Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/569837
dga quarterly 63 bigger than it does in other directors' movies. But in Ambersons the editing doesn't always carry us along as it did in Citizen Kane, because Welles didn't have final cut this time. After a disastrous preview of a 131-minute version, edited by Robert Wise to the director's specifications, RKO began lopping off chunks of the film; Welles had left for Brazil to shoot It's All True, essentially abandoning final postproduction of Ambersons. Wise couldn't stop the bleeding all by himself, and the movie was released with a running time of 88 min- utes and a new, happier ending. Individual sequences are superbly fluid, but the rhythm of the whole isn't Welles': The film moves like a great dancer wearing shoes a size too small. With this movie—and, as it turned out, nearly every movie Welles directed for the rest of his life—the pleasure of watching is tempered by the knowledge that this isn't, really, quite what was intended, that it was once something better and fuller. His next two pictures, The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai, were commercial-seeming thrillers to which Welles brought perhaps more art than was strictly necessary, and the studios recut them both. They're films in which the director's mas- tery is visible primarily in set pieces, such as the hall-of-mirrors shootout at the end of The Lady from Shanghai, which is among the most exhila- rating scenes in all of film noir. After one more stab at proving himself to Hollywood—a hast- ily shot, on-the-cheap film of Macbeth (1948), which came and went as quickly as it was made—Welles took off for Europe, where he hoped to find more creative freedom. He did, sort of, but the backers of his independent productions turned out to be only a little less capricious than the Hollywood honchos he was fleeing. His next film, a daringly beautiful Othello (1952), had to be shot over a period of several years: Money ran out, locations proved unavailable, costumes failed to arrive in time. It took all of Welles' let's-put-on-a-show theatrical enthusiasm to get the pictures and the sounds on the screen (in addition to playing the title character, he wound up dubbing quite a few of the other actors' lines), but the result is glorious, an open-air tragedy whose images are at least within shouting distance of Shakespeare's words. The nutty thriller Mr. Arkadin (1956) followed, a film that right, and his comment helps explain not only why Welles' filmmaking continues to thrill his fellow artists, but also, per- haps, why it annoyed the money men on whom the very exis- tence of these works of art depended. Producers, investors, and studio suits, then as now, tend to worry about how many ideas the paying audience can handle. Welles himself had, at least at the beginning of his career, a rather touching faith in moviego- ers. "I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand," he once said. "The problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world. That must be the feeling of the moviemaker." He certainly had that feeling when he made Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, in which he went to extraordi- nary, exuberant lengths to interest his audience in some pretty demanding material and, for the time, very unconventional dramatic techniques. The dizzying multiple-flashback con- struction of Kane wasn't what viewers were used to, but in a way that's the least of the demands the movie made of them. More challenging, perhaps, was the visual style Welles devised with his cinematographer, Gregg Toland, which featured unusually long takes, extreme depth of field, and compositions that placed characters against backgrounds in unexpected ways, at surprising (often low) an- gles. Not a scene in Citizen Kane feels obligatory, merely functional. There's no place of rest here, no letup in the movie's insistence on the viewer's attention, no still point in Welles' turning world. The Magnificent Ambersons, about a Midwestern family in decline, is less ebullient, statelier, more contemplative, but Welles—with a dif- ferent cinematographer, Stanley Cortez—is still clearly enraptured with the medium, determined to push past its boundaries and bring the audience with him. The lighting is rich, painterly, and the track- ing shots are, if anything, even longer and more elegant than those in Citizen Kane. He seems to be redefining how we see characters in film space. Here, and throughout his career, he favored wide-angle, 18.5 mm lenses, whose short focal length makes for a fuller, more inclusive image. Most of the action of The Magnificent Ambersons takes place indoors, in a rambling, fading mansion, and the rooms, as Welles films them, look vast and mysterious, like the impossible architecture of dreams. The squarish Academy frame (1.37:1) seems PHOTOS: (TOP) EVERETT COLLECTION; (BOTTOM) COLUMBIA PICTURES/PHOTOFEST The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) The Lady from Shanghai (1947)