The Magic World of Orson Welles (22 page)

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.