Surfaces and Depths

But the film offers a lesson to anyone undertaking to make a period picture: the historical signifiers should be lightly deployed, lest costuming and set dressing squeeze the life out of the movie, leaving a beautiful surface with a hollow core, as has happened many times with even the best-intentioned motion pictures. In The Magnificent Ambersons, by contrast, what you primarily recall are the faces. The most significant matters seem to largely occur in the faces of those experiencing them. Isabel’s tragic sacrifice is written in Dolores Costello’s countenance, Fanny’s festering heartbreak in Agnes Moorehead’s, Eugene’s forbearance and irony in Cotten’s, George’s arrogance and eventual comeuppance in Tim Holt’s—and, of course, Major Amberson’s decline takes place in Richard Bennett’s face, flickering in the firelight, as you watch. Welles here as elsewhere seldom isolates his faces but likes to display them in theatrical context, often positioned in front of the camera while the business of life carries on behind them. 

The film approaches but doesn’t quite equal the deep-focus magic of Citizen Kane. Gregg Toland, the earlier film’s nonpareil cinematographer, was under contract to MGM, so the shooting of The Magnificent Ambersons was done primarily by Stanley Cortez, who was certainly able enough, although Welles’s later verdict was that he was “so slow that we took longer to shoot than any picture I’ve ever done.” The picture itself isn’t slow, but it is deliberately paced; it is, after all, about the crushing relentlessness of time in its passing. The story takes place within the intersections among a collection of personalities, some of whom are more connected to actuality than others. It presents itself as an objective record of a reality that is largely subjective, although the world outside eventually crashes through. It can feel as if an Edwardian photo album has come to life, page after page of faces and decorous amusements that pretend all is well while bleeding subtext—and then it all goes to hell at the end, as the beautifully printed cartes de visite give way to tawdry fairground snapshots and photo-booth strips.  

If the outside world can seem like a fragile construct, the Amberson house’s interior is massively physical. For all its Victorian fripperies—flocked velvet wallpaper, stained glass, bronze statuettes on plinths—the house is above all a gigantic armature, its bones the beams and pillars and the extraordinary three-story open staircase, all of it dark-stained hardwood, baronial to all appearances but seemingly inspired by industrial scaffolding. (It comes as no surprise to learn that the set was later employed for producer Val Lewton’s horror movies.) The house is the inside of an enormous head—that of the Amberson family, which it represents better than any single human member, all of them weakened by their flaws. The house has no flaws; it is impregnable, until it isn’t. The staircase, its central nervous system, is a conveyance to the private sanctums as well as the third-story grand ballroom, and it is also the setting for the contretemps between George and Fanny Minafer during which she employs her envy to fuel his catastrophic hubris. That is when the disease—his, but in a larger way the family’s—metastasizes, leading to the eventual death of the house of Amberson. 

The surrounding city of Indianapolis and its many changes over the decades appear as hints. The clapboard downtown, shot on RKO’s Gower Street lot in Los Angeles, appears to fill out and become less rural, and then, when Isabel Amberson Minafer returns from Europe and is startled by the changes, we are given a fleeting glimpse of brick walls. The landscape becomes truly material only when George takes his final walk back to the Amberson house. The slums and factories we see then are incontrovertible: they were shot by Welles himself with a handheld camera in the streets of Los Angeles. The sequence, brief as it is, is a cold shower of social actuality—it suggests the sorts of urban subjects that Farm Security Administration photographers were shooting at the time the picture was being filmed—quite distinct from the view of life that has preceded it, filtered through the Ambersons’ wealth. George can see this reality only when he has lost everything. We’ll never be able to see exactly how Welles meant to employ this sudden reality in full context, since almost everything that follows it in the picture as we know it was shot by others, under orders from RKO management.

Given the protracted butchery to which the original film was subjected, the tacked-on final scene is appropriate in its own curdled way, since its happy march down a hospital corridor is redolent—in its lighting and decor no less than in its sentiments and their expression—of any number of B-movie finales of the time; we’ve undoubtedly seen that corridor before.

Rather like a runner winning a race on a broken ankle, The Magnificent Ambersons has managed to achieve and retain the status of a classic despite its mutilation. Viewers may make it all the way through—and have done so—without knowing or noticing any of it, because Welles’s rhythms are so powerful that they survive attempts at sabotage. By means of his deliberate pacing, his recurrent narration, his august surfaces, his extraordinary actors with their measured language and rigorous protocol, he situates the viewer in a time, a place, and a condition of life, managing the kind of deep immersion that is more often accomplished by the slow accretion of prose than by the staccato dynamism of cinema. He steeps us in a culture—beyond our reach but subcutaneously familiar—out of which a story arises, and each illuminates the other. It is “The Fall of the House of Usher,” with its gothic effects sublimated into set dressing, as if recounted by Anne Baxter’s Lucy Morgan with her mysterious smile, at once wise and feline.