Magnificent Ambersons Radio Program

[Tony]

I listend to the Ambersons radio program tonight; it's really terrific; here are a few observations:

-Welles's narrator voice is higher than in 1942: he says a lot of the same lines, but with much less poetry.
- Ray Collins plays the uncle in exactly the same way as the movie, and just as brilliantly.(He also says a few of the Major's lines- as the latter is not part of the radio show).
-Walter Huston is brilliant and sensitive as Eugene Morgan
-Nan Sunderland is perfect as Isabel Amberson- stronger, in a way, than Dolores Costello in the film.
-Bernard Herrman's music is, perhaps for the only time in his career, undistinguished.
-Welles as Georgie has been lambasted, but he's not that bad- as he's the narrator also, he has to use a different voice, and a youthful, selfish and immature one.
-The BIG SHOCK: no Aunt Fanny: the character is just not part of the radio program, amazing, as her character ended up taking over the film.

I'd give it a 9 out of 10. :;):

[Glenn Anders]

Quite right, tony.

I would add only that this radio adaptation, truer to Tarkington's novel than to Welles' film, was the source that his people and the RKO executives back in Hollywood turned to for additional guidance in fashioning the release version of what we now call the Mercury Production of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS.

It saved them any time consuming analysis of the underlying currents and implications inherent in the logic of the human story Tarkington had put to paper. In those currents, in those implications, Welles found his story.

Glenn

[Tony]

Glenn:

Well said, as always! Still, one thing amazes me: the ending of the radio play is very similar to the movie, except that in the radio play Eugene writes "Isabel" a letter telling her of the hospital visit, whereas, of course, in the film he tells of this visit directly to Aunt Fanny. Welles, by focussing on Aunt Fanny to the point where in the final, original scene, she has almost taken over the film (even though the content of the conversation is roughly the same in all 3 versions), severely unbalances the film in a way that he did not unbalance the radio play, and one could argue that in returning the ending of the film to one very close to both the novel and the radio play, RKO and the Mercury staffers were rebalancing the drama, even if the execution of the redone final scene was clumsy. Perhaps Joe Cotten was feeling the same thing when he wrote Welles in Brazil:

JOSEPH COTTEN TO ORSON WELLES: March 28, 1942:

"Dear Orson:

...You have written doubtless the most faithful adaptation any book has ever had, and when I had finished reading it I had the same feeling I had when I read the book. When you read it, I had that same reaction only stronger. The picture on the screen seems to mean something else. It is filled with some deep though vague psychological significance that I think you never meant it to have. Dramatically, it is like a play full of wonderful, strong second acts all coming down on the same curtain line, all proving the same tragic point. Then suddenly someone appears on the apron and says the play is over without there having been enacted a concluding third act. The emotional impact in the script seems to have lost itself somewhere in the cold visual beauty before us and at the end there is definitely a feeling of dissatisfaction…"

Cotten here mentions the screenplay, which I believe was missing the final roominghouse scene; actually, I have never liked the idea of the scene, as it provides no emotional catharsisis for the audience. I've always felt RKO should have left the whole movie alone, except for the ending, and then gotten all the principles together for a grand reunion in the hospital room: Fanny's sitting there with George when Lucy comes in; George is ecstatic to see Lucy, of course, and then Eugene comes in: George asks him to forgive him, and he does. As the scene is playing out, we hear a voiceover of Eugene reading his letter to Isabel, how he has taken George under his wing to protect him; as we are listening to Eugene, Uncle Jack arrives, and the audience is given a great emotional lift to get them out of the dark psychological intensity they've been experiencing for more than 2 hours.

Now that would have been a great ending, topped off by Welles's very upbeat photo credits of the cast, as they are in the released version.

Actually, Welles suggested an equally upbeat ending himself:

ORSON WELLES TO JACK MOSS: April 2, 1942:

"To leave audience happy for AMBERSONS, remake cast credits as follows and in this order:

First, oval framed old fashioned picture, very authentic looking of Bennett in Civil War campaign hat. Second, live shot of Ray Collins, no insert, in elegant white ducks and hair whiter than normal seated on tropical veranda with ocean and waving palm tree behind him—Negro servant serving him second long cool drink. Third, Aggie blissfully and busily playing bridge with cronies in boarding house. Fourth, circular locket with authentic old fashioned picture of Costello in ringlets, looking very young. Fifth, Jo Cotten at French window closing watch case obviously containing Costello's picture tying in with previous shot; sound of car driving away. Jo turns, looks out window and waves. Sixth, Tim Holt and Anne Baxter in open car—Tim shifting gears but looking over shoulder—as he does this, Anne looking same direction and waving, they turn to each other then look forward both very happy and gay and attractive for fadeout. Then fade in mike shot for my closing lines as before."

Note that Welles wrote this just 5 days after receiving Cotten's criticism.

Actually, though, I think my ending would have worked better!

:;):

[Glenn Anders]

Dear tony: Somewhere else here, I have expressed my theory of what Welles, in princep, was attempting to accomplish in The MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. Briefly, I think he was trying to put on record his view of how women were regarded in America (and most of the World) during all the years leading up to the 1940's. They were seen, in a patriarchal society (not that much different from the Taliban) as either virgins, wives, or mothers. God help them (and their fathers), if lightning did not strike, and they became loose daughters, old maids, or whores. Widows were given a small dispensation, but divorcees were almost the worst of the worst. (Hence, in that time, divorce was almost non-existent, except for the very wealthy.)

Whether or not we are better off now after the sexual revolution, I can not say, but my view of CITIZEN KANE and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS is that Welles was creating (quick, before it melts) a pair of bookends for American Society, the yin and the yang for our existence. Men like Kane aspired to power and empire. Women like Aunt Fanny hoped for marriage, protection, and children. Personal pleasure and satisfaction has been really secondary during most of the American Experiment. In a small part, because of historical necessity.

So in that regard, tony, I profoundly disagree with your conclusions. In my view, Welles wrote that final scene, so at odds with Tarkington's Victorian sentimentalism, to show starkly that, through no fault of her own, Aunt Fanny had really fucked up! There might be regret for for Eugene, the successful businessman'; forgiveness for and a promise of Victorian married bliss for Georgie; even Central American political retirement for Uncle Jack, but it was the poor house for Aunt Fanny! Maybe, the "loony bin."

[Aside from the fact that the state mental hospitals have been closed down, the prisons expanded, and "self help" made a huge new market, what has fundamentally changed? Women will have to exercise their gender muscles soon or feminism will be revealed a sham, and it is Aunt Fannydom for many of them, whether or not they marry, no matter how many times they marry. (Though the divorce laws favor them, as long as they have children, especially children with environmental defects.)

Today, we call it the retirement home, but the process is similar, and tens of millions of American women (and men) better get ready for it because it is just around the corner, once the cost of our insane foreign policy, multi-national corporatism, and global warming kick in.

We are returning to the days of "The Robber Barons," who did the Ambersons in before they could grab the Big Brass Ring.

Orson Welles had seen an Adolph Hitler or a Benito Mussolini in our future; it was in the cards. Whatever his faults, he was driven out of his rightful place in the Arts mostly for that view. Neither the market place, the managers, nor the general public wanted to have their fantasies destroyed, not even in the middle of the atrocity of World War II.

Aunt Fanny, making her pies, is a Victorian symbol of what was to come, and what is coming to pass.

Glenn

[Roger Ryan]

Very interesting, Glenn! I would only add that Welles' boarding house ending would make more sense in the context of the complete film. The cut first veranda scene, following the factory tour and kitchen scene, clearly establishes a certain competition between Fanny and Isabel for Eugene's affections. Fanny knows in her heart that she and Eugene will never have an intimate relationship, but that possibility is dangled throughout the story almost as a cruel joke ("Have you danced with poor old Fanny yet, Gene?"). As a substitute for finding a suitable husband, Fanny seeks to become financially independent through investing in the headlight company.

In a quick series of events, Isabel dies, the headlight company goes bust and Fanny is forced to leave the mansion. Will Eugene forgive Fanny for preventing him from seeing Isabel on her deathbed and help her financially? Could he possibly see her in a romantic light now that Isabel is gone? The boarding house scene is the film's answer. Eugene feels an obligation to visit Fanny, but he ends up professing to her his undying love to the deceased Isabel. He is romantic to a fault, enough so that he doesn't seem to realize what an insult this is to Fanny. Meanwhile, Fanny herself appears inattentive to the line of thought Eugene is trying to pursue; she has moved on in a way and does not wish to share in Eugene's nostalgic sentiment.

In a sense, the re-shot hospital corrider scene achieves some of the same effect; a number of people have commented to me how cruel Eugene is being to Fanny by telling her of his fantasies of Isabel. The major difference in the revised ending is that Fanny appears unreasonably elated with Eugene's comments which is completely unmotivated. Welles' appropriately dark ending shows the distance between the two characters. In many ways, the story as filmed is about Eugene, Isabel and Fanny and their relationship to the other characters; the boarding house scene then becomes an appropriate comment on the three of them.

The idea of ending the film with Eugene, Lucy and Fanny in the hospital room with George is not a bad one (although I'd leave out Jack, that's one hobbitt too many if you catch my drift). It's certainly better than the radio play ending with a letter being written to a dead person (and I'm glad Welles left out the seance stuff, too), but maybe the best choice would have been a reconciliation scene between Eugene and George, then the closing boarding house scene. Tarkington's ending doesn't address the strange uncomfortable relationship between Eugene and Fanny established earlier in the novel; Welles' original film ending did.

[Tashman]

the yin and yang for our existence... Men like Kane... Women like Aunt Fanny

America's preferred yin and yang undoubtedly would have been THE PICKWICK PAPERS and SMILER WITH A KNIFE. W.C. Fields and Lucille Ball could then have been our representative man and woman, and Welles would have been a rich man...

One major argument in favor of AMBERSONS over KANE is that "women like Aunt Fanny" are inextricably tied up in the actual Aunt Fanny, and there is much more of her in the film than of "them." In Kane there may be too much of "men like Kane." Welles was a moralist, indeed, but he was also larger besides. To be only a moralist, whether or not in agreement with any of Glenn's assertions above, is to be somewhat small. And what Aunt Fanny (on the script page) really has to say to all those facing an impending Social Security bust is self-evident. She says nothing. Nothing, anyway, that she doesn't say to anyone anywhere at any time.

Also, pejoratively speaking, Tarkington always struck me as much more moralist than sentimentalist.

OW had seen an Adolph Hitler or Mussolini in our future; it was in the cards.

It may also be said, and said more truly, that OW did better than see fascists in his future. He saw them in his present. I can't say from having read it, but I believe SMILER WITH A KNIFE was some form of parable about a domestic dictator. I don't know at all what OW thought the likelihood of this fairy tale ever coming true was. But if anyone thinks it has come true, the comparison would be about as apt as to say that Industrial Age fathers were kindred spirits to the Taliban. But then that was said, wasn't it? It's a thought that can only betray, even as the loosest of analogies, a very poor eye for the telling detail. In the case of the Taliban the crucial thing would be neither Puritanism nor patriarchy. Nor would Welles have entertained any such confusion.

[Glenn Anders]

Roger Ryan: Thank you for your clarifying details. You are someone who always knows what he is talking about, especially when it comes to THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. I shall always be indebted to you for allowing me to see your reconstruction of the film.

Tashman: To properly describe any work of fine art, it is necessary to deal with several or more levels of meaning. I hope you will grant me that I was attempting to give cleanly only an interpretation of the sociological and moral aim of the film, not all of its cinematic, dramatic, characterizational and emotional implications, etc.

Of course, Aunt Fanny is one person! An individual!

If she (and the other characters, singly and in ensemble) were not, we would not be discussing THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. It would be a formulaic saga, populated by dry stereotypes. It would be simply the piece of pretty junk that the RKO hacks tried to make of it.

You do not seem to grasp the common enough extrapolation of a single human individual in Literature representing a larger group, whether it is Marlowe's Faust, Shakespeare's Falstaff, Flaubert's Emma Bovary, Miller's Willy Loman or Williams' Blanche Dubois (a modern Aunt Fanny, if a retrgrade one). They are individuals, YES, but they also represent their type, their social class, their gender, and their place in history.

In the period Aunt Fanny lived, when the poor houses were set up (a kind of early day Social Security, if you will, Tashman) during and after the great panics, she would clearly have represented a class of woman known as "old maids," no matter what qualities, admirable or otherwise, she possessed. Families kept rooms in their homes, often in the attic for their "old maids." And so, Fanny does represent that group of American women then, who would call themselves today, or at least agree to the title, "emancipated women."

The gains the latter group has made in the last hundred years are now about to be challenged.

For we do still live in a patriarchal society, Tashman, an embarrassed, hang dog one, it is true, but all the surly jokes, all the mean provisions men of power (our modern day Kanes, if you like) institute to diminish women, testify to that fact. For instance, why do women, in the broad American scheme of things, still make less than men when performing the same work? Why do men not have their testicles cut off when they are promiscuous, spread what used to be called "social diseases," or when they father bastards? Most of that weight still falls on women, not men, in the form of poverty, psychotherapy, incarceration, hysterectomies, abortions, etc. That's why Aunt Fanny, and women like her, had to be kept isolated, so that they would not prove an embarrassment should they commit a mistake, "make a mess."

That's why, in addition to the motivations Roger Ryan brings up, the final boarding house scene was so vital to Welles' conception of the true meaning of Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons. Not the sentimental ending the novelist fashioned to placate socially the rich friends he hung out with in the resorts of Kennebunkport, Maine, in his later years.

In the near future, American men and women are going to begin to see that the rudimentary guarantees instituted by administrations like those of Teddy Roosevelt and FDR have been nibbled away, and the funds which might have saved them, squandered. There will be many more modern Aunt Fanny's (most of them with children) than in the late 19th Century.

I would not call Tarkington a sentimentalist in parts of The Magnificent Ambersons. As the Wikipedia tells us: "It was the second volume in Tarkington's Growth trilogy, which traced the growth of the United States through the decline of the once-powerful and aristocratic Amberson family dynasty, contrasted against the rise of industrial tycoons and "new money" families in the economic boom years after the Civil War leading up to WWI." In other words the men who led to Charles Foster Kane, but he could never entirely escape the bad habits of sentimentality, which made him the runaway popular novelist of such charming blockbusters Mary's Neck and Penrod.

It was Welles' family acquaintance Tarkington's attempt to rise above sentimental popular entertainment in a couple of novels like THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS which attracted him to the property.

And I'm afraid, Tashman, to be blunt, you are dead wrong about Welles not seeing the rise of Fascism in America. He saw it all around him. His Faust, modern dress Julias Caesar, Danton's
Death, slews of radio plays like "His Honor the Mayor," CITIZEN KANE, THE STRANGER, THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, MR. ARKADIN, and THE TRIAL are all metaphors for what he saw as the coming of fascism to America. Ironically, that was one of the reasons why those allusions were cut from many of his films, why projects like Smiler with a Knife, and The Road to Santiago were nixxed by the financiers. It was why he put himself in danger in the gathering McCarthy Period by defending a Black war hero maimed by Southern police, and the Chicanos persecuted by the LA power structure.

I am not a literary critic, nor a social revolutionary, but I can see how things were, if only in restrospect. It is something we should all strive for.

Finally, along the same line, if you do not realize that in the case of the Taliban the crucial thing WAS Puritanism and patriarchy, you do not realize why we are on the brink of an unnecessary catastrophe. They wanted us out of their moral and social order, which kept women firmly in their grip. (Still does after we have brought "democracy" to Afghanistan.) A direct line can be drawn from the efficacy they found in their "reforms" and the convenience "Industrial Age Fathers" found in publicly enforcing "Victorian morality."

That was something about which Welles often spoke, often influenced his choice of material (such as his last project, a film of King Lear), how old main hold on to their power, especially over women, their last play thing, to the very last.

In the "big picture," true believers everywhere, whether they are fundamentalist Christians Orthodox Jews, Islamists, Fascists, Nazis, Stalinists, Corporatists, etc, tend to have similar agendas for their bretheren. And it is the Aunt Fanny's who are among the victims of these Citizen Kane's.

If you do not recognize that truth, Tashman, it is you who has "a very poor eye for the telling detail." Indeed, Welles would not have entertained that confusion. I suggest you study the excellent insights of Roger Ryan because, unless it disturbs Jeff, I find debating with you marvelous sport.

Glenn

[Tony]

Glenn: What you say is fascinating; I have never thought of Kane and Ambersons as deconsructing the American male and female at the time; this gives new meaning to Bazin's description of the 2 pictures as "The Great Dyptich". Although I still disagree with you on the ending, however, from a dramatic perspective; my politics are your politics, Glenn: we are sympatico on those issues, but I don't believe the story itself (I mean the screenplay) supports Welles's ending. Why? Because it is not the "Magnificent Fanny", it is "The Magnificent Ambersons", an ensemble piece: all the characters are important, with special focus being put on Georgie, Isabel, Fanny, Eugene and Lucy. I have never understood Welles's obsession with that final scene, which was not part of the book or the first screenplay; or rather, it was: it is essentially the same conversation that Tarkington has Eugene write in a letter to Isabel, and that RKO have Cotten say in the re-shot version. So it's the setting and the mood which audiences didn't like. So why did Welles set it there? I'm afraid quite possibly for the reasons you cite, Glenn.; it's just that I don't think it works dramatically. Why? Because Fanny, though doomed to be a spinster, has just hit the jackpot: Lucy has returned to Georgie, and they are to be married. Fanny's character always loved her Georgie, and she would be ecstatic to hear this news, but not just for her nephew's recovery and happiness and the probable nieces and nephews she herself would get to dote on: Georgie would get a job from Eugene, quite possibly take over the factory: Georgie is about to become wealthier than any Amberson has ever been: his ship has just come in: he finally gets the love of his life, and a fabulous career. George is now, or soon will be, a millionaire: no more lugging around dangerous explosives for him. And even more: Fanny will move into the mansion with them, of course! They're not going to leave her in that awful boarding house! And Jack can move back too, if he wants: there's plenty for everbody! George's and Fanny's ship has come in!

That's why this scene should be a cathartic release for the characters and the audience: finally, their world is balanced again: George has seen the light, grown up, forgiven Eugene, and Eugene has forgiven George, and he and Lucy can finally, after a 3 year delay, get married. This is a genuine happy ending, and I believe if Welles had followed this, even with the heavy 2 hour original in front of it , he might have had a money-maker: leave them smiling, but do it honestly, within the dramatic scope of the story- and this is what I think the audiences and Cotten and Schaefer tried to do, albeit clumsily.

So I agree with you politically, Glenn, but differ aesthetically!

Roger: Very interesting comments, but it was Welles and RKO who had Eugene speak his thoughts to Fanny; Tarkington had him speak them only to Isabel. However, I don't think Fanny would mind: Fanny loved Isabel, and she loves Georgie, and Lucy: they are family, now more than ever; soon, George and Lucy will move into a fabulous home, and Fanny will move in with them. When the children start coming, Fanny will get to spoil them. As for Eugene speaking to Fanny: Fanny knows Eugene always loved Isabel, and I think would think it beautiful that he would confide in her; after all, he's talking about taking care of Georgie, her pride and joy: she is George's surrogate mom now, and she will be the only "Granny" the kids know: her ship has come in, as has Lucy's, as has George's, as has Eugene's: this is two families finally, after a long delay, becoming one: this is cause for a major celebration, not a time for depression. Sorry, but on this one, I think Welles was mistaken.

[Glenn Anders]

Tony: We are discussing a scene few people ever saw. At least, Roger has had the experience of puting the words of the script into the mouths of actors. You are right, we do disagree.

Everything that I know about Welles, everything I can feel in my bones, everything I see in the script or discern in the stills, tells me that Welles did not want a "happy ending" for THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. The picture, like CITIZEN KANE, follows the arc of life from youthful exuberance to depression, regret and death. As CITIZEN KANE is, in a sense, the projected story of his life, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS is the story of his family. That's one reason Aunt Fanny is brought up front. She corresponds to his own aunt, who believed in magic, Christian Science, and suffered an extended death from cancer. There would be no happy ending for the Welles family, and there would be none realistically for the Ambersons.

And that fact dooms your theory, it seems to me, about a rejuvenated, happy Fanny. You overlook what, for some never explained reason, Welles recognized so profoundly, from early childhood; that age and the deterioration of our bodies rob us of stamina, even as our spirits may protest against the process, or pretend it does not affect us. Just as fascism or totalitarianism is his great fear in film for our political future, age and what it does to us haunts the characters of his many of his films in a personal yet universal way: in CITIZEN KANE, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, MR. ARKADIN, THE TRIAL, TOUCH OF EVIL, THE IMMORTAL STORY, F FOR FAKE, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND . . . .

It would be nice to accept your theory about Aunt Fanny, that she became happy, positive and content. My being craves to accept that hope for Fanny which you hold out. But all I know of life and Welles rejects it. Fanny, never an attractive woman, always a bit absurd (as those cruel, typically American Pomona audiences recognized), has grown older. She has been robbed of her youth, her home, her possibility for marriage, her savings, her sister (perhaps a relief?), the family and its social position in the town where she has spent her life, and of her already declassee status among women. No matter how you cut it, tony, a happy ending to this film, though possibly a crowd pleaser, would be a phony, a fantasy. As is the finished film we have.

My reading of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS is that it was ostensibly about a triangle of George, Isabel, and Eugene, but was actually a triangle of George, Fanny/Isabel and Eugene. When Isabel dies, it leaves her ghost Fanny, embittered, aging, broke, but still yearning for the love she never had. There can be no happy ending for Fanny.

I agree that you may be right about Cotten and Schaefer trying "clumsily" to patch up that ending in some respectable way.

But such an ending, no matter how skillfully done, could not have worked.

Finally, there is the evidence of Bernard Herrmann's score (to which the film was to be cut), which is a beautiful curve from the power and happiness of youth to tragedy and then, the long fall to depression and despair. Welles was not interested in jazzing up his audiences, but making them feel and think.

That's why we no longer have a masterpiece in THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS.

Glenn

[Tashman]

GLENN: I'm glad you say you enjoy debating, if that was meant sincerely, because it saves putting smiley faces in my posts, or some such thing, to try to indicate in a small space that the only thing being battled is the statements, not who is saying them. I'd hoped to inject something like a smiley face with mention of Fields and Lucy, so, in general, I hope the tone is never confused.

Not least because this is an "Old Time" Radio thread, we can and will spare Wellesnet a discussion of current politics; but that train was not started by me, it was only answered. People can read about the Taliban for themselves, if they haven't, and by doing so can have the added benefit of seeing what real similarities to fascism actually look like. But just to close this area for myself, you said:

if you do not realize that in the case of the Taliban the crucial thing WAS Puritanism and patriarchy, you do not realize why we are on the brink...

Some proportion or other of Puritanism and patriarchy are nearly universal to civilization. You might as well say that the crucial thing about Russia is weather and jobs. It's a kind of truth. It might mean something, but it would take a lot of work to sort out what. You were talking about the position of women. Now, I think anyone looking objectively would not be knocked out by the sameness in your earlier comparison but by the difference. A telling detail is not inhibition, or that two inhibitions both follow systems; that is not a direct line. But the methods and extent of the inhibiting regimes, those things would tell you something quite stark and decisive, and they simply drown out all relativism. It was not the fact of comparing something to the Taliban; go right ahead. It's what you chose to compare. If you wanted to compare it with the witch-burners among our ancestry, you might find a point there. If you wanted to compare it to the systematic violence and oppression against blacks in the South at one time, then again it would be very hard to disagree. But with Aunt Fanny, you're simply touching magnets together at the wrong ends. They seem alike, but go flying apart at just the crucial moment. (Note also that I said not a thing about ousting the Taliban, and that judging whether or not we are on the brink of anything was not my purpose.)

As to un-contemporary politics, I have to defend myself against something I didn't say. I did not say that Welles did not perceive fascism on the horizon in America. I did intentionally say, "I don't know at all what OW thought the likelihood of [a future domestic dictatorship] was." Which is true. I don't know what he thought. The germ that persisted in his thinking in the films you list (and in which I would swap MACBETH and TOUCH OF EVIL for CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT) can certainly be said to inspire moral vigilance--vigilance (though a word exhausted somewhat today in the mouths of politicians) against the chance of a modern dress Caesar or a Smiler with a Knife, etc., ever taking shape. If Welles thought they would take shape imminently, I think he was obviously wrong. But what's really important, and the only reason I reply to you on these things, is that I don't think the films need to be hammered out of shape by having this argument read onto them so forcefully.

Which brings us to the last personal point. Nothing said was intended against reading a piece of literature along several strata at once. It's next to impossible to do otherwise faced with anyone of merit let alone genius. But you almost make my point for me when you couple Willy Loman with Emma Bovary. There's no doubt that if Arthur Miller had written Kane or Ambersons, one would come away from the plays saying, "You know, the Aunt Fannys of the world really are stomped into submission by the Citizen Kanes of the world." And with that we would be done, because there would be nothing else to say. We'd have deduced the singular bathos and could go home. Here--and it's a little tricky spot we're in (because this concerns a movie that doesn't exist! and I'm also sadly bereft of having seen Roger Ryan's work), but as we're all more or less versed in the intended version--here it can be said that there would seem to be nothing at all simplistic about the end of Welles' movie. If anything it promised to be something near to frighteningly unsettling and ambiguous. All of which fragile mystery and layers of irony, I say, is crushed (even in its nonexistence) by any kind of pat summation as just quoted.

I've gone on too long on things secondary to the discussion. I'll have to come back to the specific reading of Ambersons that was meant to be under consideration, which I'm glad to see has been opened up a bit more. Respond in the meantime to the above if you like or if you think it would suit everyone else. You are also right, Glenn, that Roger's summation of the context supporting the boarding house scene is the picture of clarity.

[Tony]

Glenn: I'm not arguing that Welles wasn't a realist, or possibly a pessimist; what I am arguing is that the structure of Tarkington's story demands his ending- a happy one. Not purely happy, but relatively happy. And that Welles used Tarkington's words in a possibly (because I've only read them) inappropriate way. It seems to me that Welles lumbered those words- and Tarkington's story- with too heavy a dramatic weight, a weight they couldn't sustain: Shakespeare could sustain it, but Tarkington couldn't. I fully understand Welles's temperment as an artist, I just believe he made an error in this case. I'm forming my opinion on the logic of the story, and on the book, the script and the stills. Of course we would have to see the actual scene to form a final judgement, but nevertheless I believe the story logic demands the ending, or something close to the ending, that I have described above: not because it's sappy and artificial, but because it's logical and real: Fanny's ship has finally come in; it is not artifical for her to have a great deal of happiness in the fact that Georgie is getting married, getting a great job, having kids, and that a new family is being born, in which Fanny will play an important part; this is not artificial, this is life. Of course she does not have everything she wants, or needs- but she will have a great deal.

This is life: it's realistic, not artificial. Bad stuff happens, and we are crushed, or we go on, quite often damaged. I believe Fanny will pick up the pieces and go on; after all, it's only been 3 years of bad times for them; now, their luck has changed. This is the logic of this story: I just can't see a dramatic reason for tragedy at the end.

Welles was capable of making a mistake, you know.

IMO

[mteal]

Tony,
When you say that George and Fanny's ship has come in, there would seem to be some truth to it, but one has to wonder: what kind of a ship is it? Probably the kind that will force George to live under Eugene Morgan's superior monetary(phallic?) power for the rest of his life, just as his own father, Wilbur Minafer, lived with Isabel at the Amberson estate, under the Major's superior monetary/phallic power. Beverle Huston's excellent 1982 article POWER AND DIS-INTEGRATION IN THE FILMS OF ORSON WELLES goes into this in considerably more depth. Welles frequently used leg damage as a metaphor for sexual impotence, and the fact that George's two broken legs puts him at the mercy of Eugene Morgan (the hated, would-be "second father") is significant. Stripped of his pride and monetary independence, how much phallic power will George be able to muster?

As for Fanny, she may get something indirectly out of George's marriage to Lucy, but it's questionable whether she would accept any kind of largesse from Eugene. One can certainly not imagine her wanting to move in to the Morgan house and live in the attic as an old maid, as she had done at the Amberson mansion. That would be a poor substitute for being Eugene's wife. So is she destined to wind up poor and lonely? Perhaps neither: it's interesting that the Cutting Continuity of Welles's original boardinghouse ending indicates several times that the boardinghouse residents eye her conversation with Eugene with great curiosity; not just the women playing cards in the background, but several men too. One gets the impression that Fanny might have no shortage of suiters at the boardinghouse. Whether she would want any of them or not is another matter.

But I suspect that Welles had bigger things on his mind then the fate of an old spinster when he conceived the boardinghouse ending. There is a mirror motif that runs throughout: We see Fanny at the beginning of the scene in a mirror's reflection. It is only when she leads Eugene into another room for their private conversation that we see the "real" Fanny, as it were. After Eugene's rejection of her becomes clear, he leads her back into the original room where he (and we) first saw her, and we see her reflected in the mirror once again. A symbol of Fanny's unyielding vanity perhaps, but to me, this also seems to suggest somehow that the boardinghouse is a kind of prison for the poor, a ghetto of the kind that many were being forced into across Central and Eastern Europe at the time Welles made the film. Fanny might get out of this prison, but most of the others won't. A warning about the possibility of Fascism in America? I don't know, but Welles seldom did anything that didn't have some kind of political subtext.

Also, it's noteworthy that Welles wanted Agnes Moorhead to play the Nazi Hunter in THE STRANGER, and even described her character as "an old spinster woman", just like Aunt Fanny. When Rankin kicks Mary's dog, Red, we suddenly see Wilson the Nazi Hunter rise from his sleep (as if he was the one kicked) with the revelation that Rankin is Franz Kindler ("It's only old Fanny, so I'll kick her...I'll kick her all I want to").

[Roger Ryan]

EDIT - I hadn't read mteal's response before posting this one, but I very much agree with him. A major visual clue to Welles' structure of "mirrored" sequences is the number of mirrors or reflecting surfaces used in the film.



In regards to artistic mistakes, I don't think the idea of showing Eugene entering the hospital and then a wipe to him exiting the hospital was a good one. That's about as clunky a transition as can be imagined, but without seeing the actual footage, I can't condemn it outright. We cannot know for certain how the boarding house scene played either, but to me it sounds like an appropriate, if unconventional, finale.

As Christopher Husted outlined, and I've elaborated upon in the past, "Ambersons" the film is structured as a series of "mirrored" sequences, two halves if you like hinged on an unconventional climax placed mid-way through the film (George slamming the front door in Eugene's face). Everything in the first half of the film leads to that moment; everything coming after offers an ironic comment on the first half. The seeds to this structure can be found in Tarkington's novel (the film is a very faithful adaptation for the most part), but Welles the director truly emphasized this structure with his scene-setting, camera placement, choice of music, etc. The result is a film that presents a scene, then repeats it (often in the same space) with emphasis on how the action or situation has reversed. Note in Welles' original long cut how there are two veranda scenes, two kitchen scenes, two staircase scenes, two riding/walking through town scenes, two downtown office scenes and so on. The first of these paired scenes appears in the film's front half; the second one appears in the back half. They are often diametrically-opposed as well, meaning if the first of the paired scenes appears near the film's beginning, it's partner will appear near the end (the two downtown office scenes); if the first scene appears closer to the film's climax, it's partner will as well (the staircase scenes).

When Tarkington's novel did not provide a suitable final scene to fit the structure Welles had envisioned, he created his own. The boarding house scene is meant to be the polar opposite of the film's opening montage and ballroom sequence. The charming, poetic dialogue of the partygoers has been replaced by terse, half-sentences or grunts uttered by the boarding house residents. In place of the elegant ballroom music we hear a scratchy comedy record. The denizens of the boarding house are confined to an area much smaller than the Amberson mansion, but behave like strangers. Instead of walking the streets of the town greeting passersby, Eugene is chauffeured in a car anonymously. And in Welles' original final matte shot, we were meant to see that the small town of the film's beginning had indeed transformed into a city. In serving the structure Welles imposed on the film, the boarding house sequence fits the bill.

Whether one likes it or not is a matter of opinion. Again, without seeing it we can't say for sure that it worked. But let me point out that both Peter Bogdanovich's "The Last Picture Show" and Barry Levinson's "Avalon" end with what could be called homages to Welles' boarding house scene. Both of these films have unexpected downbeat endings with characters beaten by time and circumstance and both work wonderfully in my opinion.

[Glenn Anders]

Tony: My view is that the Mercury Theater on the Air production was Booth Tarkington's "The Magnificent Ambersons," but the movie was to be Orson Welles' THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. I don't believe that Welles, knowing his passions, could have put a happy face on the story (which in his own life had been a scenario for a tragedy from which he never fully escaped). He would tell you that people live or die, but they simply do not just "move on." That's a concept made paramount in last 25 years, which allows many people and institutions, high and low, to get out from under responsibilities.

Believe me, tony, I'm old enough to remember the Aunt Fanny's of America. They did not "just move on." As late as the 1930's, there was seldom a better place to move to. And emotionally, they even less often, given their makeup as women, happily "picked up the pieces." Fanny will go on playing cards among a group of strangers, and if you know anything about what we now call "retirement homes," which the boarding house roughly is, many of those strangers will be senile, demented or on the make. Not an easy, comfortable place for prim Aunt Fanny, who once ran a mansion, had men who depended upon her, and personal hopes for domestic happiness of her own. Eugene's visit is a death sentence, emotionally, at least.

Why qualify? A death sentence. I doubt Aunt Fanny, noting her pride, would ever move.

Now, whether or not Welles could have brought off this vision, is open to question. We can never know, Welles could never know, maybe, to be fair, the people back in Hollywood could never know. What we do know is that Welles thought he could bring it off. And thirty years on, he was grieving over having lost the chance, still making efforts to restore what he considered a better film than CITIZEN KANE.

As it stands, because I don't have the contrary evidence, I think you win the argument, but not necessarily the issue.

Tashman: I think I'll leave your reply largely alone, allowing others to compare our statements, to decide which one holds the most Wellsian essence.

I reiterate that all idealogies which posit "a chosen people" tend to be male-dominated and puritanical where women are concerned. The power structure in which the Ambersons had flurished and fallen was descendant from the Christian Puritan patriarchal witch burners. You will no doubt have to agree that those acts were mainly of males persecuting females. By the late 19th Century, the residue of that thinking had migrated west to the seat of the Amberson fortune in Indiana. Major Amberson made a few bad business judgments for which everyone in his family paid, but after Georgie was forced to get a real job, and Widow Isabel died in a Victorian sense from the shame of it all, it was left for Aunt Fanny to "pick up [Tony's] pieces." Her equally Victorian hope was that Eugene, in viewing her efforts to nurse Isabel, keep the mansion together, and shepherd Georgie, would see her virtue. Obviously, he did not -- at least in a romantic, or even a truly compassionate sense. He just drove away; he just "moved on," which is a male concept. The end of Welles' film, unlike Tarkington's sunny one, accurately adapted in the radio show, was a much more human, realistic conclusion.

If Fanny was not a puritan sacrifice to the patriarchal society of her time, I don't know what would be.

When you say: "Some proportion or other of Puritanism and patriarchy are nearly universal to civilization," you have laid your hand on what many of the World's women are struggling against. The male patriarchs in their seats of power in the Hindu Kush, Washington, Israel, and wherever else "chosen males" reside, at this moment, are willing to renew their claim to your "truth" with Atom Bombs. Who ordained the truth of your statement -- God? In HIS wisdom?

Aunt Fanny, among many things she represents, is a symbol of the victimhood of that kind of thinking, which continues today from the goat herds of Afghanistan to the aries of Madison Avenue.

I think readers will find the evidence I presented on Welles' concerns about totalitarianism and fascism stands pretty well untouched. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, as Welles obviously framed it, is an ambiguous, non-didactic work of art. It was not a piece of kitsch, we both can agree, but if so, it must encompass the logic of the work. Welles, I think was following in the tradition of great dramatic artists, not that of commercial hacks and popular entertainers. His intention was not to put "a happy face" on what he viewed as a tragedy.

If he did, we should forget about THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, as it exists, and begin to analyze KING'S ROW, a much better film (influenced in many ways by Welles) about the same subject: the rejection and crushing of female wisdom by patriarchs. It is not a perfect picture, but its realized virtues are much better delineated than those of the butchered . . . AMBERSONS.

Everyone might as well have been satisfied with the Mercury Theater on the Air radio adaptation of Tarkington's novel.

As you say, if Arthur Miller had worked on CITIZEN KANE and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, "we would be done, because there would be nothing else to say."

Coincidentally, who was in Welles stable of writers during this period? Hint: His initials are A. M.

I don't know, Tashman, if what we've written will "satisfy everyone else" -- I doubt it will satisfy anyone -- but Roger Ryan's summation of the last scene of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBESONS must. He really has sifted through that final scene we've been muttering about, and he has put it back together again, very much as Welles might have done.

Glenn

[mteal]

EDIT - I hadn't read mteal's response before posting this one, but I very much agree with him. A major visual clue to Welles' structure of "mirrored" sequences is the number of mirrors or reflecting surfaces used in the film.

And I agree with your concept of the original version's mirrored structure, Roger. The original version of the film seems as if it were almost two films, one light, with poetic and comic qualities, and the other dark and tragic. And you're also right that George's rejection of Eugene is the dividing point between the two halves of the film. I think the lost scene of George unwrapping Wilbur's picture and putting it in the parlor for his mother to find (like some kind of voodoo doll), was intended to be the last semi-comic scene in the film; the last scene where the audience would have been invited to laugh at George's arrogant foolishness. In the next scene he would have sent Eugene away and the film would have begun it's long descent into darkness. And as Welles staged it, we would have first seen George unwrapping Wibur's picture in a mirror's reflection. Also, in the scene near the end where Fanny breaks down and George tries to calm her, the two walk through the now dark and desolate mansion where all the furniture is covered with sheets. The only thing that's not covered in the room is the mirror on the wall.

BTW, it's also tempting to divide Orson Welles's career into two parts - one triumphant, the other tragic - with the Ambersons debacle as the dividing line between the two.

Glenn, your analysis of Fanny reminds me of the statement Welles made in Jaglom's SOMEONE TO LOVE that, by allowing women's liberation, we were "freeing the last of our slaves".

I reiterate that all idealogies which posit "a chosen people" tend to be male-dominated and puritanical where women are concerned. The power structure in which the Ambersons had flurished and fallen was descendant from the Christian Puritan patriarchal witch burners. You will no doubt have to agree that those acts were mainly of males persecuting females.

And they were persecuted for supposedly worshipping female gods. The kind of territory that Welles's interest in Robert Graves' THE WHITE GODDESS would eventually lead him into, if he wasn't there already (He already had done THE GREEN GODDESS on stage and radio by this time). You say that Welles based Aunt Fanny on one of his aunts. I think he may have also based it on his paternal grandmother, who Welles said had helped ruin his own parents' marriage by rejecting his mother. He also accused her of being a practicing witch.

"The stabilising, comprehensive religions of the world, such as Egypt, India, and China, have always given the female principle of creation at least as much importance as the male. These were all what H.G. Wells called communities of obedience. The aggressive, nomadic societies - what he called communities of will - Isreal, Islam, and the Protestant North, conceived their gods as male. All-male religions produce no religious imagery - in most cases positively forbid it." Kenneth Clarke, CIVILIZATION