Ambersons
It was Welles’s mistake on Kane that he did not trust simplicity, the confidence that lets feelings stand alone for a moment so they can sink in. As Gilbert Adair put it, he “overdirected his masterpieces.” That is a reason to stress his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons. It comes from a novel by Booth Tarkington, published in 1918, a minor classic of the Midwest, and a Pulitzer Prize winner. It was reckoned in its day that the novel caught the times and established its people fairly, and it was a favorite book of Welles’s father. The Mercury Theatre had done it on radio in October 1939, in a version Welles adapted and in which he played George Minafer himself. In that production, Walter Huston and his wife Nan Sunderland played Eugene Morgan, the automobile inventor, and Isabel Amberson, the woman he loves in vain because her son, George—arrogant, stupid, spoiled—stands in the way of another marriage.
Welles turned to Ambersons for the second film on his RKO contract. The studio did not seek to terminate this contract, though this time they did require the right to make changes to the director’s cut. Welles accepted that amendment, though it may be judged that he did not pay proper attention to it.
A key decision on the picture was to have someone else, the young actor, Tim Holt, play George. Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that that was a great relief, allowing him to direct the picture with more ease and simplicity. Stanley Cortez was the cameraman, and if he was a little less inventive than Toland, he was more a master of mood. So whereas Kane seems to take place everywhere, Ambersons is the story of one house and one town. It is a calmer, sadder film in which the sequence style of cinema I’ve described with Renoir reaches one of its heights. The space in Kane is stretched and distorted, it is megalomaniacal, like a tyrant struggling to be born, not die. But in Ambersons space is authentic and treasured; it is as if we have lived in this house along with its inhabitants. In the ball sequence, there are camera movements and extended takes among the most beguiling in cinema. They cleave to the marvelous illusion that we were there, that we are there—for the moment lasts. In the scene where George eats strawberry shortcake and Aunt Fanny goes quietly mad, there are no cuts or asides. Quite simply, we are asked to watch people passing time. This is the most humane aspect of what can be a hectic, jittery medium.
All of this is there to be seen still in the first seventy minutes of The Magnificent Ambersons. And if you were chilled by Kane, here is evidence that Welles had human understanding and a love of character in his heart. Moreover, the cast—Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, Agnes Moorehead, Anne Baxter (very young), and Dolores Costello—are transforming. The film reaches the point where the fortunes of the Ambersons decline. We have the superb passage when George walks home in a changed mood and a harsher city, with Orson’s foreboding voice on the soundtrack—whatever you feel about Welles, he spoke like a ruined angel. But then, really, the film curls up and dies.
Orson and his cast shot a lot more: what is now an 88-minute picture was intended to run 132 minutes. George and Fanny, so ill-suited, were to be left in the house, the last of the Ambersons, as it became a boardinghouse. The magnificence of the Ambersons had been eroded by the grim twentieth century, just as their city suffered from the invention of the automobile. The ease and grace are gone—the material of a great social tragedy—to be replaced by a trite and abrupt happy ending.
The film was shot happily enough, and Welles began supervising the assembly and the editing. But then, on February 4, 1942, he left for Rio de Janeiro. He had to leave then, to be in time for the Carnival. He was going south on a mission put together by the U.S. government and RKO. But he was going on the vaguest of orders: to make some kind of movie to improve relations between the United States and South America in a time of war. The government was supporting the venture but not paying for it. The money was studio money.
Welles began to film Carnival, an open party in which he carried on numerous affairs with Latin women dancers; Welles had a thing about dancers. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the editor, Robert Wise, and Welles’s manager, Jack Moss, did their best to supervise the final work on Ambersons. The film existed as Welles wanted it, in a version that was flown down to Rio for him to look at and refine. But then attitudes changed. RKO concluded that it had lost money on Kane. It was a little weary of its own campaign on behalf of “genius,” and studio spies pointed out that Ambersons was long, dark, and depressing. There was a preview of the film, with very mixed results, that prompted studio intervention in the editing.
Welles was aware of what was happening, and yet he was still filming Carnival stuff, no matter that the Carnival was over. He was warned, and he had no reason to take for granted the benevolence of the studio. People urged him to return, and he could have done so. But he stayed on, and soon enough the picture was taken out of Mercury’s hands and redone by studio people. The result is the more painful in that for over an hour it is easy to see what a film Ambersons was going to be. The script for the cut material remains, and there are even some stills. I am not alone in thinking that if Ambersons had been released in Welles’s version, it might now be recognized as the greatest film ever made—for this simple reason: it has a more direct emotional kick than Kane could ever claim, and one that registers on first viewing.
In 1942, as Ambersons opened (to failure), there were changes at RKO. George Schaefer was dismissed and replaced by Charles Koerner. He soon gave orders for all the cut footage from Ambersons to be destroyed. As far as is known, it was dumped off the Pacific shore. A hope persists that something might be found one day; sometimes pieces of old movie do come to light. One grail is that the version sent to Rio is still there, somewhere, in some attic or favela, waiting on film scholarship. It is one of the several legends of Orson Welles.
But we have to say that Welles could and should have given up Rio and gone back to Los Angeles to defend his own picture (if he believed in art, importance, and posterity). He might not have prevented the studio from butchering it, though Welles could be intimidating in person and he might have rallied support. At the least, he should have been in a position to save or steal a version of his cut for posterity. But he had such mixed feelings toward posterity.
He was his own worst enemy. He could get into fights where he should have known to back down. And perhaps he had a feeling that nothing mattered, nothing truly survived. This is the sensibility of Kane: accumulate your wealth and then bear witness as it is submitted to the furnaces. In the end, too, there is a reappraisal of meaning itself. The dying man says “Rosebud” and hopes his life will crystallize in eternity on that thread. But “Rosebud” is a gesture, a McGuffin, if you like, a trick the magician has for keeping our gaze off his hands.
So one film is “perfect” but self-enclosed. (Jorge Luis Borges called it “a labyrinth with no center.”) Another film promised to be richer but was destroyed. Is that sequence accidental, or is it part of the helpless authorship of Orson Welles? Is it his bitter, bleak insight into the punishing rewards for seeking art in an unkind business? Some old pros resented Welles’s original contract because they felt it defied the immutable laws of all filmmaking: do as you’re told, do it as a group, do it for the money, but do your best. Is it a commentary on the nature of film and America that the attempt has been hopeless? Such questions nag at the achievement, but we are left in his thrall: Kane and Ambersons together can break our heart; and Orson Welles is that uncanny and disconcerting mixture of genius and monster to be found in many great filmmakers.
Howard Hawks: The “Slim” Years
Nancy Gross met Howard Hawks on August 30, 1938. She was twenty; he was forty-two. She was born in Salinas, California, East of Eden country, and her father owned several fish canneries in Monterey. She was a beautiful convent girl, but a spirit of adventure and a sports car took her to the Furnace Creek Inn, a classy resort in Death Valley, not far from the Nevada border. There she met movie stars—William Powell (he called her the “Slim Princess”), Warner Baxter, David Niven, Cary Grant. N
ext thing, she was invited to San Simeon, and became friendly with its owner, William Randolph Hearst, and with Marion Davies. (Hearst was seventy-five in 1938 and Marion was forty-one.)
Very soon, Slim was in Los Angeles, and on that August 30 she had been taken to the fights by two men, actor Bruce Cabot, the hero in King Kong (“seriously dumb,” she said), and Cubby Broccoli (“truly intelligent”—he would make the Bond pictures one day). After the boxing they went to the Clover Club, the most fashionable gambling nightclub in town. She was dancing with Broccoli when a tall, gray-haired man, immaculately dressed, passed by. It was Howard Hawks, just a few months off Bringing Up Baby (a flop in its day). He was known as the “Silver Fox,” and he was watching her. Watching, it would prove, was Howard’s most loving attention.
He asked her to dance and then he gave her the usual line: So, she wanted to be in movies? “No,” she said, and she meant it, though in the end she would affect Hawks’s work more than any other woman. Hawks kept a little black book with the names and numbers of pretty women who did want to be in pictures, and he called on them sometimes. He asked Nancy to come up to his house for a swim the next day, and she accepted.
They were soon in love, and then he told her about Athole. Hawks had been married since 1928 to Athole Shearer, the sister of actress Norma Shearer and of Douglas Shearer, the chief sound recordist at M-G-M. It was Athole’s second marriage after a union with John Ward. They had had a son, Peter. But Athole was not always well. Norma would say that Athole had first been disturbed when so many Canadian guys they had known—they were from Montreal—were killed in the Great War. She was depressed. She took to her bed. She heard voices or ghosts.
Athole was very pretty. She appeared in a few films; she’s at the dance in Griffith’s Way Down East. It was in 1927 that Norma Shearer married Irving Thalberg. So Hawks had joined Hollywood society and the croquet set. His biographer Todd McCarthy is properly skeptical of any suggestion that Howard didn’t know about Athole’s condition. They had two children, Barbara and David, but by the time Howard met Slim, he told her his wife “was ill a great part of the time.” What did “ill” mean, especially when California law forbade the divorcing of certified spouses? Athole’s illness had not gone that far, but it is estimated now that she was bipolar.
You may feel this is more gossip than film commentary, but the way Howard Hawks looks at women, or fantasizes them into movie life, is at the heart of his work and of a larger yearning in movies. Athole Hawks lived until 1985, and spent much of her last years in institutions. It’s clear she was disturbed some of the time (but not all of it), and a husband’s infidelities can aggravate that. We know that Hawks had affairs in the 1930s—with actresses Ann Dvorak and Joan Crawford, say—and it’s evident that he was in the habit of “discovering” young women as radiant as Frances Farmer.
Hawks gave us some of the most arresting women in American film—beautiful, smart, brave, “independent,” it seems, yet ultimately obedient to the man’s dream. In His Girl Friday (1940), Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) is on the point of marrying someone else (a man resembling Ralph Bellamy), but her ex, Walter (Cary Grant), the rascal newspaper editor, will win her back. These women are often loners—like Marie “Slim” Browning (Lauren Bacall) in To Have and Have Not (1944), who contrives somehow to be alone on Martinique in the middle of war, under the guise of an actress no more than nineteen. This “Slim” is a million miles from Hemingway’s Marie in the novel, and famously Hawks warned Humphrey Bogart that Bacall would outdo him in insolence. Well, yes, if it’s cross-talk foreplay you’re interested in (and Hawks was wild for it), but the girl’s independence dwindles away until she’s ready to soft-shoe dance out of Frenchy’s place and go with her Harry into the new dawn.
To Have and Have Not comes on sultry tough, and we all know the film’s lines, with Bacall holding up a doorway in case it faints. It’s a film with marlin fishing, gunfire at sea, and taking risks with Vichy cops (especially the creepy Dan Seymour). But the film is as complete and serene a fantasy as anything Fred Astaire ever made, and it does keep edging toward a musical, led by the droll piano player Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael). Bacall for a moment had the reputation of a slinky noir girl with an acid tongue. Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?
This is the central film of the Slim years. There is by now an unshakable legend that, one day at home, Slim saw a picture of Betty Joan Perske in Harper’s Bazaar—of a fashionably dressed young woman outside a blood bank, with the look of a vampire—and tossed the magazine over to Howard. Maybe as the magazine was in midair the wife had second thoughts. Did she guess that Howard might take a fancy to his discovery?
The film was under way from that moment, and the machinery of Hollywood’s dream surged into high gear. Betty Perske was located. She was put under a personal service contract to Howard Hawks and taught to lower her deep voice. (She wondered if her Jewishness would be overlooked by the Hawks couple.) As a script developed, with Jules Furthman not bothering to keep a word of Hemingway, the man in the film would call the girl “Slim” and she would call him “Steve.” These were the pet names Howard and Nancy had for each other. Hawks started to ask Slim what she’d say in certain situations. Furthman admitted he took some of the lines from Slim’s lips—such as the whistling stuff. In Martinique, “Slim” ended up wearing a beautifully cut houndstooth suit exactly like ones Slim Hawks favored.
A rare game was being played, good enough for a Hawks comedy, in which a director is ready to fall for his actress but keeps his wife around to pretend it isn’t so. When Bacall and Bogie fell in love, Howard was taken aback. (Bogart was forty-five; Bacall was twenty.) The director said their romance was spoiling the picture. Bacall burst into tears, and Slim asked, “But what do you do, Howard, if you’re stuck on a guy? How do you handle it?”
Slim knew that difficulty. She had been torn over living with Hawks in 1938–39 and handling the awkward matter of Athole. But she went along with the compromise. She found Hawks not just sophisticated and dry but a complicated man who tried to make everything as smooth as his camera style. Slim began to see what directing called for:
If anything, he was slightly frightened of movie making, and I suspect, surprised that he was able to do it at all. He used to tell me that on the first day of shooting a new picture he would stop the car, get out, and throw up a couple of times on his way to the studio. That process would go on for about a week until he got into the rhythm of the work and the movie started rolling along…He just made movies. Although his talent lay in being able to tell a story, it always seemed to me that he told the same one over and over. The characters never had any intellectual reactions, only emotional ones. This always puzzled me because as a person, Howard’s emotional thermometer was stuck at about six degrees below 98.6. He was frozen there. He did not take emotion into any part of his existence; neither through his children, his wife, nor, I think, his work.
Now, that is film commentary. Nancy and Howard had a daughter, Kitty Steven, born in February 1946. Hawks had more affairs—Slim named Dolores Moran (the Free French wife Hélène de Bursac in To Have and Have Not, the woman “Slim” would like to anaesthetize). Then there was Ella Raines, who is in Corvette K-225. But Slim was restless, too. She and Ernest Hemingway noticed each other, and a crucial affair started in 1946 with the agent Leland Hayward, though not before Hayward had brought his new client, Montgomery Clift, over to see Hawks about playing Matthew Garth in Red River. Clift was wary of doing a Western, so Slim took him for a walk in the garden. He told her he couldn’t ride a horse, wear a six-gun, or walk in big boots. She said Howard and John Wayne would teach him those things—the task eventually fell to a wrangler named Richard Farnsworth. When they came in from the garden, Clift said, sure, he would do it. The shoot took off for Arizona, but Slim went with Hayward.
So Slim’s years stretch from Cary Grant teasing Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) to Joanne Dru starting off with Clift by slapping his face. And
in the middle there is the timeless screwball bickering of Bogart and Bacall, perhaps the sexiest talk in an American movie to this day. Howard Hawks could do a two-shot of a man and a woman, with her rubbing her knee (call it her lower thigh) and him telling her to scratch, that any halfway-sane censor would have stopped. And Slim presided over such relationships and scenes, though she saw the colder side of Hawks that was hidden on-screen. She also realized why he had been at the Clover Club that night: he was a chronic gambler; no one knows the inside story of Hollywood without understanding the gambling.
She wrote a book, Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life, with Annette Tapert (published in 1990, the year she died), and it includes this:
I don’t know which was more unpleasant, Howard’s gambling or his infidelity…Beneath that jaunty exterior, I think there was a great deal of sexual confusion and insecurity within Howard. When I look at the role of sex in his films and compare it with his life, it’s very interesting. The love scenes in the movies are invariably the same. There’s a terrible fight, the woman insults the man, he insults her back, she insults him again, and then suddenly they’re in each other’s arms and slashing round in the hay. This scenario was, I think, a way for Howard to put sex on the screen that didn’t make him want to gag. In his own life, he had a very tough time with tenderness or sentimentality. Even at the height of our courtship he was a tentative partner. Sex was simply a physical need that had no relation to the person he was with.
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