At the End of the Street in the Shadow Page 6
The life cycle of newspapers
Kane’s choice of gaslight as a model for the newspaper is visionary. It departs from Hearst’s cynical, self-interested reinvention of democracy as ‘government by newspaper’. Kane’s comparison with gaslight implies a reimagining of the newspaper as an essential utility within the public infrastructure. Various shots, scattered across the film and taken from different periods of the city’s history, disjointedly depict the stages of newspaper production and distribution through the built urban spaces of New York City. The commodity is news, but the material commodity is paper: we see giant rolls in Kane’s paper mills, the work of typesetters and compositors, the printing presses, bound stacks of finished papers, a newsboy on a corner,29 readers in public spaces, and finally discarded pages in the dirty streets. Welles several times incorporates paper detritus into his mise-en-scène, including the crushed campaign streamers after Kane’s electoral defeat in 1916 (paper detritus is a symbolic element in several subsequent films, notably Touch of Evil). Under Kane’s control, newspapers are flushed through the city as daily vehicles for his megalomania.
* * *
Hearst was elected to Congress for a single term as representative of New York’s 11th District in 1903. After that he campaigned for sympathetic figures such as Mayor Hylan.30 Kane’s political campaign for state governor in 1916 backfires with the exposure of his love affair with Susan Alexander. Through with the democratic political process, awash in self-pity after his abandonment by the people, he attempts to remake the urban landscape in the image of his own vanity. His first step is to construct the $3 million Chicago Municipal Opera House as a venue for Susan’s disastrous opera debut. Welles makes an economical choice: the only exterior glimpse is an architectural drawing in the style of the working drawings Perry Ferguson’s department had created.
The Chicago Municipal Opera House in Citizen Kane
Ultimately Kane retreats from the city to the Florida Gulf Coast, where he constructs his never-finished estate, Xanadu: as Leland says, “He was disappointed in the world so he built one of his own, an absolute monarchy. Something bigger than an opera house, anyway.”
NOTES
1 Scott Simmon, ‘Too Much Johnson in Context’, National Film Preservation Foundation, 2014, 2, at http://www.filmpreservation.org/userfiles/image/preserved-films/TMJ-press-photos/TMJ-workprint-essay.pdf (accessed 7 June 2015).
2 Simmons, ‘Too Much Johnson in Context’, 2.
3 Frank Brady, Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles (New York: Scribner’s, 1989), 147.
4 McBride, ‘Too Much Johnson: Recovering Orson Welles’s Dream of Early Cinema’.
5 The Too Much Johnson sequences never graduated beyond the editing room. They were not screened even during the initial theatrical production in 1938, and the workprint was thought destroyed in a fire at Welles’s house outside Madrid in August 1970. In one of the miracles of film archaeology, Welles’s nitrate workprint was rediscovered in an Italian warehouse, identified definitively in 2012, and restored and screened to acclaim in 2013. See Simmons, ‘Too Much Johnson in Context’, 1.
6 Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 40.
7 Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 66–72.
8 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 51.
9 James Naremore, ‘Style and Meaning in Citizen Kane’, in Naremore (ed.), Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: A Casebook, 132.
10 Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 65.
11 Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 87–99.
12 See Pauline Kael, ‘Raising Kane’, introduction to The Citizen Kane Book (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).
13 Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 81, 98, 117, 155n12.
14 Orson Welles, ‘Orson Welles on His Purpose in Making Citizen Kane’, in Ronald Gottesman (ed.), Perspectives on Citizen Kane (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), 23–5.
15 Proctor, William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 4–7, 49, 76, 77, 138, 142.
16 Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema, 329, 335.
17 James Naremore, ‘Introduction’, in Naremore (ed.), Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: A Casebook, 9.
18 Proctor, William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 43.
19 Ben Proctor, William Randolph Hearst: The Later Years, 1911–1951 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 247–8.
20 Ferdinand Lundberg, Imperial Hearst: A Social Biography (New York: Modern Library, 1936), 196.
21 See Naremore, ‘Introduction’, in Naremore (ed.), Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: A Casebook, 9–11; and Lundberg, Imperial Hearst, 174–80.
22 Carringer, ‘The Scripts of Citizen Kane’, 88–9.
23 Naremore, ‘Style and Meaning in Citizen Kane’, 153–4.
24 Proctor, William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 146–8, 154.
25 Zachary M. Schrag suggests in both Hearst and Hylan “a sincere and progressive hostility towards monopolies with a demagogic willingness to oversimplify economics for the sake of getting votes”. See Schrag, ‘“The Bus Is Young and Honest”: Transportation Politics, Technical Choice, and the Motorization of Manhattan Surface Transit, 1919–1936’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 41, No. 1, January 2000, 51–79.
26 Welles and Mankiewicz, Citizen Kane ‘3rd Revised Final’, 10.
27 Welles and Mankiewicz, Citizen Kane ‘3rd Revised Final’, 9.
28 Proctor, William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 112, 137, 148.
29 Admittedly the only shot of a newsboy in Citizen Kane is of one selling the rival Chronicle.
30 Proctor, William Randolph Hearst: The Later Years, 62.
CHAPTER 3
THE DARKENING MIDLAND
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
It lives on as the truest, cruelest picture of the growth of the Middle West and the liveliest portrait left to us of the people who made it grow. It’s better than a good book.
– Orson Welles1
None other of Orson Welles’s films so explicitly concerns the transformation of a city as The Magnificent Ambersons. For his second feature production, Welles was again able to exploit RKO’s studio resources to reimagine American urban history on screen. This time a much larger percentage of the budget was devoted to the construction of elaborate and spatially comprehensive sets.2 He worked with a new art director and cinematographer, respectively Mark-Lee Kirk and Stanley Cortez, and although the results were spectacular, the collaboration proved a less happy experience for Welles than the Kane collaboration with Ferguson and Toland. He eventually fired Cortez, supposedly for slowness, and the film went substantially over budget.3
Welles had typically loaded himself with projects following the May 1941 release of Citizen Kane. He’d already adapted Arthur Calder-Marshall’s recent thriller The Way to Santiago, and had commissioned draft scripts for segments of his gestating anthology film It’s All True. In the summer, at RKO’s request, Welles and Joseph Cotten co-wrote an adaptation of Eric Ambler’s thriller Journey into Fear. Welles later denied he was ever going to direct that film, but it seems to have been his original plan.4 He was also developing a script based on the case of the French serial wife-murderer Henri Désiré Landru that later became Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947). In September ‘My Friend Bonito’, an episode of It’s All True, began production in Mexico under the supervisory direction of Norman Forster. Welles had visited Mexico briefly that month before the shoot and intended to share a co-directing credit with Foster.5 From 15 September he produced, directed, and starred in The Orson Welles Show, a weekly CBS radio variety programme.
Welles had already adapted Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) for a 1939 Campbell Playhouse radio broadcast. Welles’s final script for the film adaptation was dated 7 October 1941, three weeks before the commencement of production. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December changed Welles’s priorities and forced him to re-evaluate his current film commitments. Nelson Rockefeller, who he
aded the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) under President Roosevelt, asked Welles to travel to South America in early February as a Good Will Ambassador for the Good Neighbor Policy. Rockefeller was also a stockholder on the RKO board of directors. In response to a request from the Brazilian government, the OCIAA invited Welles to film Rio de Janeiro’s 1942 Carnaval. Welles decided to incorporate this mooted Carnaval documentary into his evolving It’s All True, which now obtained United States government co-sponsorship, with the OCIAA guaranteeing $300,000 against any RKO losses. Welles would work in South America without a salary, although his expenses would be paid. The idea was to strengthen Pan-American unity against fascism.6
Rio’s Carnaval would start on 8 February, so Welles had to finish his Hollywood work ahead of schedule. Norman Foster was brought back to the United States just before Christmas, which forever postponed completion of ‘My Friend Bonito’. He was assigned to direct Journey into Fear starting 6 January. Welles performed his supporting role as Colonel Haki at night while continuing to film on The Magnificent Ambersons by day.
Principal photography of Ambersons wrapped on 22 January, with a few additional shots made in the days before Welles left Hollywood on 2 February. For three days in Miami, with the clock ticking down to his departure to Brazil, he worked on post-production with editor Robert Wise. The studio agreed to send Wise to Brazil to work on the film with Welles, but this proved impossible during wartime.7
On 11 March Wise sent a 131-minute print of Ambersons to Rio de Janeiro.8 A typed cutting continuity of this lost version – a shot-by-shot transcription of the editing – was made at RKO on 12 March.9 The continuity has survived as the most detailed record of the longest version of the film before it was altered, partially reshot, and progressively shortened by RKO.
Whereas Kane uses a multiple flashback structure to dance across its seventy years of history, the action of The Magnificent Ambersons progresses chronologically from 1885 to 1912, with a narrator – Welles himself – looking back from the vantage of a modernity positioned somewhere between 1918 and 1942. Like Tarkington’s, Welles’s narrator makes a direct identification with the audience.
The 131-minute version begins in 1884 when Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), experimenter in automobiles, embarrasses himself attempting to woo Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello) with a serenade: he falls drunkenly through his bass viol under her window. Isabel’s fragile sense of propriety is offended and she marries instead the dull Wilbur Minafer (Don Dillaway). The town gossip predicts the offspring of this loveless marriage will be the “worst spoiled lot of children this town will ever see”. As it turns out, there is only one child, a “princely terror” named George Amberson Minafer. George’s childhood fights with the townsfolk are gently tolerated by his weak parents. In 1902 George (Tim Holt) returns from school and demonstrates his bullying arrogance in retaking leadership of the ‘Friends of the Ace’ society.
Two years later the Ambersons host a Christmastide ball in honour of George, home from his sophomore year at college. At the ball Isabel is reunited with Eugene, by now a successful businessman in the emerging automobile industry. A widower, he introduces his pretty daughter, Lucy (Anne Baxter). Eugene and Isabel are chastely entranced with one another, and George in turn attempts to court Lucy, all the while condescending to her father and his involvement in automobiles.
Wilbur dies shortly after Christmas. His spinster sister Fanny (Agnes Moorehead), who lives with the Ambersons, mourns both her brother and her lost chance with Eugene now that Isabel is free. The next year Fanny is dismayed by Isabel’s closeness with Eugene. George and Isabel’s brother Jack (Ray Collins) tease that Eugene is really scheming for Fanny’s hand and drive her to tears. Meanwhile, the patriarch, Major Amberson (Richard Bennett), has begun to subdivide the grounds of his estate, to his grandson George’s horror and bewilderment.
Lucy refuses to accept George’s proposal of marriage because of his disdain for work and lack of ambition. George interprets this as the imposition of her father’s values, and later fantasises that Lucy grovels in apology to him and renounces her father. During a dinner, George insults Eugene indirectly by dismissing the very invention of the automobile. Eugene is unruffled, ambivalent himself about the technology’s effects on civilisation.
Fanny approves of George’s attack on Eugene; she chooses to interpret it as a defence of his mother’s reputation against unseemly town gossip. The self-obsessed George has been ignorant of talk that the romance between Isabel and Eugene preceded Wilbur’s death – ignorant, it turns out, of any romance at all. Absurdly over-sensitive about his family’s reputation, George attacks Mrs Johnson, the town gossip, and is resolutely against his mother’s marriage to Eugene. He bars Eugene from visiting Isabel and demands she renounce her true love. Uncle Jack cannot persuade George to butt out. Isabel agrees to depart with her son for a long period abroad. When George farewells Lucy, she feigns cheerful ignorance of George’s manoeuvers.
In 1910 Jack Amberson relays the news to Eugene and Lucy that Isabel has fallen ill during her long absence. When Isabel returns to Indianapolis that year, she is close to death. George once again prevents Eugene from seeing her. She dies, followed shortly by her elderly father.
The Amberson finances are in disarray. Major Amberson died without having deeded the mansion to his children, and Jack and Aunt Fanny have each lost their own money investing in a headlamp company. In 1911 the remaining three must vacate the mansion. Jack departs by train to Washington to find a consulship that will see out his remaining days. As George walks home from the station, he is shocked by the ugly, empty, alien city. In the lonely mansion he begs forgiveness of his dead mother. Then Fanny hysterically reveals she is broke. In order to support Fanny’s upkeep at her preferred boarding house, George abandons a low-paid but respectable job at a law office to take an immediately lucrative job dealing with dangerous chemicals.
Meanwhile, Lucy has renounced romance and decided to live with her father. In 1912, George is hit by a car and laid up in hospital. Eugene hears the news while in his factory. We see him enter and leave the hospital, then proceed to Fanny’s boarding house. Eugene tells Fanny that George has asked for forgiveness. It also seems Lucy and George will now be married after all. Fanny is listless and disinterested. Eugene leaves the boarding house alone.10
* * *
This lost and longest version of The Magnificent Ambersons, which has become the Holy Grail for film lovers, can only be considered a provisional cut based on Welles’s instructions as of early March. In fact, before Welles had received his copy of this print, on which he intended to base his editorial responses, he had already requested the deletion of the long section spanning the years 1905 to 1911, probably in response to the studio’s complaints about the film’s length. The exile of George and Isabel would be replaced by a short new bridging scene to be directed by Wise: Isabel would die suddenly in 1905 after George’s refusal to give his blessing to her marriage. Welles obtained a print of Wise’s new scene before 25 March, when he wrote to his business manager, Jack Moss, to criticise its quality. He asked for Norman Foster to reshoot the scene.
Meanwhile, a different version running 110 minutes – three scenes had been removed at the request of George Schaefer – was prepared for a 17 March preview in Pomona, California. The film was presented as part of a double bill with a patriotic musical, The Fleet’s In, and a concluding in-person appearance by actor James Cagney. The audience’s comment cards in response to the Ambersons preview were mixed, although the negative comments and the general atmosphere discouraged RKO’s executives.11
A second preview in Pasadena on 20 March seems to have reverted to the 131-minute version. Despite the more enthusiastic audience reception, RKO maintained that the film needed substantial revision before release. Ultimately RKO, in the middle of an executive power struggle, relied upon Wise, Cotten, Moss, and first assistant director Freddie Fleck – all Welles associates now work
ing independently and counter to his instructions – to write and direct eleven minutes of replacement scenes. From afar Welles tried to retain authority, but RKO mostly ignored him. The final cut of the film – the only one to have survived – is a mere 88 minutes. Many of Welles’s surviving scenes were altered, shortened, or moved to different places within the film’s structure. Inferior new music by Roy Webb supplemented what remained of Bernard Herrmann’s score; the loyal and uncompromising Herrmann insisted his name be removed from the credits. The non-Welles elements only diminish the film’s dramatic power, coherence, and continuity. The film was approved for release and premiered in Welles’s absence on 10 July 1942, on a double bill with the slightly less ambitious Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost. By then Shaefer had been ousted from his position as studio head.12 His successor, Charles Koerner, ordered the destruction of Amberson’s outtakes later that year.13 The 131-minute print sent to Welles was left behind in Rio and languished for a time at Cinédia Studios. It was probably destroyed in line with RKO’s instructions around 1945.14
Ambersons – like all of Welles’s subsequent Hollywood films except for the two versions of Macbeth (1948 and 1950) – is impossible to consider a finished work by Orson Welles. But thanks to the investigative work of Peter Bogdanovich, Robert L. Carringer, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and others, extensive documentation about the longest version has been recovered and published. This research has drawn on the shooting script, the cutting continuity, still photographs, and frame enlargements from the cut sequences. Bernard Herrmann’s complete score manuscript also survived and has been re-recorded commercially.
Many of the cuts and alterations by RKO weakened the status of Ambersons as a city film. Mostly faithful to the Tarkington novel, the provisional 131-minute version maintained emphasis on the transformation of the material structures of Indianapolis amid the rise of the automobile. The RKO release version diminishes that emphasis. Fortunately Wise retained the dinner scene where the characters discuss the impact of automobile-based suburbanisation on real estate values in the old town centre, undoubtedly because it is a key moment in the dramatic conflict between George and Eugene. The film’s other reflective moments about the changing urban landscape were deemed least essential to the basic story of a wealthy family evaporating amid death and financial ruin.15