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| The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) | |
| The Story (continued)
[The following scene, in which George speaks with Isabel about Eugene's letter, is the first time in the film that original footage is mixed with re-shot and re-written material.] After reading Eugene's letter, George enters his mother's room and taunts her with his reaction to it, mocking Eugene's reassuring feeling that they shouldn't care about gossip and what cruel tongues say: "Fair! Fair when he says that he and you don't care what people say?" He also can't fathom gossips speaking the obvious truth that she has always loved Eugene. As an aspiring "Amberson" himself, he is appalled by her acceptance of Eugene's love:
With tenderness and compassion, Isabel responds with her motherly nature, comforting and forgiving George's arrogance and contemptuousness. In a momentous decision, she postpones any further romance with Eugene by renouncing him and siding with her oedipal son. She tells George as she cradles his head in her hands that they will take an extended European tour to forget their troubles: "We'll go away for a while, you and I." The next day, as George is about to leave for the trip with his mother, he accidentally meets Lucy, by chance, on the street. At this point, Lucy is unaware of the conflict between George and Eugene, although she reminds him of their previous quarrel about the direction of their lives during a buggy ride. While they promenade along the main boardwalk of the town in another of the film's long takes, [they stroll in front of many shops, and also by the Bijou movie house marquee where Jack Holt, Tim Holt's father, is starring in a western titled The Revenge], he bluntly and hesitantly tells her that he is imminently departing for a world trip. As they step into the sunlight at a street corner, he hints that their relationship might die right there with his break-away - he hopes that she will show some emotion for him - but his theatricality doesn't affect her:
Although she has faced his goodbye with a fixed smile unbetrayed by sadness, and she has wished him well: "I do hope you have the most splendid trip," once George has left, her face reveals a deep sadness and her eyes fill with tears [the shot of her face, in soft-focus closeup, was inserted inappropriately by RKO]. She faints in a nearby chemist's shop after asking for a glass of water and a few drops of aromatic spirits of ammonia. [A major scene involving the decline of the Ambersons has been removed at this point. In other excised film footage, Jack had warned George of the peril to Isabel's health if she traveled, but he ignored it and went abroad anyway.] Several months later in a reception room at Eugene's mansion, in a scene that now illustrates Eugene's prosperous ascendancy (the room is lit by electricity), Jack pays a visit to Lucy and her father after a trip abroad to visit Isabel and George. During the after-dinner conversation, Eugene sits prominently in a high-backed, wing chair, as a fire burns behind him in the chimney's fireplace. Lucy sits to the right with her facial expression turned away from the camera. In a long continuous and fixed-camera take with deep focus typical of Welles, Jack reveals - to the differing perspectives of father and daughter - that he saw Isabel, who "isn't particularly well" and "ought to be in a wheelchair." In his account, she seemed cheerful but was "short of breath" and her health was deteriorating. Jack expresses his view about Isabel returning home: "I told her I thought she ought to make Georgie let her come home," but "she doesn't urge it" since George appears to be enjoying life in Europe: "George seems to like the life there in his grand, gloomy and peculiar way." Wasting away, Isabel should come home, but George doesn't let it happen:
And then Isabel returns from abroad, but she is so frail and ill that she has to be assisted from the railway station into a waiting carriage. As the horse-drawn carriage moves toward town, and diagonal shadows flash across her, Jack and George strain to hear her withdrawn voice:
[Another scene was cut in which the Amberson family is upstairs discussing the state of Isabel's health.] Eugene comes calling to see Isabel, [another scene re-shot and re-written] and again, the insensitive George immediately refuses entrance. Although Eugene insists on seeing her, both Fanny (in tears) and Jack gently reinforce the doctor's recommendation that she be visited later. It is ultimately a great injustice to Eugene - he is prevented from seeing her just as she is about to die. In a beautifully-captured close-up image, George watches as Eugene departs the mansion for the last time. His determined face is reflected in the window pane from Isabel's familiar vantage point - he replaces her image and imposes his own will. [It is one of the most famous shots in the original film.] A nurse hovers in the background between dark pillars and ominous music plays. In Isabel's death-bed farewell scene, George enters his mother's dimly-lit room. Her face is covered with a complex spider-web pattern of lighting from the window's lace curtain - another superb cinematographic effect. The web is symbolically one of frustration, pride, and conflicting loves from which she was never able to free herself. Delirious, she shows tender concern for her son, even though she is the one who is dying:
And then she inquires whether Eugene and Lucy know that they have returned from their trip abroad. She pointedly asks: "Has he asked about me?" Learning that Eugene was there and left, she sighs poignantly: "I would have liked to have seen him. Just once." To symbolize the darkness of death taking her, the shade is pulled down over the lace curtain and the web patterns becomes dark over Isabel's face. Nearby, Major Amberson restlessly reclines fully clothed in a near-death stupor himself in George's bed. (George's Harvard banner is above it.) Isabel's death occurs off-screen in a simple, emotionally-effective scene. In desperate anguish after the death, Fanny rushes in and embraces George tightly: "She loved you. She loved you." An abrupt transition moves into the haunting scene of Major Amberson's own death. [It is not immediately after Isabel's death, but at some unspecified time in the future when affairs of the estate are being decided.] A dying fire flickers on a close-up of his pensive, staring face (toward the camera) as he ponders his own death and the here-after - in a long camera take. Welles softly narrates from Booth Tarkington's words:
The Major is too far senile to answer Jack's (off-screen) complex probate and estate questions concerning the deed to the house. [The Major leaves no deeds to his remaining property, and the mansion itself is sold off, and later subdivided into a boarding house.] In a rambling, incoherent speech (again from Tarkington), the old Major disjointedly muses on the source of life:
When the light fades, his voice grows silent, the screen turns slowly to black, and his life ends. [The next scene is also some time in the future. Footage is missing of Jack borrowing money from George to make his trip. He will use his past Congressional position to secure a consulship somewhere overseas.] In a farewell scene at the railroad station before a column and a railroad bench and in front of the great inside dome, Uncle Jack leaves George to seek a new job, attempting to earn some money to bolster the sagging Amberson finances - now busted. Jack identifies them as "two gentlemen of elegant appearance in a state of bustitude." In a very economical scene, he both manages to reminisce about a goodbye to a young girl he once knew (in Tarkington's words), and to ambivalently praise and blame George with chastening words:
[The following garden scene was originally intended to come after the scene of Fanny's final hysteria.] In a lyrical garden scene [faithful to Tarkington's novel], Lucy (with Eugene) recounts an Indian folk tale (fabricated by her?) about a detestable Indian chief sent into exile - the legend obviously parallels the story of the life of George Amberson. As they walk toward the camera between tall weeping willow trees, and orchestral garden music plays, Eugene knocks his pipe against the palm of his hand. She has resigned herself to not marrying George because of his vindictiveness. Instead, she will remain in her garden and see to her father's every wish, forgetting the name of the Indian chief and George's name as well:
In the now dim, deserted and changed Amberson house in the empty kitchen [in a scene partially re-shot to replace the original film and spliced together with the original Cortez/Welles film], George and Fanny discuss the sorry state of their finances and how much they'll need to live:
After admitting her foolish investment of her small inheritance from Wilbur in an auto headlight factory, she worries whether Georgie will abandon her, and then slumps helplessly against the boiler and slides to the floor:
Knowing that both of them are equally destitute and penniless, George demands that she get up from her defeated, child-like position. Tormented and grief-stricken, she remains down and complains about how her own penny-pinching efforts to provide have failed miserably:
Again, George commands her to get up and not sit there with her back against the boiler, but she becomes hysterical:
And then in a brilliantly-choreographed, elaborate tracking dolly shot moving through four rooms, they continue to argue. They move backward from the cold boiler out the kitchen door and through the reception hall (past the circular staircase) and into the boarded-up front parlor - where sheets shroud the furniture in the otherwise empty living room. As George shakes her to end her maniacal, hysterical laughter, he learns she has picked out boarding house accommodations for them that cost $36 a month and $22.50 for dinner. Sacrificially, George must abandon not only the Amberson mansion but also his law-firm position and his law career to earn money - something unthinkable years earlier - so that he can support himself and his spinster aunt. In the offices of his employer Benson, George decides on a desperate alternative - he will take a higher-paying position as a dynamiter:
Feeling some of the responsibility, Benson promises to help George find a suitable job as a dynamiter: "You certainly are the most practical young man I ever met." As George walks home for the last time, images of the new machine age and the changed way of life in the growing industrialized city are seen from George's perspective. As the town grows, it also dies, "befouled" with large buildings, telegraph poles and lines, pipelines, electric streetcar wires, steel girders, factory windows, deserted homes in the central part of the city, and "New Hope Apartment For Rent" signs. Welles' voice-over narrates and then the screen goes black:
At the foot of the bed where his mother died, in a bedroom now dark and depressing, George kneels to say a final prayer and farewell to his long-departed mother: "God, forgive me." The narration begins again, quietly. The eagerly-awaited fall (when he gets his 'come-uppance') of Georgie Amberson Minafer passes almost unnoticed, as his mother dies after he has suffered the loss of Lucy's love. The Ambersons (and most definitely the Minafers) are already a forgotten family:
A clanging bell presages an automobile accident shortly afterwards - a third tragedy. George is almost killed - literally and physically run over by an automobile (made by Eugene's company?) - a machine that he had earlier called "a useless nuisance." At the accident scene, as George's form is carried away on a stretcher [never to be seen again in the film], one of the policemen remarks: "It's wonderful the damage one of these little machines can do. You'd never believe it." A headline in the city's newspaper, The Indianapolis Daily Inquirer announces a bold headline: "AUTO CASUALTIES MOUNT." [Two 'inside' jokes refer to Citizen Kane (1941) - the paper is a Kane Empire newspaper, and the left column article entitled "Stage Views" is written by Jed Leland, a character played by Joseph Cotten in the film.] Another newspaper column titled TODAY'S TOLL describes George's crippling accident - abbreviating his name to mere initials: "Serious Accident - G. A. Minafer, Akers Chemical Co., both legs broken." In his study, Eugene reads about the accident in the paper and then contemplates whether he will respond to the notice. He doesn't answer Lucy's question: "What are you going to do, Papa?" She decides to visit the pauperized George in the hospital after he was brought down by the street accident: "I'm going to him. You coming, father?" and then she strides out of the frame. Eugene is resigned to join her and rises after he hears the door shut. Eugene, Lucy and George are ultimately reconciled in the hospital. At last, outside George's hospital room and as they walk down the corridor in a long traveling shot, Eugene [a representative of the machine age] is able to confide to Fanny that George had asked for forgiveness from him.
Despite George's own character faults, it is understood that he will be redeemed. Eugene will take care of the disabled George. Through Eugene, Isabel would love her own son, enabling Eugene to feel close and remain faithful to the memory of his true love, Isabel. Fanny will have nothing to fear, now that Isabel is dead, and she smiles indulgently as they both look straight ahead and walk toward the camera. Fulfilled, Eugene tells Fanny of his conviction that he is "true at last" to his true love - Isabel:
The reconciliation scene ends on a close-up of Fanny's face wearing a beatific, rejoicing smile and looking upward toward heaven [toward Isabel in the spiritual world], before it fades to black from a view of the empty, barren hospital corridor. Violins swell with sentimentality on the soundtrack. [The last sugar-coated scene in the hospital in the film's happy, uplifting conclusion has been much criticized as the ultimate insult toward Welles and the original film. The scene was re-written and re-directed, and then tacked onto the film. In the original film's ending (footage that was destroyed), Eugene visited an aging, bitter Fanny in her sparse boarding room house/old folks' home and told her about his hospital visit to George and their reconciliation, as she rocked back and forth in a creaking chair and listened to a phonograph record playing in the background.] In the final, imaginative credits sequence, Orson Welles returns in voice-over, off-stage. In the darkness and then with a display of the book, his voice has the final words:
He re-introduces the various major contributors of the crew (and then cast) by their names (and trademarks):
The final image of the film is a closeup of a microphone that hangs from a boom in space - as Welles intones about his own triple contribution (as screenwriter, director, and producer):
The boom and microphone swing up and away into a shaft of light coming through a skylight in the ceiling. |
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Midway through the voice-over, the scene dissolves
to the room where Isabel is reading the letter. Obviously, the letter
is deeply affecting her - her face is saddened, and her eyes are
luminous with tears. She rises and moves in the darkness toward the
camera and small shafts of light. Her eyes reflect light in a difficult-to-achieve
effect - a marvelous example of Stanley Cortez' cinematography.