The Magic World of Orson Welles (19 page)

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.

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.