The Magic World of Orson Welles (21 page)

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.