The Magnificent Ambersons

The available, 85 minute long version of Welles 1942 tour
This film is magnificently elegant; it surely counts as one of Welles' least 'jarring' pictures, for all its wonderful images, there are few (though a few) of his sotospeak 'smashes' into the audience. Yes, there are close-ups, the wide angle, and a few jaw-dropping moments. But generally the form does not scream out at one; it rather creeps up, has the kind of melancholy elegance of the characters, with smart pans, creeping cranes, and restraint at showing action (what happens to Lucy at the drugstore? Her face, when we first see her, is also obscured).
Perhaps the film this runs most closely alongside is Resnais' 'L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad'. Obviously the decaying class, here given rather more analysis than Resnais, but also in many compostions. The use of two figures, standing in those huge open spaces. The Amberson house, like Resnais' hotel, is an incredible creation. Dappled, harsh lighting across wide open spaces, hangings and carpets and staircases all decaying. The staging here works with the camera; elegantly pushing them along. The stasis is presented with quite literal stillness; actors rooted to the spot. Yet the staging is wonderfully inventive; dead on 180' cuts pushing the action, tacks along that give a fluidity, the scene moving in one direction with the change to tableaus, the one actors move that cuts across everything (George crossing Eugene's eyeline on his last visit to Isabel). Their is, in classic Wellesean mood, some immense depth here; though conversations can well be had on one plane, something than then crop up in the background in a startling, but not 'in your face' way.
Welles does not pack his characters (in depth) on top of each other as much here as in 'Kane'. Their is more of a widescreen sense, of distance, of genuine balance of a horizontal space. He uses a variety of different compostions, long and portrait, all careful, changin, and, with the lighting, striking. Notable here is a scene of Isobel and George, side-on (as commonly done in this film), full does to each other, and slow movements. Time is witnessed.
Some scenes in this film are particularly special. An early one, as Eugene and Lucy leave the party, where Welles tracks slowly, creating different, moving tableaus, in half the frame, as in depth we have others leaving in the other section. Their is the famous long, long take, almost neo-realist, of Fanny and George's kitchen scene, before the intruder changes the callibration. This has the feature of contingency. Their are some remarkable camera movements, not shcoking but creeping; the pan to follow up the stairs, and around the rooms of the party.
What Welles exploits to a great extent in this film is lighting. It is often harsh, and constantly changes (even, unrealistically, in shot-reverse kind of schemas). Welles is not scared to plunge his leads into darkness, often with hard backlighting in perpendicular compostions. As they move, they move from one area of light to the other; the house if given physiogonomy as they burst into a patch of harsh light, striking dramatic moments. It can be hard, front on, to. The characters, alone in the emptying mansions rooms, are at once stuck in, part of it, like dust, but also stand out. This is often as they are the opposite; the light to the shade, the dark to the light, of the area they are in, but share a tone with the other side of the room (another feature of Welles' use of a wider screen).
The script here is explosive, and, with the few slightly out-of-character Welles' monologues, almost always perfect. Each line comes laced with historical and class truth, but at the same time speak directly to the situation. This comes surely from years spent devising the characters; maybe it's Tarkington's work, but then Welles' has the credit, and he can't have had so long.... it is subtle, but usually to the point.
The story proceeds, especially in the first half, with a wonderful sort of sliding-downhill momentum. It is a story of people caught in circumstances outside of them (more Eisenstein than classic Hollywood), and is a story about economics, but always through their lens. It jumps around near the end, and the last, non-Welles scene, is almost a joke. The themes of the decay, the new age where the children of the old, the crazy, obsessive, jealous bonds of family tie more than anything. This is no 'make way for the new'; it is a class rather than an age that is disintegrating with little dignity (Fanny surely has more than George). They are at once unsympathetic, and in a sense are trashed by Welles; yet we see their sheer inability, any kind of self-determination, so caught in a web, even those of a different class can recognise, and, if not quite sympathise, ask; 'why should we take pleasure in this boy's pain?'. It is attending a funeral.
The use of voiceover, the story at the start (breaking in diagetic/ non-diagetic) gives, (with camera angles) the critical distance needed. We are with this film, rather than in it. Yet we are inside the mind of someone, or something; Welles. And as the story breaks up to the studio edit (of course, this might not have been noticed if we hadn't known this before, but I'll continue my little story), we nearly take the film's side against itself; we are truer to the film more than the concrete film is true to itself. As the wonderful end credits, Welles, though always self-aggrandising, being peculiarly quiet, almost modest, one has the feeling that there is no position outside the dying we have seen so masterfully displayed; we too, the cinematic dreamer, who at least hopes to identify, who dreams of being on the same side as Welles; that side is dying too.