The Magnificent Ambersons

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) is a film that I have seen, perhaps, 10 times.  Like all classics, the contours of the picture change imperceptibly with each viewing.  The movie that I watch now on Criterion's new Blu-Ray is different from the picture that I first saw on late-night TV in 1970 transected by more than a dozen commercials.  At 64, I'm more patient, I think, and more attentive to detail -- when I was 16, the movie seemed disappointing after the razzle-dazzle of Citizen Kane.  It now seems to me that Citizen Kane with its snarky subtext about William Randolph Hearst and it's flashy, expressionistic camera-work is very much a masculine movie -- a provocation, something, in fact, like a challenge to duel.  The film is defiant and satirical, a collage of taunts.  The Magnificent Ambersons is quieter, more resigned, and much more subtle-- it is very much a melodrama, a film designed for women and, I think,Welles intended the movie as an example of a woman's picture, a three-hankie weeper.  It's probably unwise, and, certainly, problematic to use gender to characterize films in this way, but Welles' first two movies seem constructed to contrast with one another -- Citizen Kane is an extroverted challenge to the film industry and contemporary media; Ambersons is introverted, restrained, and elliptical, a picture in which a single luminous close-up of the leading lady provides the impetus for the tragedy that envelopes the characters.  Kane is aggressive; Ambersons seems weirdly passive -- in  a late scene, one of the sexually thwarted heroines, Lucy Morgan (Ann Baxter) accepts her lonely, blighted life by improvising in the classic American grain an Indian legend:  the characters belong to the tribe of those "who couldn't help themselves."  Kane spans the globe, or, at least, the American part of the world -- the producers of the film within the film, the newsreel, travel all around the country to seek clues about the great man.  Ambersons is set almost entirely within a crumbling Gothic mansion in a unnamed, but mundane Midwestern City -- a place like Welles' hometown Kenosha, Wisconsin, or Booth Tarkington's Indianapolis.  Both films chart the trajectory from youthful ambition and joy to middle-aged or, even, elderly misery.  The great man in Kane is divided into a trio of women in The Magnificent Ambersons, two of them destroyed by pride and the third simply bypassed by life (someone says that it's not a good vocation to be "the (maiden) Aunt" like poor Fanny).  Kane shows us how men go wrong and fail; Ambersons turns this malign light on women.  Welles is never far from Shakespeare and The Magnificent Ambersons resembles, curiously enough, Hamlet -- the monstrous Georgie Minafer is like the melancholy Prince of the Danes:  his quasi-incestuous desire to protect his mother and defend her reputation, a purely narcissistic endeavor since he perceives any slight to her as a slight to him, destroys poor Gertrude (in this case Isabel Amberson Minafer).  The castle of Elsinore is here the dark, immense mansion in Indianapolis.  Georgie's paralysis is like that of Hamlet -- he can't act accept destructively.  But, unlike Shakespeare's tragic melodrama, The Magnificent Ambersons is not characterized by atrocious acts -- rather, its tragedy arises from what doesn't happen, from desires that are thwarted and acts that go uncommitted.  Isabel's pride causes her to reject Gene's courtship; instead of marrying the man she loved, she marries another.  Later, Isabel's "perfect and selfless motherhood" keeps her from happiness -- she rejects Gene again, this time at the behest of the viciously protective, Georgie.  The film is built from a number of long, tense scenes, that are about repression -- things that are desired but that can't be achieved or, even, in some cases named.  (In this way, the film also contrasts with Citizen Kane and, even, in a way seems to rebuke the earlier masterpiece -- Welles uses very long takes with minimal camera movement:  the impression, even when the camera moves, is often one of profound stillness.  Welles' rejection of the showy editing in Kane permits a more unreserved and intense focus on the acting.)  The paradigm sequence in the film is a long scene in which Georgie Minafer and Lucie Morgan, the woman whom he thinks he loves (she really loves him) promenade along Main Street -- the camera tracks along the two as they walk giving the impression of a static two-shot although the background changes as they stroll alongside the camera.  The girl chatters nervously with a fixed smile about Georgie's tour of Europe -- he wants her to beg him not to go, but she is too proud to humble herself in this way and so she counters his increasingly hysterical proclamations that he is leaving town with banal chitchat and an eerie masklike smile frozen on her face.  After Georgie leaves, she goes into a drugstore, asks for aromatic spirits, and, then, faints dead away on the floor -- such is the disastrous price of pride. 

Welles' constructs The Magnificent Ambersons like a Swiss clockmaker.  Everything fits into place, an effect that makes the travesty of the studio-imposed ending more calamitous.  The first half-hour of the film is like a sonnet, tiny details all exquisitely arrayed to establish different systems of meaning.  The chorus of townspeople say that the Amberson mansion was constructed with $60,000 dollars worth of woodwork -- throughout the film, we see that woodwork, particularly in the form of mighty coffered ceilings and overhead balustrades shaped like ship's prows and fantastical spikes aimed down over thresholds -- the woodwork alone seems to be an elaborate engine for doom and destruction.  The emphasis on street cars and carriages in the opening scenes establishes a framework that will make meaningful later the film's theme about the coming of automobiles and how cars will destroy the genteel life that the Ambersons enjoyed.  Welles sets the camera very close to the ground to show Gene and his friends running toward the Amberson mansion when the hero, a little drunk and excited, slips and falls flat on his bass viol, destroying the instrument and, thus, ruining the serenade planned for under Isabel's window.  This shot, startling with respect to its unusual camera angle and very deep focus (most of the image is the dark night sky) is ostentatiously significant -- it's a sign that something important is about to happen.  And the next shot is one of Welles' boldest inventions:  we see Isabel at her window, bathed in soft, but bright white light -- her face is contorted with anger when she sees that her beaux has fallen on his face, crushing his bass fiddle, shaming himself and (by the narrative's peculiar calculus) shaming her as well.  The audacity of this shot remains breathtaking in its narrative context:  we haven't seen Isabel yet and have no idea who she is.  The spatial relationship between Isabel, in her bedroom window, and the debacle on her lawn is not established -- this is because the shot, a inserted close-up coming out of nowhere, signifies that there is no relationship between the young man and the woman and, in fact, no relationship is even imaginable -- we don't know where they stand with respect to one another.  (Isabel seems curiously old in this shot -- we might mistake her for the matronly figure that she becomes later in the film.  In this regard, the shot also foreshadows the action that dominate the film:  Isabel's renunciation of love ostensibly for maternal purposes, so that she can be a good mother to her bully of a son, Georgie.)  The startling shot of Isabel, intruding into the picture like a lightning bolt, is memorable but we don't know what it means or portends.  Only as the film unfolds across the next hour will we learn the entire and devastating significance of this sequence, which in the context of the film's first ten minutes, can be scarcely deciphered at all. 

When I was a boy, Agnes Moorhead played the witch Endora on the Tv sit-com Bewitched.  Endora was a curious figure, feline, glamorous, and too my eyes for seductive than Elizabeth Montgomery, the actress playing the cute suburban housewife and witch.  I sensed that Agnes Moorhead had charisma, presence of a certain kind that I could not quite  articulate.  Moorhead's performance as Aunt Fanny in The Magnficent Ambersons is the film's anchor and she embodies in the most overt way the price that the characters pay for their destructive pride.  Her scenes with the Georgie are among the most terrifying in American film -- a sequence in which she collapses to the floor with her back to a boiler and, then, proclaims that the boiler is cold because the hot water has been shut-off to the mansion (and, then, cries out that she wishes that the boiler were hot enough to scald her) is one of the most excoriating things ever put on film.  (In its original version, cut after the test audience in Pomona, Ca. responded with derision, Moorhead's acting is said to have been even more terrifying.  And, if we are affected by this sequence, so is the selfish Georgie Minafer.  His love for his mother, indistinguishable from the most grandiose self-love, has smothered her.  But Georgie recognizes genuine obligations to Aunt Fanny, subjecting himself to the humiliation of entering the work place as a common laborer in a dynamite (!) factory in order to save her from homelessness -- unable to love his own mother except in the most destructive manner, Georgie seems to redeem himself by his sacrifice for Aunt Fanny.  In the beginning of the film, an old gossip says that everyone wants to see the arrogant bully, Georgie Minafer, get his comeuppance.  In Welles domestic or bourgeois tragedy no one is poisoned and no one stabbed -- "comeuppance" is the term used for the film's tragic denouement, a concept entirely appropriate to the film's introversion.  And, further, its a "comeuppance" that isn't showy or, even, visible to anyone but the film's audience -- everyone else had forgotten that the magnificent Ambersons even existed.