What Is and What Might Have Been

Citizen Kane was not only Welles’s first feature but—almost unbelievably—the first time he had stepped onto a studio set. With it, he became an instant touchstone for filmmakers, even ones whose styles and concerns were utterly alien to his own. It was more about a kind of license: An outsider and only twenty-five! This is what one can do! This is what one can get away with! Kane infected American cinema with what Andrew Sarris called the virus of ambition.

The acclaim did not translate into box office, however, and Welles was already on shaky ground at RKO when he started his fateful Ambersons project. He had a producer-director contract to make three films a year for his executive ally, George Schaefer, but Schaefer was himself in trouble. He would approve Welles’s adaptation of Tarkington’s novel, in return for which Welles would act in and produce Journey into Fear, with Norman Foster directing. Near the end, Welles was acting in that film by night and shooting The Magnificent Ambersons by day. 

Production itself was fraught. After Gregg Toland, the masterful cinematographer of Citizen Kane, proved unavailable, Welles brought in the journeyman Stanley Cortez, who had a reputation for working fast, mostly from B pictures for Universal. But when Cortez, suddenly seized with his own artistic ambitions, became painstakingly slow, Welles replaced him with Harry J. Wild as principal cameraman. Bernard Herrmann was the (uncredited) composer, but not exclusively.

To complicate matters further, the U.S. had just entered World War II, and in late December 1941 Welles agreed to shoot a goodwill documentary in Brazil, to be part of an omnibus coproduction—It’s All True—between RKO and the U.S. government. Shooting had to happen immediately, during Carnival, so he recorded the narration for Ambersons quickly and worked with Robert Wise long-distance, via telephone and telegram, on the edit, until RKO, anxious to open in the spring, ordered that infamous sneak preview in Pomona, California. There were further cuts, and material added without Welles’s consent, until control was taken away from Welles—the beginning of the end of any hope for a finished film that would reflect his design. 

Bazin’s early praise of Welles, and of Toland, applauding the principle of long takes and deep focus as a new kind of cinematic realism, has come to be modified—“realism” is, after all, a term whose meaning shifts with decades and fashion. There is nothing naturalistic or “neutral” in Welles’s films, nothing in the expressionistic sets, the complex compositions and startling angles, that resembles the way we sit in a room and idly take in its properties. He is deciding what we will see and how we will see it, deliberately creating a theatrical atmosphere. But the aspect of Bazin’s realism that remains is the psychological one—it resides, like Shakespeare’s, in the glorious ambiguity of character. Bazin points to the emotional suspense created in The Magnificent Ambersons’ kitchen scene by the immobility of the camera, and Welles’s refusal to cue the audience through cuts, underlining, close-ups. No one in Welles’s work is all good or all bad, and the putative villains are complex and fascinating, the heroes riddled with doubts or fatal weaknesses. His attraction to the variety of human nature, and the way character determines fate, has never been more evident than in this ensemble. 

A great deal of the book makes its way into the film version of The Magnificent Ambersons, including the tone of wry amusement. But the surgery practiced by Welles is what gives the movie its power. He trims, streamlines, darkens, and intensifies, reducing the number of characters so that the ones that remain acquire density and focus. His wizardry at conveying multiple points of view reaches a crescendo at the Amberson ball, “the last of the great, long-remembered dances that everybody talked about”—an ebullient, dazzling, multilayered set piece, bringing class and character together in sharp relief and creating the sense of a vast net in which the two couples are gracefully but ineluctably caught. Its memory really does live on, tantalizingly, like music, recalling a once-hopeful time, even as sorrows engulf the subjects. Here is Welles at his pyrotechnic best, leading us through that interior so expressive of both elegance and excess, and roving up and down that winding staircase that is host to so many breakdowns, arguments, eavesdroppings. Amid the heavy Victorian furnishings and gargoyles, and in the subtle shifts of the score, many lives are hanging in the balance, held aloft magically like a juggler’s balls. 

No one steals the show in this magnificent group effort, but Moorehead as Aunt Fanny casts the longest shadow, a scarecrow who both fascinates and repels, warped by frustrated passion, always on the verge of hysteria. Her scenes with Holt are savage and violent but also wildly, darkly comical, as the two characters mimic each other, scraping on each other’s nerves, she trying to dissemble and disguise, he to ferret out every truth about  Eugene’s place in the family. Two spinsters locked together to the bitter end. 

As Isabel, Costello—a silent star who came out of early retirement in the midthirties—is stunning and unreachable, striking just the right note of vague melancholy that conceals desperation. Isabel is what was once called a Great Beauty, with all the frailties that can attend that supposed social asset: complacency and lassitude, like one of those blonde zombies of the forties, the woman with no will of her own. By contrast, Anne Baxter’s Lucy Morgan is everything Isabel is not: smart, curious, with a sense of irony that gives her a saving detachment. She has a strong sense of identity and needs to respect as well as love the man to whom she gives herself, something George, isolated in his bubble of self-importance, can never understand. It is Lucy who shrewdly and poetically pinpoints the inevitability of George’s behavior by comparing him, in a scene with her father, to the bad Indian chief whose name means “rides down everything.” As for Cotten’s Eugene, he started out as a popular fellow, spoiled, a spendthrift without money of whom nothing much was expected. He might have lost out anyway, but the fall from grace that broke his heart spurred him to make something of himself.

Cotten captures Welles’s own ambivalence in the wonderful dinner scene where the relentlessly antagonistic George viciously insults him and his automobile, while Eugene responds not with understandable anger or resentment but with quiet affability, concession: he agrees with George, expressing his own reservations about the invention and what it will do to humanity. We never know what technology will do and how it will change us, he says, and he might be talking about the electronic inventions of a century later. 

With the film’s abundance of lovely vertical and horizontal movements, the times when the camera comes to rest are all the more memorable: on Isabel’s profile at the door at the end of the party, or on Fanny after her brother has died—her face upturned, with a stricken expression of more than grief, perhaps rage, terror. Who will protect Fanny Minafer now? And will she finally lose Eugene, her great passion, to her widowed sister-in-law? These haunting images seem to be telling us something, anticipating shadows, loss, darkness, we’re not sure what. The well-placed narration by Welles in the beginning and near the end seems almost uncannily right, and the dialogue is brilliant throughout. But equally eloquent, and even more ambiguous, are the silences of what’s not said. 

Because of all of Welles’s aborted, butchered, and unfinished films, not to mention the ones that survive in multiple and contradictory fragments, early biographers diagnosed him as having a “fear of completion.” This overly negative and clinical designation has been disputed by subsequent scholars—and rightly so. What Welles did have was a chronic, almost debilitating dissatisfaction that sprang from the very nature of his genius: an overabundance of ideas. Peter Brook, who directed him in a 1953 television adaptation of King Lear, has spoken admiringly of Welles’s habit, in the theater, of settling on one remarkable piece of business and immediately superseding it with another. He dreaded having to see his completed films (and avoided screenings all his life) because he would have to live with choices he’d made that would eventually and inevitably feel inferior to some new idea. Because he was a master of so many (too many?) of the facets of the cinema—cutting, staging, camera movement and framing, dialogue, sound, and performance—there was always some new angle to try. Every film contained many films, unrealized possibilities.

He was ornery and difficult but also a courageous and gallant soul, who would always be at odds with the moneyed world of Hollywood, men who thought in terms of speed and profit. He had his revenge, becoming the patron saint of independent cinema, and his work of both the finished and unfinished varieties has yielded a never-ending harvest of discovery and fresh interpretation. How lucky he was—he often said so—to achieve what he did, and how lucky are we, its beneficiaries.