Orson Welles | The Magnificent Ambersons / 1942

a comeuppance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Orson Welles (screenplay, based on the fiction by Booth Tarkington; and director) The Magnificent Ambersons / 1942

 

At once one the most beautifully filmed of American movies and a terribly flawed soap opera, Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons is a fascinating work that I have watched numerous times over the years and taught as a graduate assistant in an English department film course. 

      Seeing it again, recently, those extremes became even more apparent. One might also be tempted to suggest it is a richer work than his masterpiece Citizen Kane, if it weren’t for the fact that Booth Tarkington’s novel, upon which the film is based, is basically just a story of a family, who over the course of the narrative, falls from grace. And, although Welles certainly attempts to lift the film to the gravitas of Kane, suggesting that the Ambersons’/Minifers’ fall comes simultaneously with end of the belle époque and the rise of industrialism, the real cause for their decay is the family’s pride and the utter blindness of certain family members to the well-being of family individuals and the community at large, issues that have universal significance.

      Much has been written, moreover, about the editorial changes made without Welles’ approval. Welles, shooting a film for the government in Brazil, was not allowed to share in the decisions, despite his attempt to intervene. Even composer Bernard Herrmann insisted that his name be taken from the credits when a large part of his original score was cut. Yet, many of the changes made, do, in retrospect, make sense, while other alterations, particularly the film’s ending, can easily be recognized as flaws.    

 

     Welles begins his tale by trying to tie the wealthy Ambersons with both the period (a time, which the narrator [Welles himself] describes as one in which the streetcar would stop and wait for the woman of the house, while she put on her hat and spoke to the cook about dinner) and with the community—through the everyday gossip about the family. But the early incidents which fuel the gossips, the drunken behavior of the Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), Isabel Amberson’s (Dolores Costello) inability to forgive him, and her marriage, soon after, to the more stable but utterly boring Wilbur Minifer (Don Dillaway), seem such trivial events that it is difficult even to care about what might happen to the grand Ambersons and the things they represent.

      As one gossip predicts, because Isabel is not truly in love with Wilbur, she will spoil her children, giving all her love to them, turns out to be true, except in one detail, that she has only one child George (Tim Holt). In a short series of scenarios, we meet the young spoiled boy, decked out with long curls of flowing hair that represents him more as an effeminate prig than a spoiled brat.

      It is only when Eugene, somewhat inexplicably, returns to Indianapolis that the movie actually becomes more interesting. For Eugene (through Cotten’s excellent acting) is not only a charmer, he is now a successful businessman, a creator of a new automobile that will drive even through snow.

 

    The memorable ball which Isabel and Major Amberson (Richard Bennett) throw to celebrate his return with his daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter) is a whirling affair where—at least in the original cut—the camera lifted in crane shots in one long flow throughout the house, moving from room to room as Lucy and George walk through the attendees and dancers. Much of that scene was cut, but even as it is, we recognize it as amazing moment of film, wherein, through its fluid shifts in space, it is quickly established that Eugene is beloved by the entire community and that his daughter has already been feted by many of the citizens in the brief time since her arrival.

     It is clear that she might have dated nearly any young man in the room, while George seems dismissive of them all, and particularly of the man at the center of the affair, who he does not recognize as her father—and, whom, he soon discovers much to his horror, was the former courtier of his mother and would-be lover of his Aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead).

     In the very next scene, we witness a continuation of that evening, as Eugene attempts to drive his car, filled with the elder Ambersons, through a snow-white field. The car is having difficulty in moving, just as a horse-drawn sleigh, which contains George and Lucy, comes effortlessly springing through the landscape, proving, momentarily, the preference of the past methods of transportation to the present. A moment later, however, the sleigh, hitting a snow bank, spills out its passengers, and the younger couple, no worse for wear, must join the others in the automobile, which the young George is enlisted in pushing. The car does eventually start, and, however gingerly, makes its way across the beautiful countryside in what is surely one the most beautiful and arresting images in American filmmaking.

      In a real sense, “Georgie,” in that very scene has had a kind of “comeuppance,” as the city dwellers predict; he simply does not yet recognize it as one. And after, when his father dies and he and others of his family are invited to dine with the Morgans, he gets his psychological revenge by brutally dismissing the creation of his host (“automobiles are a useless nuisance, which had no business being invented”). Eugene’s suave response—suggesting that George may turn out to be right and recognizing that, if nothing else, the automobile would surely alter human civilization—again represents his true fairness and nobility as opposed to George’s simple priggishness.

 

     The scenes where George attempts to court Lucy, where Welles walks his characters laterally along streets, similarly reveals her ease of the way things are, while George seems uncomfortably out of place in his own hometown.

      The difficulty of Holt’s role is that, despite the unlikableness of his character, he must nonetheless make George seem intelligent and interesting enough to attract Lucy’s attention. In Welles’ original, his attack on Eugene was evidently much more vicious; while the studio revisers —which included noted director Robert Wise—I think appropriately toned it down so that might still hold out some hope for his change.

     In the famed “kitchen scene” where George and Jack tease Fanny until she cries, Welles originally followed it by a scene where George catches a glimpse of his grandfather’s new construction from the window and rushes into a rainstorm shouting out in rage, which, reportedly, preview audiences derisively heckled. Once again, it appears, some careful editing was necessary if the character were to remain believable.

     As the various figures, Jack (Ray Collins), Fanny, and George, hovering over the grand staircases of the Amberson house, whisper and squabble, it becomes increasingly apparent to him just how in love both his mother and aunt were with the man he now perceives as the intruder, the character growing so mean and selfish that we can no longer imagine why Lucy might even have bothered with him. And, finally, as the relationship between Eugene and Isabel develops, George becomes entirely implacable, refusing Eugene even entry into their home. As Lucy herself metaphorically describes George to her father, he is like the Native American chief who was “pushed out on a canoe into the sea” when he became too overbearing to the tribe.

      Welles brilliantly hints that these family melodramas are something closer to madness, which temporarily heightens the grandeur of his story; but when Isabel, choosing to placate her son as opposed to fulfilling her own desires, finally refuses Eugene’s offer to marry, the story, even as Welles himself recognized, has nowhere else to go.

      Traveling with her son to Europe, Isabel sinks out of sight and quickly dissipates through an illness into nothingness, Eugene is not even allowed a final visit with her before her death. Originally, Eugene was kept from her only by Fanny’s turning him away; but, once again the studio editors improved the scene, I would argue, by having all three, Jack, George, and Fanny, tell him to leave, helping us to realize that the entire family has disintegrated, falling to the level of the spoiled son.

     Unable to find the deed to their house after Isabel’s death, and losing their money in investments in a headlight company, the family quickly crumbles, Fanny psychologically breaking down. In the original version Welles allowed her the full force of melodramatic fury. While some claimed it was Morehead’s best scene, preview audiences, however, found it laughable, and again the studio revised it, demanding a more subdued performance from the actress.

      The final scenes of Welles’ original cut do seem, in hindsight, far preferable to what the studio refilmed after the director had left for Brazil. In the original, George wanders through the city, followed by a long tracking shot by cinematographer Stanley Cortez, presumably finally receiving his “comeuppance”—although even the narrator notes that those who so wanted it were no longer around to witness it.

     The very final scene consisted of Eugene visiting Fanny in her boarding house where, throughout their conversation, overheard by other residential friends, Fanny squeakily rocks away in her chair while a corny comedy record plays in the corner.

      All of these scenes, alas, were cut, to be replaced by the quite obviously inferior scene with which the film now ends. Even the light looks radically different from Welles’ intense black and white images, as Eugene and Fanny, upon visiting the injured George in the hospital, leave the place together, suggesting a reconciliation between the two.     

     In short, as Wise and others have argued, the final film we see today is perhaps no better or worse than the one Welles had shot. That such a basically conventional fiction still resulted in such a magnificent film, is testimony enough to Welles’ remarkable talents, even if he was not the total genius he himself and others have declared him to be.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2017).

René Clair | I Married a Witch / 1942

taming the barbarians

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Pirosh, Marc Connelly (screenplay, based on the novel The Passionate Witch by Thorne Smith, complete by Norman H. Matson; with further dialogue by René Clair, André Rigaud, and Dalton Trumbo, all uncredited), René Clair (director) I Married a Witch / 1942

 

     In René Clair’s 1942 fantasy, I Married a Witch, it is clear that Jennifer (Veronica Lake) is an “actual” rather than a societally “perceived” witch, having centuries ago been condemned to death by Wallace Wooley’s (Fredric March) Puritan ancestor, Jonathan. A tree is planted over where she and her father, deemed a sorcerer, were burned to keep their spirits inside the earth.

 

    In the first few frames of the film, we discover the real reason why Wooley has condemned Jennifer as a witch is because he felt sexually tempted by her when she followed him into the haystack and attempted to kiss on his lips.

     Clearly Jonathan was an outright prude, about to marry an ugly woman named Purity Sykes (Marie Blake) who is already criticizing him for not paying her more attention. The film quickly moves on to 1770 where Nathaniel Wooley, obviously also terrified of females, is about to propose to Martha, a very plain woman. And in 1861 on the verge of the Civil War, Daniel Wooley’s wife Bessie is so violently hurling objects at him that he runs off to the nearest recruiting office.

     In fact, because he has rejected her kisses, Jennifer, the woman who has just been burned as a witch along with her father have, in turn, cast a spell upon all the Wooleys who come after Jonathan, dooming the Wooley tribe forever to bad marriages, a tradition Wallace is about to carry out in a forced wedding with a local political bosses’ daughter, Estelle Masterson (a forever frowning Susan Hayward)—although when later Jennifer  reminds her father of the Wooley curse, he responds, “Every man that marries, marries the wrong woman. True suffering cometh when a man falls in love with the woman he cannot marry.”

     In Clair’s fantasy she comes back to life only through another series of fiery forces, lightning striking the tree over Jennifer and her father’s burial site, bringing them back to life, and the destruction of a city hotel, from which Wallace carries the previously invisible witch to safety, thus bringing her back into the visible human world, where after catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror even Jennifer finds that she’s rather beautiful, although she wonders whether or not she should be a brunette.                      Accordingly, if there was ever a true barbarian, someone in the Puritan mind eternally burning in hell, it is Jennifer and her father Daniel (Cecil Kellaway), set on the destruction of the civilized world. Indeed, it is the chaos they introduce into the so-called civilized world that makes the first part of this film so delightful. It is hard even to sympathize with the hypocritical Wallace and his ancestors, given their bourgeois aspirations and their sacrifice of their ideals to community demands.

      March, clearly not in love with his arguing fiancée, spends most of this part of this movie with a drink in his hand, as he tries to escape Hayward’s scolds. At one point she even forces him to given up his drink, which his friend Dudley (Robert Benchley) grabs and immediately finishes off.

      But the movie shifts course when the barbarians “get inside,” so to speak, and refuse to leave. And what else can you do when they’ve squeaked through but to fall in love. It’s interesting just how influential this film was on later works such as the play and film Bell, Book, and Candle, and the television series Bewitched. In each of them falling in love is associated with witchcraft, and requires the male to readjust to a life with a woman who has used magical powers to woo him and alter his life.

      Obviously, in all three of these “bewitching” tales, even if the women are originally powerful, they are also seen to be dangerous outside forces who got their companions through guile and cunning. Moreover, throughout history—and well represented in LGBTQ films—witches were thought to be lesbians, presumably since females with whom such females consorted were imagined to be unable to actually fall in love—love being defined as it still often is as heteronormative sex. And as in Bell, Book, and Candle Jennifer begins the film with the idea of only doing further harm to the Wooley ancestor, forcing him to fall in love with no results. As with Wallace’s Puritan ancestor Jonathan, temptation is her goal rather than a heterosexual relationship. She is not even interested in sex.

     The surge of the betwitching powers in each of these works is what make them so much fun. It’s almost disappointing when Jennifer accidentally is served the magic potion her father has cooked up for her revenge. For as she falls in love and loses her powers the story becomes almost misogynistic as she spends an inordinate amount of time between her clever remarks by posing in Wallace’s pajamas, displaying her legs, and generally seeking out the male gaze as Veronica Lake purrs out her sexual admiration of her companion.

     In real life neither of them much liked each other. As Guy Maddin has reminded us:

 

“No one could suspect how much they loathed each other. Lake claimed she spurned the forty-five-year-old leading man’s advances. March claimed she was an ill-behaved amateur. The hatred between the two performers playing at romance on-screen is so hot it works wildly! Watching the heavenly Lake, positively itchy with sexual frustration because she can’t seduce this man, is enough to cast a blazing spell over anyone!”

 

     Like was most certainly irresponsible at times and often irrepressible. As she wrote her autobiography:

 

“One scene had me in a rocking chair. A picture falls off the wall and strikes me unconscious. I’m supposed to sit in the chair without movement while March desperately attempts to talk to me.

     The shot was medium, showing only the two of us from waist-high. We were into the scene and he came close to me. He was standing directly in front of the chair. I carefully brought my foot up between his legs. And I moved my foot up and down, each upward movement pushing it ever so slightly into his groin. Pro that he is, it wasn’t easy for him, and I delighted simply in knowing what was going through his mind. Naturally, when the scene was over, he laced into me. I just smiled.”

 

     Yet there is still enough fun throughout to keep the film as the Masterson’s drop in for a morning visit after Jennifer has settled into Wallace’s mansion permanently, despite he attempts to get rid of her. As in the original author Thorne Smith’s Topper stories, doors inexplicably slam shut, brooms move of their volition, and rum bottles speak. Pianos play of their own accord, the pot boils, and a revolver goes off by itself, temporarily killing Jennifer’s father. By the end of the film Clair even cooks up a flying taxi.

      And even after the film switches to its inevitable heterosexual plot after her drinking the love potion, Jennifer and her father attempt to stop Wallace’s wedding by causing a small cyclone of chaos as the couple begin down the aisle. When Wallace comes down again, it is hand in hand with his friend Dudley and when his bride-to-be finally joins him, the bridgegroom faints. A few minutes later, his fiancée Estelle finds him back upstairs kissing Jennifer. And even though Masterson attempts to ruin the man who was to be his son-in-law, Jennifer not only arranges for their marriage, a room to stay for the night, but saves the election by allowing him to win every single vote. 

     Like Kim Novak in Bell, Book, and Candle and Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched, she finally admits she is, in fact, is a witch, promising that from now all she will give up magic. However, she needed worry about that since she had lost her powers and is now a mere mortal, endangered by her father’s insistence that she return to the tree again. The newlyweds are finally saved by mortal love and a cork put back on a bottle of rum her pop inside. At the end of the film, we see the couple’s young daughter, Tabitha, astride a broom.

 

Los Angeles, February 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (February 17, 2024).

Chris Marker | L’ambassade (The Embassy) / 1973

the turn

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Marker (screenwriter and director) L’ambassade (The Embassy) / 1973

 

Chris Marker’s short film The Embassy of 1973 begins with a few intellects fleeing to an Embassy for protection. Others soon follow, and in this pseudo-documentary, the grim and worried asylum seekers realize that they have been saved from what appears to be wholesale slaughter simply because they lived nearer to the embassy than did the workers.

     

     At first, despite their fears, the group bands together. The Ambassador of the unknown country to whose embassy they have fled, not only finds rooms for them and is graciously willing to feed them, but joins in on everyday tasks such as vacuuming their rooms, demonstrating a deep sense of commitment to their cause and for their protection.

      But gradually, the unknown cameraman who films their gathering, begins to note the group’s dissatisfaction and, we perceive, some of these presumably leftist allies break up into smaller parties, arguing with each other. These students, intellectuals, artists, and politicians react differently to the radio reports they hear.

 

     Group games, played to pass the time, grow into conversations that turn into serious political debates, some arguing for more involvement, others for less; some criticizing the others for their political actions, others praising themselves for their positions. And soon they all begin to perceive that, in some senses, they have been part of the problem.

      Gradually, through the jerky cinéma-vérité scenes portrayed in the film, we begin to realize that, perhaps, it is the very fact that these leftist refugees have not worked together in the past that has enabled the right to take over, killing so many of their countrymen.

     As critic Dennis Grunes observes, the situation becomes similar to “the sixties U.S. Twilight Zone episode in which Agnes Moorehead wars with tiny alien invaders, who it turns out are the U.S. military.” The would-be heroes are, in fact, the “enemies” through the very fact that their inability to agree has allowed the fascists to come to power.

      Marker brilliantly tricks us in other ways as well. Since we do not know who these people really are or in what country they live or even at what embassy they have sought refuge, we can only speculate on the situation. Marker himself, in his personal life and films spent a great deal of time with the Chilean refugees in Paris after the 1973 coup, resulting in his 1975 film The Spiral. Accordingly, we might not be mistaken in imagining that this may be the French Embassy in Chile, particularly since the refugees continue to express their shock that the city has turned silent, that news has disappeared, that even what they can see from their windows reveals no signs of human life. Clearly, we must be in an internationally lesser-known capital city.

      Yet, here again, the director shifts the reality, as, when the refugees are permitted to be spirited out of the city, it appears that they are really in France, and that, in this fiction, it is Paris itself which is the location of the coup. The smugness of the left—to which I see myself aligned—is yet another “turn” or “spiral,” to use Marker’s title of his 1975 film, which has allowed its own destruction.

      Seeing this film during a year in which the American right had taken over, attempting to destroy all progressive Democratic advances achieved by President Obama, I could not help but shutter a bit when seeing Marker’s political parable. Surely, we (those of us who argue, often bitterly against one another, for liberal policies) have helped to allow the barbarians to take over our cities and to rule our estate—even despite our majority.

 

Los Angeles, August 2, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2017).

Jean-Pierre Melville | Le Samouraï (The Samurai) / 1967

death charm

Jean-Pierre Melville and Georges Pellegrin (screenplay), Jean-Pierre Melville (director) Le Samouraï (The Samurai) / 1967

 

Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, like many of his films, does not truly depend upon plot, but upon how expertly the simple plot—in this case a couple of murders by Paris hitman Jef Costello (Alain Delon)—is carried out. Sauve skill is demanded, which, of course, actor Delon emanates in nearly all of his films, and a strange loyalty to codes that do not always rationally make sense. And in this case Delon’s character is the consummate samurai, living out of a nearly empty room with only a forever chirping bird by his bed.

 

     We never discover why Jef has been hired to kill a nightclub owner; it doesn’t matter. And even though we may hate his actions, we come to perceive him as a kind of hero in a world of both policemen and gang leaders who would arrest or kill him.

      His method is simple. He uses arrestment itself as a tool to demonstrate his innocence. Dressed in a long coat with collar upturned, his head topped with a distinctive hat, he simply walks into the café where Valérie (Cathy Rosier) is playing the piano, and puts on his long white gloves before escaping through a side door into the basement which houses the owner’s office. The murder his silent and quick; but as he leaves the office he runs face on into the piano player again, who surely might later serve as witness.

      Tossing the gloves and gun into the Seine, Jef checks the time and ducks into his former girlfriend Jane’s (Nathalie Delon) apartment house. At precisely 2:00 a.m., as Jane’s current lover arrives, Jef walks out through the front door to be witnessed leaving the place. With Jane’s agreement to testify that he was there for several hours, he has what might be seen as an airtight cover.

      The police do, indeed, arrest him. But in the line-up all but one of the witnesses deny that he’s the man they saw at the club, even the pianist. The police have no choice but to let him go, yet put him under tight surveillance. Our “hero” however knows the subway system inside out, and eventually escapes them to meet with the man who will pay him for his deed.

      Instead of handing over the cash, however, the man attempts to kill him, fortunately only hitting Jef’s arm. After a few hours of nursing the wound, he determines to meet with the pianist to discover why she has protected him. She never quite explains herself, but plans for a later meeting with him.

      In the meanwhile, the police have bugged his apartment, but his pet bird has been so annoyed by the intrusion that it will not stop chirping, while dropping several of its feathers. Jef finds the bug and destroys it.

     Returning to his apartment his former shooter sits waiting for his arrival, gun in hand. This time, however, he not only pays Jef but puts him under contract for another job.   

      

     Jef eventually overpowers him, demanding that he name his boss. And, as we might suspect, that man becomes his next target (a trope picked up and repeated in a later hit-man movie, Richard Shepard’s The Matador of 2005).

     Amazingly, the very next scene shows Jef, reentering the nightclub, dressed similarly to his last visit there. This time he checks his hat, but refuses the tab.

     Walking slowly to the pianist, he takes out his gun and prepares to shoot her, but before he can, he himself is shot by a trailing detective. You’re lucky we got here in time mutters the detective, as another, picking up the gun, discovers that all of its chambers are empty. Valérie, obviously, was to have been his next contract target, which he had no intention of carrying out.

      If this rather clumsy retelling of the story seems a bit uninteresting, I can assure that Melville’s movie is anything but. It’s a work of style and beauty, both in its sets and actors. Melville reportedly had originally wanted to end Jef’s life with one last long look at Delon’s beautiful face, his sly smile still pasted to it. But he angrily changed it after learning that Delon had already played another movie death scene the same way. It is almost as if, in this case, even the director could not get enough of Delon’s radiantly visual charm.

 

Los Angeles, September 5, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2017).