Orson Welles: Hello Americans (7 page)

It is doubtful whether Tarkington would have recognised him as such. At all times – even after his fall – George is described in terms of his exceptional elegance and nobility of bearing. ‘George’s imperious good looks were altogether manly, yet approached
actual beauty as closely as a boy’s good looks should dare.’ He is ‘the magnificent youth’, his manners
de haut en bas
. When he comes home from university, ‘it was as if M. le Duc had returned from the gay life of the capital to show himself for a week among the loyal peasants belonging to the old château, and their quaint habits and costumes afforded him mild amusement’. At the celebrated ball
in the Ambersons’ mansion, ‘it is to be doubted if anybody felt more illustrious or more negligently grand than George Amberson Minafer felt at this party’.

There is nothing negligent, grand or magnificent about Tim Holt’s George: he is stocky, plebeian in manner, sulky and impetuous. In the Arthur William Brown illustrations to the original edition (which, as it happens, the artist sent to Welles
during the preparations for the film), George appears almost as a young Basil Rathbone, soigné, unsmiling, impeccably elegant. This is not a quibble: in the novel, his appearance expresses everything that he
stands
for, his features frozen in the attitudes of his class. Even in the boarding house, when he and Fanny have to scrabble for their very subsistence, he insists on dressing for dinner.
Tim Holt could never play this character, even if he were more versatile – and he was not versatile. He was essentially a one-performance actor, a performance with which Welles was very familiar. This must have been the way he wanted George portrayed. Perhaps he thought that a more patrician performance would have alienated the audience; or perhaps he thought that expressing the baffled, emotionally
strangled soul of George Amberson Minafer was more important than realising his external characteristics. Either way, the whole sense of the story is changed by this decision: this is the point at which casting becomes narrative. At the centre of Welles’s
The Magnificent Ambersons
is a pettish lout; at the centre of Tarkington’s is a gilded youth who seeks to arrest history.

To cast the roles
of George’s mother and his grandfather, Welles also stepped out of the fold of the Mercurians. In the pivotal role of Isabel Amberson, he cast Dolores Costello. Here sentimental factors governed his choice: she had been a great star of the silent movies, and she had once been married to Welles’s hero (and, latterly, friend) the once-great, now ruined, John Barrymore. Again, she was not quite Tarkington’s
Isabel, and again, that is neither here nor there, except in so far as it affects the balance of the story. Isabel, the universally adored, is characterised throughout the novel for her uncanny youthfulness: as often as not, says Tarkington, she seems to be fourteen years old, vivacious and girlish. (Again, Brown’s illustrations are an interesting pointer: his Isabel looks more like George’s
sister than his mother.) Costello, though only thirty-seven at the time, seems matronly and elegiac from the start, anticipating Isabel’s physical decline and making her relationship with both George and Eugene less vivid, less dangerous. The morbid tone starts early in the film; in the book, it only makes its appearance with Isabel’s illness and death.

For the casting of Major Amberson, Welles
again turned to the silent movies: Richard Bennett had been a considerable film star from the time of
Damaged Goods
(1914), though it was on the Chicago stage that Welles had first encountered him: ‘I’d been such a breathless fan of his in the theatre,’ he told Peter Bogdanovich.
³
‘He had the greatest lyric power of any actor I ever saw on the English speaking stage. There’s no way of describing
the beauty of that man in the theatre.’ Welles might certainly have seen Bennett in
Winterset
in New York (his last stage performance); it is conceivable that he
saw
him in his greatest role, the title character in Andreyev’s expressionist fantasy
He Who Gets Slapped
, in which his performance was thought to be the culmination of romantic acting. Despite being the father of a famous trio of actresses
(Joan, Constance and Barbara Bennett), his circumstances had declined to the point at which Welles had discovered him – he said – living alone in a Catalina boarding house. This, of course, was the stuff of theatre romance for Welles: his genuine and practical love of elderly performers was a constant in his life, and entirely reciprocal; they knew he was one of them. Bennett later wrote to
him with affectionate
esprit de corps
in the parlance of his generation of theatre folk: ‘You have made me – happy – with sweet potentialities – I hope my meagre epistles have not bored you – they are only to remind you that you are still making people happy this side of the equator – Bless you, boy – RB.’
⁴
In this piece of casting, Tarkington’s conception of the character and Welles’s are identical;
Tarkington (no mean playwright himself) may well have seen Bennett’s work in the Chicago theatre; Bennett, like the author, was of good Hoosier stock.

For Lucy, the object of George’s unwavering but perennially unrequited passion, Welles cast the eighteen-year-old Anne Baxter, who was perfectly able to realise the charm, intelligence and independence of the character. She may sometimes fail to
go much beyond the limits of a conventionally high-spirited young woman of the period – Tarkington suggests something a little deeper – and is hard-pressed to convey the strength of her feelings for George, but one never questions her ability to provoke the love he feels for her, which is perhaps the more crucial matter. She very credibly creates the relationship with her father, who is played by
that key figure in Welles’s life and that of the Mercury, Joseph Cotten, who was thirty-six, exactly ten years older than Welles, and probably ten years younger than Eugene Morgan. Casting Cotten in the role ensured that it would be sympathetically played; his easy Virginian charm and soft handsomeness, allied to his perfect deportment, ideally convey the elegance and restraint of Gene Morgan and
the chivalrous romanticism of his
tendresse
for Isabel Minafer. His attempt to play a part ten years older than he was – always a very difficult transformation, much harder than playing extreme old age – would inevitably tend to create a slightly muted impression, and here he and Welles would start to part company with Tarkington, whose Eugene is a more forceful and more reckless character than
Cotten would be able to suggest. Morgan has suffered two financial collapses already by the time he returns to his home town, ready to invest everything in a
newfangled
and widely suspected invention, the automobile. ‘There was something of the sixteenth-century buccaneer,’ Tarkington observes, ‘about Eugene Morgan’, but that was not in Joseph Cotten’s repertory. George Minafer accuses him of
being a businessman and Lucy ripostes that he is a genius. He must of course be both, an inspired entrepreneur who ends up as one of the wealthiest men of his era. He has not achieved this by charm alone: Cotten’s casting would make it seem as if he had, which somewhat diminishes the force of George’s intuitive reaction against him. Gene stands for everything that George rejects: doing is his natural
mode; being is neither here nor there. The balance between Tim Holt and Joseph Cotten as actors is almost the reverse of Tarkington’s. Holt’s turbulent, slightly brutish energy makes his claims to epitomise the ideals of American aristocracy unconvincing, while Cotten’s natural relaxed amiability and languidness scarcely suggest the restless spirit of capitalist enterprise. Whether from filial
piety or from a more general desire to create a sepia-tinted vision of the recent American past, Welles’s casting here again conspires to rob the narrative of some of its meaning and a great deal of its energy.

Where the book and the casting are again triumphantly at one is in the role of Fanny Minafer, Isabel’s deeply disappointed sister-in-law. The character is Tarkington’s most compelling
creation, self-defeating and desperate, at war with George, pathetic and sometimes malign in her attempts to deal with her hopeless passion for Eugene. Agnes Moorehead was perhaps the most remarkable of all the actors in the Mercury stable. Like many of the others, she had first worked with Welles on radio; as early as 1937 she had been in
The Shadow
, playing the long-suffering secretary Margot
to his Lamont Cranston. She joined the Mercury Theatre on the Air the following year, appeared in the very first programme,
Dracula
, in the notorious
War of the Worlds
and, to startling effect, in
Rebecca
. In addition to the high spirits and technical skill of the other actors, she brought an extraordinary emotional depth and a transforming imagination to her work, which made each of her roles
uniquely expressive; like the very greatest actors, she forged a mask that both liberated her and imprinted itself indelibly on the spectator’s mind. Welles took her to Hollywood with him, and in
Citizen Kane
cast her in the small role of the mother of the young Charles Foster Kane. Noting the terrifyingly intense determination she brought to the part, allied to and expressed by the American Primitive
gauntness of her appearance – hair tautly swept back, cheeks lined, waist tightly nipped – he and Toland shot her in such a way as to give her work maximum
impact:
these brief scenes become the fulcrum of the film. Now, in
The Magnificent Ambersons
, he cast Moorehead in the part that would be the high point of her early career. There was in the actress a latent (and sometimes naked) neediness,
a disappointment in herself and, especially, her physical appearance, that can often be the source of exceptional power. Her greatest admirers as directors – and the directors whom she most admired – were Orson Welles and Charles Laughton, and both of them had a particular protective affection for her beyond their respect for her work. On any consideration – in terms of age (thirty-six at the time
of filming), physically, vocally, emotionally – Moorehead was perfectly placed to play Fanny Minafer.

The rest of the roles were cast very much from Mercury ranks, the most prominent of them being that radio stalwart, Ray Collins, the powerful Boss Jim Gettys in
Citizen Kane
, here set down to play George’s Uncle Jack (renamed, presumably to avoid confusion, from the Uncle George of the novel).
Once again, the casting is slightly off. The novel’s Uncle George is a failed congressman, a failed businessman, a failed lover – useless, in fact, for anything at all except the distant colonial embassy to which he is despatched at the end of the book. He is a Turgenevian superfluous man, unfitted for the modern world. Welles’s Uncle Jack is inevitably a sturdier type, because Collins was. There
is nothing of the exquisite or the aristocratic about him, nor could there be.

Having cast the film, Welles went away, in July of 1941, with Amalia Kent, his trusty amanuensis and erstwhile tutor in screen-writing, and wrote the screenplay on King Vidor’s yacht; perhaps some of the vision of the great experimentalist of the silent cinema rubbed off on him. Working from the novel, two earlier
screenplays and the script of his own radio broadcast, he selected with immense flair from the vast array of incident and character, adding little of his own, but emphasising the epic backdrop to the characters’ lives. His fidelity to the book is extraordinary. He changes Uncle George into Uncle Jack, as we have seen; he gives George’s line after he’s been run over (‘Riff-raff’) to the policeman,
which is a little odd since it is George’s catchphrase. But in almost every other way his approach has been to realise the book as faithfully and literally as possible – instead of asking, as with the other projects on which he was working at the time, how can this material be used for cinematic purposes? He places the film at the disposal of the novel, rather than vice versa; in the narrations –
a direct transposition of his familiar radio techniques – Welles allows the author’s characteristic cadences to be heard, unmediated. Tarkington is nobly served. Only in the
last
reel, no doubt embarrassed by the spiritualist contrivances of the book – Eugene’s highly uncharacteristic visit to a clairvoyant – does Welles offer a radical rewrite; but even then, in translating the final scene in
the hospital into a reported one, in which Eugene visits Fanny in the boarding house, Welles tells precisely the same story, omitting only the mediumistic element. He also gives a proper (if perhaps slightly unTarkingtonian) end to Fanny’s story. The original screenplay, with its collage of distant comedy records, squeaking rocking chair, heavy shadows passing across faces and extreme close-ups,
gives a striking sense of unease, of things unresolved, of deepening bitterness and perhaps incipient insanity, where the novel speaks only of healing. This is clearly a vast improvement over Tarkington.

Fine and intelligent though it is, the screenplay suggests a less radical form of film-making than
Citizen Kane
– or indeed than
Journey into Fear
, to say nothing of the planned
Way to Santiago/Mexican
Melodrama
, which is a complete reinvention of the book for cinematic purposes. It is, however, a profound, very grown-up, and somewhat sombre subject for a mainstream Hollywood film to address head-on, and in the screenplay, for all the charm and affection of Welles’s version, he does not for a moment shy away from his theme. No faithful treatment of
The Magnificent Ambersons
could be anything
other than a sobering experience; it describes the
dégringolade
of a class, and the growth of what Michael Denning in
The Cultural Front
calls ‘Fordism’: the triumph of the automobile, with all that that implies. Welles the missionary for the reform of Hollywood insisted that ‘audiences are more intelligent than the people who create their entertainment’. While he was shooting
The Magnificent
Ambersons
, he told students at the University of California Los Angeles: ‘I can think of nothing that an audience won’t understand.
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The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested they understand anything in the world. That must be the feeling of the movie maker.’ In his preparations for the film, he was governed by his conviction that ‘the movies are the nearest thing to reality
… if the production is intelligent you could find out more about life from a movie screen than you can from theatre or radio’.