the beginning, Welles had been disliked in Hollywood, and his problems were compounded by the management at RKO. A month after Kane he was given a “producer-director” contract under which he would bring out three pictures a year. Meanwhile the studio’s profits were falling and Floyd Odlum’s Atlas Company was gaining a controlling interest. Odlum applied pressure to George Schaefer, who in turn made life difficult for Welles. By early 1942 Atlas was in total control and had replaced Schaefer with their own man; in the process Welles’s next three films were sabotaged and his Mercury organization ordered from the lot.

Before the end came, Welles had expressed interest in various projects. The “Mexican Melodrama” described in chapter 1 was announced and then abandoned; according to press releases, Harnett Kane’s Louisiana Hayride, a biography of Huey Long, was considered and soon dropped, as was Zoe Atkins’s Starvation on Red River. At some point Welles persuaded George Schaefer to approve Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, which the Mercury had done on radio; indeed Welles even played a recording of the radio broadcast to Schaefer in order to convince him. Welles in turn agreed to produce Journey into Fear at Schaefer’s request. Soon the war began, and Welles immediately involved himself in a noncommercial project sponsored jointly by RKO and the Rockefeller interests within the US government—an ambitious Latin American documentary composed of several interrelated stories and shot in color and black-and-white, titled It’s All True. For this undertaking Welles agreed to waive payment and work in Rio de Janeiro, handling his other film and radio commitments at long distance.

Partly because of RKO’s growing desire to be rid of Welles, the documentary turned into a nightmare. RKO had promised to have Robert Wise deliver the rough cut of Ambersons to Rio, but Welles never saw it. The film received some bad preview notices in Pomona (where it was shown following a Dorothy Lamour musical called The Fleet’s In), but it also received some excellent notices. The studio’s response was to reduce it in length by about forty-five minutes and add new material without the director’s approval. The Welles–Norman Foster film Journey into Fear, scripted by Joseph Cotten and various others (including, according to press reports, Ben Hecht), was also recut by the studio. Meanwhile the new management began circulating rumors that Welles’s Rio footage was chaotic and extravagant. With It’s All True nearly complete, Welles was ordered home; RKO collected its guaranteed money from the government, printed about 13,000 feet of Welles’s work (which was never shown), and supposedly destroyed the rest. As for Ambersons—a less sensational and less inherently popular work than Kane—it was first widely advertised and then downgraded by the studio. In a few big city markets audiences were reported to have laughed at the dramatic moments, and even though the film did respectably at the box office when it was first released, it was soon playing at the bottom end of double-feature programs. Kane had been a succès de scandale, It’s All True had become a victim of studio politics, and Ambersons had shown no profit. In combination the three films put an end to Welles’s power in Hollywood.

It was the saddest chapter in Welles’s career, and it remains a subject of controversy. Charles Higham, for example, has said that Welles “ran out” on Ambersons and made It’s All True a needlessly expensive film, partly because of what Higham calls “a fear of completion.” But Welles and virtually everyone else involved with the making of the two movies claimed otherwise. In the mid-1980s, at about the time of Welles’s death, almost two-thirds of the material he had shot on and near the coast of Fortaleza for It’s All True was discovered in Brazil. Richard Wilson made a short documentary, Four Men on a Raft, from some of this material, and more was used in a 1993 feature, It’s All True, supervised by Wilson, Bill Krohn, and others. Wilson, Robert Stam, and Catherine Benamou had already written important essays about Welles’s film, pointing out the explicit, sometimes unconscious racism that determined RKO’s attitude toward it. In 2007 Benamou published It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey, which is a definitive historical reconstruction. For this reason I have not attempted to write about the film, nor about Journey into Fear, which was directed partly by Norman Foster. Instead I have concentrated upon The Magnificent Ambersons, a film RKO seems to have resented from the start but that survives in something relatively close to its original form.

I

Throughout his early career Welles had been fascinated with literature of and about the 1890s. In 1938 alone his radio broadcasts included adaptations of The Man Who Was Thursday, Sherlock Holmes, Around the World in Eighty Days, Heart of Darkness, The Gift of the Magi, Life with Father, Seventeen, and Clarence. The Mercury stage performances alternated between the Elizabethans and turn-of-the-century dramatists like William Gillette, William Archer, and George Bernard Shaw; the early sections of Citizen Kane were filled with an exuberant recreation of nineties Americana; and when Welles tried to revive the Mercury in 1945, Around the World was his first project.

Among all of these properties, however, The Magnificent Ambersons exuded a special appeal. The novel, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1918, is virtually ignored today, perhaps because Tarkington clung to an antimacassar style and opted for a popular, sentimental conclusion. The old-fashioned plot conventions, the painfully obvious symbolism, the continually “regional” quality of his work pale compared to the works of the following generation of American writers, yet Ambersons remains intelligent and more readable than many other books with greater reputations. It tells the story of the members of a faintly absurd Midwestern aristocratic family who are blind to the coming of the industrial age. Pathetically out of date, living side by side in their grand houses, the Ambersons are destroyed by a new economy that eats away at the foundations of their property. Their decline parallels the rise of Eugene Morgan, an automobile inventor who becomes a power in the growing city. (The novel gives the town no name, but in the film it is identified by an insert showing the front page of the Indianapolis Inquirer.) Ironically, Morgan has always loved Major Amberson’s daughter, but the two are unable to marry because of the Amberson pride. At first Morgan is rejected because he seems a wastrel; Isabel Amberson marries the passionless Wilbur Minafer, but when Wilbur dies, Morgan is kept away by Isabel’s spoiled son, George. Only at the end, in a projected marriage between George and Morgan’s daughter, Lucy, does the old wealth promise to join with the new. The Amberson era, however, has completely passed, and their houses are bought and divided up by the growing city.

Booth Tarkington had been a friend of Welles’s father, and the novel’s portrait of a “midland town” passing into the twentieth century was surely reminiscent of Welles’s experience as a boy in the quasi-Victorian atmosphere of Kenosha and Woodstock. The book was written at about the time of Welles’s birth, so certain of its characterizations struck quite close to home. The inventor Morgan and the beautiful Isabel Amberson are not unlike Welles’s own parents, and Isabel’s son George strongly resembles the insufferable young George Orson himself. An overprotected youth, George Amberson Minafer is universally hated by the townspeople, who describe him as a “fool boy with the pride of Satan” and a “highhanded Lucifer.” When Isabel dies, leaving this son to become reconciled with a father figure he has treated as a rival, the possible affinities with Welles’s life become even more intimate. In fact it is interesting that the oedipal triangle in the novel should be represented in the film by three players who have relatively weak personalities, as if they were simultaneously hinting at autobiographical parallels and defending against them. Eugene Morgan as portrayed by Joseph Cotten is more of a dandy than the Morgan in the book and therefore presumably bears a greater resemblance to Welles’s father; yet Cotten is an actor who seems to have been born middle-aged and is less sexually threatening to George than he should be. Dolores Costello, an agelessly beautiful silent movie actress who had come out of retirement, makes Isabel into a golden-haired Madonna, a woman so abstracted into a complacently sweet and self-sacrificing role that she becomes almost invisible (although in the original version, before RKO revised a scene between her and her son, she was a stronger character). Tim Holt, as George, has dark, baby-fat looks that make him a double for the director, but he lacks the appropriate neurotic energy that Welles himself would have brought to the part.

Despite the relative blandness of these actors, the film manages to evoke far more sexual anxiety than the novel, chiefly because of Agnes Moorehead’s performance as the spinster Aunt Fanny and Welles’s own handling of the mise-en-scène. After making only a few changes in the ending of the story, Welles used the full weight of a gothic style to transform Tarkington’s bittersweet, undisturbing book into a dark, almost nervous film. The potential mania of George and the hysteria of Fanny are heightened by grotesque visuals, as in the shot shown in figure 4.1, where the shadow of an angry peacock echoes Moorehead’s profile. The Amberson mansion itself differs considerably from Tarkington’s descriptions of a reasonably pleasant, if ostentatious, manor and sometimes resembles the house of Frankenstein, as, for example, when the mansion is shown in a thunderstorm after the death of Wilbur (see fig. 4.2).

Figure 4.1: George (Tim Holt) and Aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead).

Everywhere Welles has emphasized the pessimistic qualities of his source, giving the film a sharper satiric edge, a greater degree of sexual frustration and madness. These slight changes of tone, however, are in keeping with Tarkington’s underlying social despair. Throughout the film the inability of the characters to overcome psychological divisions is linked to the split within the society. At the beginning we see Eugene Morgan returning to town after a twenty-years absence; a widower with a grown daughter, he longs for the beautiful Amberson woman almost in the way Jay Gatsby longs for Daisy. When Isabel’s husband dies, Morgan seems to have been given a second chance, but history only repeats itself through the intervention of George. In still another repetition, George is parted from Lucy (Anne Baxter), who cannot accept him until his illusions of grandeur have been destroyed. Even the supporting characters are sexually isolated, though not necessarily because of social impediments: Major Amberson is a widower, Mrs. Johnson lives alone in the house across the way, and neither Fanny nor Uncle Jack Amberson has been able to find a mate. The only marriage we see is the companionate union of Isabel and Wilbur, and the web of unrequited loves that make up the plot suggests that loneliness pervades the entire world. Everyone has become a prisoner of class or sex, a citizen of a town Lucy whimsically names “They-Couldn’t-Help-It.”

Figure 4.2: The Amberson mansion in a storm.

Clearly The Magnificent Ambersons had permitted Welles to return to the autobiographical material that was one of his obsessions in Citizen Kane and to create the same deterministic universe. Although the film covered a shorter time span (1885–1912), it also gave rise to the same notions about the movement of history. Among other things, Kane had been devoted to America’s passage from one kind of economic organization to another; Charles Foster Kane was a late product of the Gilded Age, a tycoon whose breed was slowly replaced by corporate organizations and faceless newsmen. Because Kane was shown at various stages of his life, we can see his character echoed by all the generations in Ambersons: like the elderly major, Kane becomes an anachronism; like Eugene Morgan, he is the progenitor of a new world, an inventor who creates a monster; like George Minafer, he is an overgrown child with a demonic will. In the purely economic and historical sense, Kane might be said to resemble Morgan most of all, his childlike infatuation with his newspaper being very like Morgan’s delight in the quaint little horseless carriages at the beginning of Ambersons. Hence, just as the newsrooms in Kane underwent a transformation from the oak-grained offices of the Inquirer to the darkened, smoky theater of “News on the March,” so the midland streets of Ambersons are transformed into grimy highways.

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.

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 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.

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 contemplate, 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.”

Figure 4.4: George and Lucy on the stairs, Eugene and Fanny in the distance.

If parents keep intruding on their children, as in this shot, the reverse is also true. For example, at a later point in the evening the Ambersons stand around a punchbowl with Eugene Morgan. It is a formal, quite static grouping, everyone gathered as if they were having their picture taken. The major stands with his back to us, toasting the group and saying, “Isabel, I remember the last drink Eugene ever had.” But this attempt to recapture the past is quickly frustrated when Eugene looks offscreen to his left and comments on “the only thing that makes me forgive that bass viol for getting in the way.” George and Lucy then cross in the foreground, the camera panning with them and the group around the punchbowl scattering in acknowledgment that times have in fact changed.

Figure 4.5: Eugene Morgan and the Ambersons.

Everyone at the party is caught up in a process, a flux of time that is subtly represented by the constant movement of camera and players. A frustration and sadness runs beneath the joy of the evening, affecting both the young and their more anxious but ostensibly cheerful elders. While physical relationships are shifting and changing before our eyes, the dialogue is filled with ironic references to the difference between “old times” and “new times,” and in the original version, before RKO senselessly cut a huge section from one of the long tracking shots, Welles had included the following exchange:

JACK (looking at the young people in the party): Life’s got a special walloping for every mother’s son of ’em! . . . I suppose you know that all these young faces have got to get lines on ’em?

ISABEL: Maybe they won’t. Maybe times will change, and nobody will have to wear lines.

EUGENE (looking meaningfully at Isabel): Times have changed like that for only one person I know.

JACK: What puts the lines on faces? Age or trouble? We can’t say that wisdom does it.

EUGENE: . . . The deepest wrinkles are caused by lack of faith. The serenest brow is the one that believes the most.

ISABEL: In what?

EUGENE: In everything.

Beneath Isabel’s apparent innocence and Eugene’s worship of her there is a sadness, an implicit acknowledgment that time levels everything. It is a pessimistic moment, but it reveals Welles’s admiration for characters who cling to an ideal. Indeed the film’s whole attitude toward time suggests feelings of loss and idealistic longing, emotions that are central to Welles’s best work.

The relationship of the characters and their attitudes toward time are nowhere more beautifully represented than in the climactic moment when parents and children join together in a dance. We see Eugene and Jack standing before a warm fireplace, backed with a mantel and a pier glass. Jack remarks wistfully, “Eighteen years have passed, but have they? . . . By gosh, old times are certainly starting all over again!” Meanwhile the camera withdraws as Eugene takes Isabel’s hand and dances forward, moving to a tune that blends old waltz rhythms with a newer, more buoyant ragtime. “Old times?” Eugene says. “Not a bit. There aren’t any old times. When times are gone they aren’t old, they’re dead. There aren’t any times but new times.” Exuberantly, he dances with Isabel in a nearly straight line, passing out of the frame at the right foreground, whereupon George and Lucy enter from the left and stand facing each other in a close two-shot. Lucy asks, “What are you doing in school?” George answers, “I don’t intend to go into any business or profession. . . . Lawyers, bankers, politicians, what do they ever get out of life?” He declares his intention to be a yachtsman and immediately waltzes backward with Lucy, joining the movement of dancers on the floor. The movements of George and Eugene have exactly corresponded to their respective attitudes as reactionary and progressive, and as the camera now pans across the dancers, Eugene can be seen guiding Isabel in a straight, diagonal movement, dancing in a different style from the other couples. Life, however, will have a “walloping” in store for him as well as George; if George is wrong in assuming that things are permanent, Eugene Morgan seems equally naïve in believing that the past can be rubbed out or rewritten. Both characters, in their own way, feel an illusory confidence that the remainder of the film will undermine.

The dance is an ideal image with which to close the sequence, because it is movement without destination, labor without pain, stasis within a measured beat of time. For a moment everything seems to be in harmony, but at the very peak of gaiety and light, at the instant when the Amberson ballroom is filled with busy joy, the image dissolves; time has already passed, the house is shrouded in darkness, and Eugene and Isabel are seen waltzing alone to a solitary violinist. The last of the “great, long-remembered dances” is over. When Welles cuts to a closer view of Eugene and Isabel, he underlines the sadness of their lives by posing their children in the distance, in a pool of light. The power of this shot derives from its complex significance. On the one hand it holds out hope that the past can be recaptured; if Eugene Morgan cannot reclaim his “one true love,” then at least there is the next generation, represented by the couple in the distance. But even while the image makes us believe that history repeats itself, it also makes us aware of change within repetition. The lighting gives Eugene and Isabel the look of ghosts haunting an old mansion, and we can see the years between them and their children.

The tragic situations of all the characters are glimpsed in the aftermath of the ball, where parallel editing contrasts the Morgans and the Ambersons. Eugene and his daughter are seen driving home, their voices cheerfully shouting above a rattling auto engine, their eyes squinting and tearing in the wintry wind; Eugene clearly loves Isabel, and his daughter smiles indulgently as he talks about her. Meanwhile, inside the darkened mansion, George and his mother whisper in the shadows. Isabel worries about her husband’s health and his bad investments—“See here,” George asks, “he isn’t going into Morgan’s automobile concern, is he?” For a moment Wilbur himself (Don Dillaway) appears in a dressing gown, and a single close-up shows that his face has the prim, harried lines of an overworked clerk. As George speaks with his father, Jack and Fanny enter in the background, their fancy dress mocking their age, making them a pathetic couple. Even when George teases Fanny about her interest in the widower Morgan, the comedy turns grotesque. Fanny tries to mock George, but her voice rises to a nervous, off-key pitch; from somewhere in the distance we hear Jack shouting for the couple to quiet down—the first in a series of occasions in this film where an off-camera voice provides an ironic counterpoint to the action. “I’m gonna move to a hotel!” Jack shouts down the cavernous hall, but in a sense he already lives in one.

Figure 4.6: Eugene and Isabel say goodnight, with their children in the background.

The evening gives way to the following day and the ride in the snow, further evidence of the beautifully alternating moods and rhythms in the opening parts of the film. Outwardly, this section is cheerful and communal, the most lighthearted moment in the story. George’s sleigh speeds past Eugene’s stranded auto but then overturns, dumping him and Lucy into a snowbank as the horse, Pendennis, gallops out of sight. Eugene rushes over and looks on with fatherly amusement as George and Lucy steal a kiss. Isabel, Jack, and Fanny make their way from the car to the fallen couple, their voices mingling like the chatter of a happy family. Eventually everyone climbs aboard the “Morgan Invincible,” and they putter off down the road, singing “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.” Despite the surface gaiety, however, the essential themes are the same as in previous sequences, and the occasional visual references to Currier and Ives are mingled with dark ironies. The conflict between Morgan’s “horseless carriage” and George’s sled is both charming and serious, the symbolism carried to the blatant extent of having George push the car and eat its exhaust. (George was to breathe auto fumes at two later points in the film, but RKO’s cutting obscures one of these instances and leaves the other out entirely.) Bernard Herrmann gives the sequence a sort of music-box orchestration, evoking the sparkle of ice and jingle of bells, but these sounds are repeatedly disrupted by the squeaky hand crank and sputtering motor of an automobile. Even the countryside is not really idyllic, because it is dotted everywhere with houses, mailboxes, and telephone lines. In the original version the scene ran longer, showing a brief conversation between Eugene and Isabel about changes and pollution in the town:

EUGENE: I think it used to be nicer.

ISABEL: It’s because we were young.

EUGENE: There always seemed to be gold dust in the air. . . .

LUCY (to George, in back seat of car): I don’t ever seem to be thinking about the present moment. I’m always looking forward to something.

This dialogue, taken almost directly from Tarkington, makes explicit the interweaving of personal time and social time that can be felt everywhere in the film. In one sense there is no “present moment,” because the characters are continually preoccupied with past or future, and every image becomes an intersection of what has been with what will be, a painful joining of regrets and wishes.

Besides these temporal ironies, there is a continuing dramatic tension among the characters. Wilbur Minafer is significantly absent from the fun, and while Eugene compliments Isabel, calling her a “divinely ridiculous woman,” Fanny Minafer sits in the backseat of the car with Jack and Lucy, trying to talk loudly enough to make Eugene hear. (“It’s so interesting! . . . It’s so like old times to hear him talk!”) The more Fanny affects girlishness, the more frightening she becomes; Moorehead’s voice, hovering brilliantly between delight and mania, injects a note of authentic pain that contrasts with everyone else’s happiness. Indeed throughout the film, death and madness are never very far away, and the slow, nostalgic iris that closes this section provides not only an affectionate homage to old-time movies but also a foreshadowing of the next episode: after the circle of darkness closes around the distant auto and the Christmas-card town, the screen lightens to show a dark, circular funeral wreath on the Amberson door.

Though Wilbur Minafer is the most ineffectual character in the movie, his demise is analogous to the explosion that sets events in motion at the beginning of Touch of Evil. His funeral (scored by Herrmann with the death music from Citizen Kane) not only marks a turning point in the economic fortunes of the Ambersons, but it also sets the stage for the overt battle between George and Eugene. The first third of the film has been preparation, a cheerful exposition filled with suggestions of impending disaster; the rest, like Kane, becomes increasingly somber, with poverty and industrial dirt spreading like slow stains. Unfortunately, however, the remainder of the film has been badly truncated by the studio and must be discussed in more general fashion. What chiefly survives is Agnes Moorehead’s vivid portrayal of Aunt Fanny and a remarkable imagery of decay.

Wilbur’s funeral is shot from inside the coffin, looking up at a stream of respectful but hardly grief-stricken mourners. It closes with a large, impressive close-up of Fanny’s tear-stained face—the plain, pinched visage of a true Minafer, expressing not only sorrow but an intense, barely concealed fury. An ugly duckling from the puritanical middle class, Fanny has found it necessary to repress both her sexual feelings and her jealousy of the Ambersons; Jack later remarks that she has nothing “except her feeling about Eugene,” but now even that is threatened by Isabel’s freedom.

Throughout the film Moorehead conveys Fanny’s torment in every birdlike gesture of her body, frequently drawing the spectator’s eye into little corners of the frame, where she dominates the screen without saying a word. In the brief scene at Morgan’s growing automobile factory, she can be seen bestowing an adoring look on her beloved as he tells Isabel that he feels like writing poetry again; the glance speaks volumes but is delivered at the very margin of the playing area and is totally ignored by the other actors. In later scenes Moorehead’s depiction of a maddened spinster is so intense that it completely overshadows Tim Holt’s performance as George. “I believe I’m going crazy!” George exclaims when Fanny tells him of rumors circulating about Eugene and Isabel; nevertheless, he behaves like a dumb child, his insanity reflected chiefly in the settings and in this willingness to listen to his aunt. She pursues him like a harpy (“George, what are you going to do, George?”), her emotions swinging between panic, embittered self-pity, and devilish cunning. The dialogue between the two is staged on the Amberson stairway, where stained-glass windows carry ironic mottoes like “Poetry” and “Music.” At one point Welles even photographs them as if they were Iago and Othello, standing at separate levels of an Elizabethan theater and backed by expressionist shadow.

Figure 4.7: Fanny and George backed by expressionist shadow.

Fanny, who is the second maternal figure in George’s life, is also a predator, as this shot indicates. Without a child of her own, she reinforces Isabel’s protective attitude toward the boy and at the same time manipulates his jealousy toward Morgan. We see her making strawberry shortcake for her nephew and then cautioning him not to eat fast; later she comforts George when his mother dies and remains guiltily beside him until the end of the film, when she collapses on the floor of an empty kitchen in a helpless, childlike despair. Like George, she becomes a mere pedestrian in the town, her sexual frustrations compounded by a motherly instinct and a penny-pinching anxiety that has been bred into her by generations of thrifty Minafers. “I walked my heels off looking for a place for us to live,” she tells George in a tearful singsong. “I walked all over this town. I didn’t go a single block on a streetcar.” In this climactic scene, with her back resting against a cold boiler, Moorehead reaches a degree of grief and rage barely suggested in Tarkington’s novel. As she dashes out of the kitchen, the camera withdrawing anxiously before her, her performance becomes as extreme as Welles’s own directorial style, rising to a pitch of hysteria that makes most Hollywood acting seem pale and mannered.

In defense of Tim Holt, it must be said that he is given a difficult role, with fewer opportunities to express George’s mania. The character he plays is supposed to remain stiff, arrogant, and somewhat ridiculously old-fashioned, speaking a language appropriate to Victorian melodrama. Some of his more powerful scenes—his confrontation with Isabel after he sends Eugene away from the house, his solitary recitation of Hamlet’s “’Tis not my inky cloak, good Mother”—have been reshot or cut entirely. As a result he becomes an exceedingly bland presence who is repeatedly mocked by his environment. His successive trips through the city, for example, are designed to comment bitterly on his decline: as a child and as a young man he roars through the dirt streets in a horse cart, the camera photographing him from a low angle when he scatters passersby and lashes a workman. Later he is seen trotting slowly through traffic with Lucy at his side; as he speaks of the “Movements” he wants to administer, his horse clatters loudly on pavement and we glimpse mock-aristocratic signboards in the background—“Elite Cleaners,” “Barber Shop: Tony Gentry, prop.” Finally, as the last indignity, he traverses the streets on foot, passing advertisements such as “Blaize Credit Co.” and “New Hope Apartments.”

But if the film is unable to give George a psychologically rich characterization, it does not fail in its evocation of death and decay. Major Amberson’s ride through the town and the later shot of Isabel in the same carriage after her return from Europe are photographed as if the characters were in a hearse. In the first shot a slanting, white-hot light burns through the darkness and falls ruthlessly on the major’s aging face; in the second we see an elaborate, impressionistic view of the city through the carriage windows, the buildings magnified on a process screen and tilted at a crazy angle. Two of the simplest shots—the announcement of Isabel’s death and the close-up of a dying Major Amberson—are among the most emotionally effective scenes in all of Welles’s cinema, despite the fact that the first was cut in half by studio editors and the second was reshot at Welles’s instructions by Robert Wise. When Isabel dies the major is seen reclining on George’s bed, fully clothed and sleeping in the midst of the day; suddenly he wakes for no apparent reason, glancing around the young man’s room in senile confusion; the camera pulls nervously back and Herrmann plays an eerie, dreamlike music as George’s shadow crosses in front of the lens; the camera pans quickly to catch the back of George’s head as Fanny bursts in; she grasps him in a tight embrace, her eyes glazed and staring at the ceiling as she whispers, “She loved you, George, she loved you!” The next scene presents the major’s dying monologue; from a dark screen Welles’s voice speaks slowly, majestically: “And now Major Amberson was engaged in the profoundest thinking of his life.” Gradually we see a close-up of Richard Bennett, a silent film star who was in fact close to death when the scene was shot; firelight illuminates his face as he mutters, “The sun. It must be the sun.” Offscreen Jack’s voice can be heard asking about the disposition of the family property.

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 looks 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.