Lost and Found: Miss Tatlock's Millions (1948)

I interrupt my consideration of The Magnificent
Ambersons for this entry in the Classic Movie
Blog Association's Comedy Classics Blogathon.
For other posts in the blogathon, click on the
link; you'll find my colleagues at CMBA holding
forth on comedies from City Lights to Pillow
Talk, from Ball of Fire to The Producers,
and on stars from Jean Harlow to Gene
Tierney. There are a lot of famous names
and revered titles on the agenda; trust
me to pick one you never heard of.

Miss Tatlock's Millions (1948) is another one of those pre-1950 Paramounts now owned by Universal that I used to see regularly in late-night TV syndication, like Night Has a Thousand Eyes and Alias Nick Beal. That's where I discovered it in the late 1960s -- our local CBS affiliate dipped freely into the Paramount package, and after local news signed off at 11:30 p.m. it was movies every weeknight until the wee hours. Tatlock was one of the titles I used to search for every week in the Late Late Show listings as soon as we got the TV Guide home from the supermarket.

If (as it's sometimes said) Charade and Witness for the Prosecution are the best Hitchcock movies Hitchcock never made, then Miss Tatlock's Millions is one of the best Preston Sturges movies Preston Sturges never made. Of course Sturges (like Hitchcock) remains peerless, and I wouldn't necessarily rank Miss Tatlock's Millions up there with The Lady Eve or Sullivan's Travels. But The Great McGinty? Christmas in July? Definitely. (And for that matter, miles ahead of The Sin of Harold Diddlebock or The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend.)

For starters, just take a gander at -- feast your eyes upon -- the roster of names on this poster. That's what I call a pretty deep bench. I'll get to all of them in time, but let's begin with the fine print way down there at the bottom.

Charles Brackett's name probably rings a bell, and well it should. He was Billy Wilder's writing partner for 13 years; they turned out scripts for other directors (Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, Midnight, Ninotchka, Hold Back the Dawn) and, once Billy turned director, for Wilder himself (The Major and the Minor, Five Graves to Cairo, The Lost Weekend, and their mutual masterpiece Sunset Blvd.) Brackett teamed almost as often with young Richard Breen (Breen was 30 in 1948, Brackett 56), and five years later they would share an Oscar (with Walter Reisch) for writing the first Titanic with Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck. Brackett and Breen came to Miss Tatlock's Millions fresh from collaborating with Wilder on A Foreign Affair. (And by the way, for info on another Brackett-Breen collaboration, hop over to Tales of the Easily Distracted and read DorianTB on Henry Hathaway's Niagara, another terrific Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock didn't make. But I digress.)

Miss Tatlock's Millions begins, like Sullivan's Travels, with a midnight brawl between two men, this time in a seedy room rather than on a speeding train. Also like Sullivan's Travels, the opener turns out to be a movie-within-the-movie tease. Not on the screen, but on the set: One of the two men crashes through a window, rolls across an overhang, falls on his back in the street below, and a voice shouts, "Okay, cut!" The director is Paramount ace Mitchell Leisen ("I had hoped he'd hit his head on the chimney coming down, but I guess that's the best we can get."), and the man who took the tumble is stuntman Tim Burke (John Lund), doubling for star Ray Milland. Leisen and Milland here make in-joke cameos, a favor to Brackett in return for ones he's done them: scripts for Leisen (Midnight, Hold Back the Dawn, To Each His Own), roles -- and an Oscar -- for Milland (The Major and the Minor; Arise, My Love; The Uninvited; The Lost Weekend). (And say, check out that nameless script girl standing between them; eager to make an impression, or what?)

As he leaves the set, Burke is approached by Denno Noonan (Barry Fitzgerald), who found him through a picture file at Central Casting. Noonan is the social secretary (i.e., "keeper") for one Schuyler Tatlock, the eccentric (i.e., "barking mad") scion of the wealthy Santa Barbara Tatlocks, shipped off by his concerned (i.e., "embarrassed") family to the safe distance of the Hawaiian Islands. That is, he was Schuyler's keeper -- until two years ago, when Schuyler, indulging his weakness for matches, burned himself to death while Noonan was in the village indulging his own weakness for Irish whisky. Noonan never told the family, just stayed there enjoying the sunshine, tropical breezes, and $500-a-month allowance checks. But now Schuyler's grandparents have both died, and Noonan must produce him for the reading of the will; he wants to hire Burke to impersonate Schuyler, "a thousand dollars in 48 hours and no physical discomfort whatsoever." Noonan insists the family won't know the difference -- "They haven't seen him in ten years and they didn't look at him then." Looking at a snapshot, Burke admits there is a strong resemblance. Of course, he'll have to darken his blonde hair, adopt the glasses Schuyler always wore...

...and put the proper expression on his face.

Burke is still dubious, but as Noonan wisely points out, it beats falling off buildings for 150 bucks a pop, so before long they're motoring up the Coast Highway toward Santa Barbara. That's where Burke gets his first glimpse of the Tatlock estate. "Just a sweet little family cottage," Noonan explains, "with 22 bathrooms." "How come they didn't buy the Pacific Ocean too?" asks Burke. "They would've," Noonan says, "only they couldn't landscape the other side."

In that sweet little cottage up there, the heirs of Grandfather and Grandmother Tatlock have started to gather. Already there is Schuyler's younger sister Nancy (Wanda Hendrix), who lived with her grandparents, joined by her uncles Gifford (Dan Tobin) and Miles (Monty Woolley) and Miles's wife Emily (Dorothy Stickney). Emily is sweetly engrossed in her embroidery, but the two brothers are already licking their chops. Miles calculates that after all the assorted taxes and fees, their parents' estate will come to "only" about $6 million. "As a practicing communist, you should be pleased." "Gifford's not a communist, Miles dear," Emily says; "he just likes to see his name on letterheads." "Oh, I admit you're not one by conviction," says Miles. "You just haven't the guts to face being a rich man." Nancy is appalled at their naked greed and goes for a walk in the vast garden (with its $900-a-month watering bill).

Noonan comes in with the ersatz

Schuyler, announcing that Schuyler

is "a turtle" today, and he refuses

to talk to anybody but

other turtles...

 ...so Miles, Gifford and Emily have

no choice but to follow suit -- only

to have "Schuyler" change the game

and guffaw at their silly poses.

Next to arrive is Nicky Van Alen

(Robert Stack), Schuyler and Nancy's

cousin. He's a shallow, conceited Polo

Lounge Lothario who's never given a

second's thought to anything but himself

-- but he's the first one to notice that

there's something different about

Schuyler.

Finally, Burke/Schuyler meets 19-year-old Nancy, who greets him affectionately and remembers how he was "so sweet to me when I was little." Burke is speechless, not sure how to respond, and Nancy turns dolefully to Noonan. "He's worse, isn't he?" Nancy is beautiful, fetching and open-hearted, and it's a real effort for Burke to maintain Schuyler's idiot grin. This job is getting more complicated by the minute.

The last relative to arrive is imperious Cassie Van Alen

(Ilka Chase), Nicky's mother and Miles and Gifford's

sister. But when the will is finally opened and read,

there are a couple of surprises in store for the

acquisitive branches of the Tatlock-Van Alen clan.

Grandfather Tatlock, after a few small bequests to

the servants, left his entire estate to "my beloved

wife Annette Tatlock, for distribution to our heirs"

-- never suspecting that she would outlive him by

only an hour. And what nobody suspected until

now is that Grandmother Annette left a hand-written

holographic will leaving "everything I possess" to her

unfortunate grandson Schuyler -- and as things turned

out, everything she possessed at her death consisted

of the entire Tatlock estate, lock, stock and barrel.

Schuyler gets absolutely everything.

The next morning at breakfast, Miles, Cassie and Gifford fawn over their new favorite nephew, then ignore him as he climbs under the patio table, complacently sure that their conversation will go over his head -- literally and figuratively. From his perch at their feet, Burke hears the three siblings cut a deal: Miles and Gifford will have themselves made Schuyler's trustees, and will then settle a generous allowance -- "Say, $100,000 a year for life" -- on Nancy, which Cassie will gain control of by marrying Nancy off to Nicky.

Once Cassie has explained the facts of life to Nicky, he turns on the oily charm to Nancy, nurturing the crush she has had on him since childhood. "It just hit me all of a sudden," he preens, "I haven't been giving you a break. Did a miracle happen overnight? You've stepped right up into my class. I could show you around with a lot of pleasure."

That night after dinner, Nicky turns up the heat over candlelight and cocktails in the greenhouse. Meanwhile, Burke prowls protectively (and jealously) in the trees overhead, keeping an eye on the snake Nicky's progress. Suddenly he slips and falls through the glass roof, landing flat on his back at Nicky and Nancy's feet, in a real-life reprise of the stunt that opens the picture. This time, however, he's injured and momentarily stunned. Before his head can clear, he speaks to Nancy, forgetting to keep up the babbling Schuyler act. Nancy is thrilled, convinced that the shock has knocked Schuyler into his right mind, and that she has "a real brother" at last.

In the days that follow, Nancy appoints herself Schuyler's personal therapist, moving him into the room next to hers, nursing him back to health, planning to take over his education and ease him into adult society. The aunt and uncles scramble to ingratiate themselves with their newly-competent nephew. And Nicky pouts and fumes that suddenly Nancy has no time for him.

Things quickly get complicated, especially for Burke, who has fallen in love with Nancy. For Nancy too, who can't imagine why all at once her lifelong crush on Nicky pales beside her affection for her "brother". (Here the script plays with sexual taboo in much the way Brackett and Wilder did in The Major and the Minor: In the earlier picture, Ray Milland was disturbed by his feelings for the "child" Ginger Rogers, and the movie got away with it because we knew she was really an adult. In the same way, we know here that "Schuyler" isn't really her brother -- but Nancy doesn't.)

Things begin to tumble out of control, just as Burke did when he fell through the greenhouse roof. Aunt Cassie finds a mysterious bottle of hair dye under the mattress in Noonan's room, which sets her thinking, and doing a little homework. She still has a few tricks up her sleeve.

Well, I think that's about as far as I want to go; mustn't spoil everything. Miss Tatlock's Millions is one of the forgotten pleasures of 1940s Hollywood. I'm told that it was a moderate success at the box office with a loyal cult following (rather similar, I imagine, to the response to the original Peter Cook-Dudley Moore Bedazzled in 1967). A quick glance at the picture's user reviews (including my own) on the IMDb testifies to the fondness for it among those who saw it, either in theaters in 1948 or (like me) later in its TV syndication.

Miss Tatlock's Millions was directed by veteran character actor Richard Haydn, who also appears (under the name "Richard Rancyd") as the family attorney who breaks the good news to "Schuyler" and the bad news to Miles, Cassie and Gifford. As Lawyer Fergel (accent on the second syllable, please), Haydn uses the patented hyper-nasal, super-enunciated voice for which he was famous, the same voice he used as the Caterpillar in Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland ("Ah-whooo...aaaarrrrrre...Ah-yooo?"). Haydn could be just as memorable without the voice, most noticeably as "Uncle" Max Detweiler in The Sound of Music in 1965. (I've heard many people bemoan the fact that Christopher Plummer was passed over for an Oscar nomination in that picture, and I agree with them. But even more unjust, I think, was the failure to nominate Haydn as best supporting actor. It should have been the capstone of his career.) For Tatlock -- the first of only three pictures he directed -- Haydn adopted a style and pace less headlong and frenetic than Preston Sturges at his best, but still sprightly, giving his sterling cast plenty of room to stretch out and enjoy themselves. (Brackett and Breen's sparkling dialogue gave Monty Woolley one of his signature lines, often quoted by people with no idea of where it came from: "California, the only state in the Union where you can go to sleep under a rosebush in full bloom -- and freeze to death.")

Haydn could take considerable pride in the performance he got from John Lund. Lund's career never quite fulfilled its early promise; he seems to have spent much of it -- certainly at Paramount -- being palmed off as a taller version of Alan Ladd. Certainly, he shows here a flair for semi-slapstick comedy that was seldom given rein, and never exploited as fully as Brackett, Breen and Haydn do here. Miss Tatlock's Millions is, not to mince words, a riot, and it's largely thanks to John Lund.

Miss Tatlock's Millions is harder to find than it was in 1948, or during the 1960s and '70s on TV, but it hasn't entirely dropped off the face of the earth. It briefly appeared on VHS during the Video Stone Age. Still, it was rare enough that I considered myself lucky to score a 16mm print on eBay about six years ago. No sooner did I do that than it came out on DVD-R from Hollywood's Attic (as a general rule of thumb, if you want to ensure that a movie comes out on DVD, talk me into buying a 16mm print of it). That disc appears to have been transferred from a 16mm syndication print, but it's decent enough; the pictures in this post are frame-caps from it. But even that is out of print now, though you can still (as of this writing) find a few copies on Amazon. Miss Tatlock's Millions is long overdue for a proper DVD transfer from original elements, or at least a 35mm print -- a transfer that does justice not only to the performances, but to Victor Young's music and Charles Lang's cinematography. 

How about it, Universal?

Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 1

It happens to be my personal opinion that Citizen Kane is Orson Welles's second greatest movie; I prefer The Magnificent Ambersons, and by a considerable margin. Maybe it's because I first discovered Ambersons on late-night TV in the early 1960s, a good four years before I first saw Kane. I hadn't yet heard all the tales and legends behind the making (and editing) of the picture, so I didn't know I was supposed to regard it with sorrowful disdain as The Great Saint Orson's might-have-been masterpiece yanked from his loving hands and mutilated by the mindless paws of lesser, crasser men. All I knew was what I saw on the screen, and I thought it was a terrific movie. I still do.

It's not my purpose here to try to dethrone Kane in favor of Ambersons; that's a fool's errand and I know it. Everybody who considers Citizen Kane the greatest movie ever made -- i.e., just about everybody with an opinion on the subject -- has good and sufficient reasons for saying so, and I wouldn't dream of trying to talk them out of it. Personally, I've always found Kane ... well, dazzling, impressive, virtuosic and all that, certainly, and a singular achievement any way you cut it. But for me it's a rather cold movie that I rather coldly admire, like a display of fireworks seen from afar.

In Ambersons the fireworks are much closer and consequently quieter -- and they're very personal. The Magnificent Ambersons was a very personal picture for Orson Welles, too; quite a bit more personal, I think, than Citizen Kane had been. And I suspect that's why he took what happened to Ambersons so personally; his bitterness was palpable any time the title was mentioned during the last 43 years of his life. "They destroyed Ambersons," he often said, "and the picture destroyed me."

Pardon me, but nobody destroyed The Magnificent Ambersons. If the picture is not as great as it might have been -- and I do not concede that point -- I say Orson Welles deserves as much blame for it as anyone. I suspect that on some level he knew that, and I think his bitterness over it must have come from chagrin as much as righteous indignation -- maybe more.

But before I get too deep into barstool psychology, let's review the facts.

The Magnificent Ambersons, first of all, was a novel that
won Booth Tarkington the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes in
1919 (the second came three years later for Alice Adams).
Born in 1869 in Indianapolis, Tarkington was successful right
out of the chute with his first novel, The Gentleman from
Indiana, published when he was 30. He was popular and
prolific, turning out some 53 novels, plays and nonfiction
books, including one published posthumously in 1947.
Like many of his contemporaries, he has drifted out of
fashion, but in his day he was nationally famous and
well respected; his Penrod books, idealized yarns of
mischievous childhood, gave Mark Twain's Tom and
Huck a good run for their money, and in 1922 the
Literary Digest proclaimed him "America's greatest
living writer".

Tarkington's current obscurity is undeserved. Certainly his
two Pulitzer Prize winners are as good as they ever
were. The Magnificent Ambersons was the middle
volume of a trilogy Tarkington called Growth (the
others: The Turmoil ['15] and The Midlander ['24]),
and is the only one of the three that remains in print.

Tarkington's inspiration for The Magnificent Ambersons was the town where he lived much of his adult life (and where he died in 1946): Woodruff Place, named for James O. Woodruff, who owned the 80 acres where the town sat, about a mile-and-a-half northeast of downtown Indianapolis. Woodruff Place was characterized by wide avenues designed for horse-and-buggy traffic, multi-tiered fountains at the intersections, pseudo-European statuary posed under the magnolia and oak trees that lined the expansive streets, and stately, even pretentious upscale homes. Most stately and pretentious of all was Woodruff House itself. Here's a postcard image of the house in its heyday (it was demolished in the 1930s); anyone who has read Tarkington's novel (or seen Welles's movie) will readily recognize the prototype of the Amberson Mansion, Tarkington's "house of arches and turrets and girdling stone porches".

Woodruff Place began in 1872 as a tony suburb for the prosperous merchants of Indianapolis, a parkland refuge from the soot and smoke of the growing city. It was incorporated as a town in 1876, even as Indianapolis crept out to engulf it. (James Woodruff, meanwhile, didn't live to see the full flowering of his municipal namesake, dying at 38 of "congestion of the brain" in New York while planning an educational around-the-world cruise in 1879.)

New homes continued to rise for the rest of the 19th century, but the coming of the automobile accelerated both Indianapolis's growth -- by 1907, it was the fourth-largest manufacturer of cars in the world -- and Woodruff Place's decay. As cars made commuting more practical, residential suburbs sprouted ever farther from the city center, and by 1910 the town of Woodruff Place was surrounded on all sides by Indianapolis. Affluent citizens followed the city's spreading outskirts, the industrial inner city grew, and the grand homes of Woodruff Place were subdivided into apartments, sometimes as many as eight or ten, for the burgeoning blue-collar population. Finally, in 1962, Woodruff Place's long struggle for independence ended when it was annexed by Indianapolis. Today it is on the National Register of Historic Places and a designated preservation district by the City of Indianapolis.

Much of Woodruff Place's decline came after even Booth Tarkington was dead, but the handwriting was on the wall decades earlier as he mapped out his Growth trilogy. For this second volume, Woodruff Place became Amberson Addition (Tarkington's description is unmistakeable), while James Orton Woodruff was transformed into the leonine Major Amberson (and permitted to live to a ripe old age). Tarkington saw what was happening to Woodruff Place, and he chose to portray it as reflected in the decline of a single family through their failure to cope with the changing times. And Tarkington's symbol of that change was the automobile.

Magnificence, Tarkington writes, is always comparative; the magnificence of the Ambersons dated from 1873, when Major Amberson made his fortune, and it lasted "throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city". The Ambersons and their doings dominate the town's activities and its conversations; everybody knows what they are up to and cares what they say, think and do. Major Amberson has six offspring, but only three of them figure in Tarkington's plot: sons George and Sydney and daughter Isabel. Isabel in turn has two suitors: careful, quiet Wilbur Minafer ("a steady young businessman and a good church-goer") and George's best friend Eugene Morgan -- dashing, charming, and a little wild.

One night, Eugene gets a bit too wild. In a state of inebriation while trying to serenade Isabel, he stumbles through a bass viol, reducing it to splinters and himself to a mumbling heap. Humiliated by his "making a clown of himself in her front yard", Isabel refuses to accept his apologies or even to see him, and two weeks later announces her engagement to Wilbur. The wedding is a grand Amberson affair, the honeymoon as staid and careful as the groom, and Wilbur and Isabel move into their new house, a wedding present from the Major next door to (and almost as impressive as) his own, and they live there with Wilbur's unmarried sister Fanny.

Isabel is a good and faithful wife to Wilbur, but she doesn't really love him. A town dowager predicts that all her love will go to their children, "and she'll ruin 'em." The dowager is only partly wrong: Wilbur and Isabel don't have children, they have one child.

By the time he is ten years old, George Amberson Minafer, the Major's only grandchild and the apple of his adoring mother's eye, is a spoiled rotten brat, lording it over local citizens and strutting around town as if he owns the whole place -- which he assumes, by right of birth, he will someday. As a teenager he high-hats and bullies his supposed friends in a "secret club" they have formed when they dare to elect someone else president. The idea that he may be making enemies never enters Georgie's mind; it's other people's job to curry favor with him. He dismisses anyone not an Amberson as "riffraff". Among the solid citizens of the town, more than a few long for the day this haughty young prince will get his "come-uppance" ("Something was bound to take him down, some day, and they only wanted to be there!").

So much for prologue. The Magnificent Ambersons really begins when 19-year-old George Minafer, now grown into a strikingly handsome young man, comes home from school for the Christmas holiday. His parents and grandfather host an elaborate formal soiree in his honor at the Major's mansion. It is "the last of the great long-remembered dances that 'everybody talked about'" -- because, although the Ambersons may not realize it, their town is already growing too large for "everybody" to talk about anything.

At this party George comports himself according to his idea of noblesse oblige, pretending to remember people when he doesn't (and, with some of his former boyhood friends, pretending he doesn't know them when he does). One of the people he pretends to remember is none other than Eugene Morgan, now a widower with an 18-year-old daughter, returning to town for the first time since before George was born. George doesn't know the history between his mother and Eugene, of course, but there's something about the man that he doesn't quite like.

Eugene's daughter Lucy, however, is another matter. George likes her very much; he is instantly smitten. Lucy, for her part, takes a liking to him as well, despite his rather smug and grandiose airs, which, to his consternation, she finds slightly amusing.

Eugene spends the evening dancing with Isabel and George's Aunt Fanny and talking over old times with Uncle George, the Major, and his old rival Wilbur. Fanny -- who, like many young women back in the day, was quite taken with Eugene -- revels in his return, and in a quieter way, so does Isabel.

Young George's suspicions are aroused when he learns that Eugene, who left town years ago as a struggling lawyer, has turned inventor and intends to establish a factory in town manufacturing horseless carriages. George insists that those noisy, unreliable machines will never amount to anything and suspects that Eugene is trying to weasel his way into the family's graces to get the Major to invest in his fly-by-night operation. When Fanny defends Eugene, George teases her about setting her cap for him. Fanny angrily berates him for his "mean little mind", and George is amazed to realize he must have struck a nerve.

George stifles his mild dislike for Eugene as he continues to court Lucy, never quite sure where he stands with her, but finding her so much more interesting than the "silly" girls he grew up with. Eugene, meanwhile, becomes a regular visitor in the Minafer home, taking Fanny and Isabel, and sometimes Uncle George, on frequent outings in his automobile. For all of them it seems like old times, which both amuses and unsettles young George.

Some time later, the first crack in Major Amberson's vast fortune appears when Uncle Sydney and his wife Amelia -- insufferable snobs -- decide that the town isn't fit for a "gentleman" to live in, and pressure the Major to give them their share of his estate now rather than make them wait to inherit it in his will. Uncle George holds that the estate can't handle being broken up so soon, and in the ensuing squabble Amelia makes catty allusions to rumors going around about Eugene and Isabel. Young George, his latent antipathy aroused, is alarmed, but Aunt Fanny, herself infatuated with Morgan, pooh-poohs the idea, while Uncle George dismisses it as the idle gabble of the malicious and greedy Amelia.

During young George's senior year at college, Wilbur Minafer dies, the victim of a listless constitution and his worries about a business that died just before he did, taking all the Minafer money with it. Wilbur's death therefore leaves Fanny penniless and at the mercy of her Amberson in-laws. Isabel and George agree that Fanny should continue to live with them, and they assign Wilbur's life insurance money to her to give her something of a nest-egg. Still, she remains bereft, insecure and emotionally fragile; when Georgie returns home after graduation and teases her anew about Eugene Morgan, she is quickly driven to tears.

Also on his return from college, George is appalled to discover that the broad lawn between the Amberson Mansion and his and Isabel's house has been subdivided by the Major to build five smaller houses as rental properties. George's aesthetic sensibilities are offended; even more offensive is the idea of strangers -- riffraff -- interloping on Amberson property. Uncle George fails to impress on his nephew the idea that perhaps the Major needs the money. Later, when George asks his grandfather to buy a larger two-horse carriage, or even a four-in-hand, the Major temporizes, then mumbles something about helping George get through law school. George fails to make the obvious connection; he worries that the Major is getting senile.

Eugene Morgan continues a frequent visitor at the Amberson and Minafer homes, taking Isabel and Fanny -- sometimes the Major, or Uncle George, or young George too, but always Isabel -- for drives in his motorcar. Georgie, for his part, prefers buggy rides with Lucy, but his courtship is not going well. Whenever he presses her to become engaged, she sadly parries his advances. Finally George gets her to admit that she is concerned for her father's approval and uneasy about George's reluctance to "make something of himself". George is affronted; why should he make something of himself when he's already an Amberson? The very suggestion that he enter some profession insults him. He becomes quarrelsome, and he and Lucy are estranged.

That same evening, on their front porch, as Fanny and Isabel chat, George daydreams of Lucy begging his forgiveness, promising she will never listen to her father again, that she now dislikes him just as much as George does. This is followed by another, less pleasant fantasy: He imagines Lucy surrounded by young men -- the same ones he bullied and dominated when they were boys -- and laughing gaily, giving no thought to him. Riffraff! George continues to stew over his foundering romance with Lucy, and what he sees as Eugene's meddling in his personal life. (Everything is always about George Amberson Minafer.)

One night, when Eugene comes to dinner --
without Lucy -- George's resentment boils
over. As Eugene and the Major chat about
Eugene's flourishing automobile factory,
George blurts out that automobiles are a
useless nuisance; they'll never amount to
anything and had no business being invented.
In the awkward silence that follows, the Major
chides George for his tactlessness. Eugene's
answer is worth quoting because it has become
-- partly due to the abbreviated version of it
that appears in Orson Welles's movie -- the
most famous passage from the novel:

"I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles. With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can't have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that George is right, and that the spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree with him that automobiles 'had no business to be invented.'"

 

Eugene excuses himself and leaves, while Isabel, Fanny and the Major wonder at George's rudeness. Isabel asks George why he dislikes Eugene so, but he denies disliking him -- or liking him, for that matter. He affects a pose of lofty indifference, although he is slightly perplexed when Aunt Fanny hastily whispers to him that he has "struck just the right treatment to adopt".

Some time later, when George, still brooding over his break with Lucy, again snubs Eugene, Fanny sees it and comes to George's room to congratulate him. She knows exactly what he's doing, she says, but she doesn't. In fact, she has let her own frustrated dreams of marrying Eugene Morgan poison her, and the poison festers as she sees long-buried feelings blossoming again between Eugene and Isabel. Now, misunderstanding George's motives, she says she understands that he's only trying to protect his mother's reputation, that he'd give up Lucy in a minute if it was a matter of Isabel's good name.

George is thunderstruck. In his self-absorption he hasn't given a thought to Eugene and Isabel, but now, badgering the sputtering Fanny, he learns that Aunt Amelia was right, there has been talk about them, and it has only increased since Wilbur's death. Fanny thought he already knew, but in fact she's the one who has told him. Now she tries to restrain him, but he flies into a fury.

George storms across the street to confront Fanny's friend Mrs. Johnson, a notorious gossip. Imperious as always, he demands to know who has been slandering his mother's name, but she indignantly orders him out of her house. When George turns to his uncle, Uncle George is appalled at what George has done. Doesn't he realize that he's only thrown fuel on the fire? Gossip is never fatal until it's denied, he says. Worse yet, in his nephew's eyes, he appears unperturbed at the thought of Eugene and Isabel marrying; why shouldn't they, he says, if they're both free and care about each other? Young George calls the idea "monstrous".

It is clear to Georgie that it's up to him to defend his mother's good name -- the Amberson name -- not to mention the memory of his father (whom he barely noticed when he was alive). When Eugene comes to the door to take Isabel driving, George intercepts him, refuses to let him in, tells him he is no longer welcome, and slams the door in his face.

Isabel waits in vain all afternoon for Eugene to come for her. Instead, late that evening, her brother George arrives, takes her into the parlor and closes the door. Fanny stops Georgie from barging in on them; She knows Uncle George is telling Isabel what her son has done.  Too late, Fanny realizes the damage she has done, and is aghast. She realizes that she's been a fool; she never had a chance with Morgan, and wouldn't have had, even if Wilbur had lived. She was only letting off steam, and now look what she's done.

Uncle George has brought a letter from Eugene pleading with Isabel to stand up to her son for the sake of their happiness. But George remains adamant, and the heartbroken Isabel can't bring herself to go against his wishes. She breaks it off with Eugene once again. "This time," he laments, "I've not deserved it."

The next day George encounters Lucy downtown. It is clear she doesn't yet know about the scene with Eugene. She is friendly and cordial, but she keeps the conversation light and trivial, which frustrates George. He had thought losing Lucy would be "no great sacrifice", but now that he sees her, and she offers no hint of their former intimacy, he knows otherwise. Reminding him of their quarrel, she says since they can't "play nicely", they'd best not play at all. He tells her that he and Isabel are going away soon -- indefinitely, perhaps permanently -- and he may never see her again. She expresses casual regret but wishes him "ever so jolly a time". Stung, he stalks off. Only when he is gone does Lucy show her true feelings, nearly swooning inside a nearby shop. When she gets home, she finds Fanny Minafer waiting for her, and at last she hears about what George has done to her father. Immediately after Fanny leaves, Lucy burns George's pictures and all his letters.

The next day George and his mother leave on a round-the-world tour. Fanny has warned George that Isabel's health is not good, but he refuses to believe it, says she's the healthiest person he knows. In their absence, real estate values in Amberson Addition decline sharply, so much that the Major is unable to rent all of the new houses he had built.

One evening, relaxing on the veranda, Fanny and Uncle George fall to talking about money-making opportunities in the face of the dwindling Amberson fortune. Old Frank Bronson, the Major's lawyer, has told George about a new company planning to manufacture automobile headlights; with the proliferation of motorcars like Eugene Morgan's, this could prove to be a lucrative investment. Fanny and George agree to consider putting some money into the company, agreeing also not to invest more than they can afford to lose.

They ask Eugene's opinion, and he advises caution, but by then Fanny and George have "the fever" and see the headlight company as a sure-fire way to get rich quick. They both "plunge" on the company, forgetting their resolve not to invest too much. It's a decision that will have serious consequences.

Eugene Morgan's factory continues to prosper. Soon he and Lucy are able to move from the modest house they have been renting into a luxurious new mansion which Eugene has built in a new suburb of the city, farther from the center of town and less vulnerable to the urban smoke and soot that have blighted Amberson Addition. George Amberson comes to see them after a visit to Paris where Isabel and young George are staying. The elder George tells them he was alarmed at the evident decline in Isabel's health; he tells them also that his nephew refuses to see it. He says he sensed that Isabel wants to come home, but that Georgie, without actually using force, refuses to let her. One night, Amberson says, Isabel expressed a wish to see her father once more, and it struck him that his sister was more worried about the state of her own health than about the Major's.

Finally, after nearly a year and a half abroad, even young George can see that they must return home now if his mother is ever to withstand the journey. As it is, the trip home is so arduous that by the time they arrive Isabel is too weak to walk a step, and George has to carry her up to her room. A doctor and nurse have been summoned and are waiting. Fanny, Uncle George and the Major are desolate, understanding -- as young George does not, quite -- that Isabel is on her deathbed.

Eugene Morgan hears, and comes to see Isabel, but George again refuses to let him in; if it weren't for Morgan, he says, none of this would have happened. When Isabel learns that Eugene has been there, she whispers that she would have liked to see him -- just once. The next morning she is dead.

Young George is dazed and devastated; he had been clinging to the forlorn hope that she might get better. Even a month later, he is still answering the unspoken reproaches he imagines coming from Uncle George and Aunt Fanny. "What else could I have done?" Before long, his question becomes, "If I was wrong, couldn't someone have stopped me?" Fanny tells him, bleakly, that no, nobody could stop him; he was too strong, and Isabel loved him too much.

On some level, George seems to understand that his mother died of a broken heart, and that it was he and not Eugene Morgan who broke it. And even in his wretched grief and denial, he certainly knows this: He refused his mother's dying wish to see Eugene one last time.

With Isabel's death, the fall of the House of Amberson gathers a terrible momentum. Major Amberson withdraws into his own private contemplation of mortality, where his son and grandson can no longer reach him. The headlight company where Uncle George and Fanny put so much money fails, never having resolved the technical flaws in the product. No one can find a clear title to Isabel's house, the wedding present from the Major so many years ago; it seems the Major neglected to transfer the deed to Isabel or to register it with the county land office. Nor is the Major any help; his mind seems elsewhere. The two Georges hesitate to question him on the matter, but they hesitate too long; one morning a servant finds the Major dead in the easy chair by his bedroom window.

Between the money Uncle George invested in the headlight company and the share that Sydney and Amelia took (which turns out to have been the only share that was really worth anything), the Major has died virtually penniless. Sydney and Amelia, now living like royalty in their Italian villa, decline to help.

Young George loses his mother's house and land, and is able to clear only about $600 from the sale of Isabel's furniture and clothes. Uncle George, thanks to his political connections, lands a minor consulship in South America, but even then he must borrow $200 from his nephew to make the trip to his new home. At their last meeting, before boarding his train, uncle tells nephew that he's always been fond of him -- hasn't always liked him, but always been fond. You've had some hard blows lately, he says, and you've taken them like a man. There may be others in this town who are fond of you too; don't be too proud to turn to them. And with that he is gone; both men know that they'll probably never see each other again.

George's only prospect now is an $8-a-week job as law clerk to Frank Bronson, with the prospect of on-the-job training, eventually to become a lawyer himself. He and Fanny must vacate the Minafer home, and Fanny has found a place for them in a boarding house across town where some of her old acquaintances are living. But when Fanny and George look closely at their finances, they find that, for all intents and purposes, they have none. Fanny had in fact, despite her assurances to the contrary, invested every penny she had in the headlight company, and now it's gone; she has only $28 left to her name. George, after dismissing the servants and staking his uncle, has only about $200 left. The boarding house is going to cost, at a minimum, $100 a month. And George will be making $32.

George tells Frank Bronson that he can't take the job, and he hasn't time to wait to become a lawyer. He needs something that pays well right away. Bronson protests, but George explains that, well, he has much to atone for in his life, and he can't really make it up to the people he owes it to. The next best thing is to behave decently to poor Fanny, whom he has never really treated very well. Now George has heard that there are well-paying jobs for men in dangerous professions -- handling chemicals or explosives, things like that. Bronson reluctantly agrees to help George find such a job: "You certainly are the most practical young man I ever met!"

All this time, Lucy still has feelings for George, and she indirectly admits as much to her father. He doesn't tell her that he has learned that George has found a job handling nitroglycerine at a chemical plant -- a job with a high mortality rate. An old friend tells Eugene that George seems to be trying to do the decent thing for "old Fanny", and he hints that he (Eugene) might find a safer job for George. Eugene is in fact a silent partner in that chemical plant, and could arrange something without George ever knowing. But Eugene, still bitter, is unwilling to do George any favors.

On one of his Sunday walks, while Fanny is at church, George takes a melancholy stroll through Amberson Addition. The once-stately houses are now rundown, soot-stained and seedy, converted into apartment buildings, boarding houses, shops, lodge halls and the like -- or, like the Amberson Mansion and Isabel and Wilbur's old house, demolished, waiting for the rubble to be carted away. Even the newer houses the Major built as rental properties have been pulled down. The fountains at the intersections are dry and crumbling, the statues lining the streets corroded and pitted. All that's left of the family name, he muses, is the name of Amberson Boulevard itself. But a corner streetsign disabuses him: Amberson Boulevard has been changed to Tenth Street.

Returning to the boarding house, George remembers a book he saw in the parlor, a municipal tome chronicling the 500 most prominent families in the history of the city. He takes the book down, opens to the index, and looks over the names listed there: Abbett, Abbott, Abrams, Adam, Adams, Adler, Akers, Albertsmeyer, Alexander, Allen, Ambrose, Ambuhl, Anderson...

George stares a long time at the page. Five hundred families, and there's nothing between "Allen" and "Ambrose". He puts the book back on the shelf. Something has happened that has been a long time coming: Georgie Minafer has had his come-uppance -- "three times filled and running over." But all those people who so longed for it are not there to see it. "Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him."

In the end, it's not the nitroglycerine that gets George. Of all things, it's an automobile. One Sunday, walking downtown, he remembers seeing a young lady stepping into an expensive motorcar. He thought at the time that it might be Lucy, but he couldn't be sure. Now, standing in the street, he remembers back to that day, and while he's standing there thinking about the auto in his memory, another auto in the here-and-now runs him down, breaking both his legs. As George lies there in a haze of agony, the driver jumps out of his car and begins jabbering to police that it wasn't his fault; he's sorry for George but it wasn't his fault, and he has a witness. As George lies there dusty and bloodied, waiting for the ambulance, he mutters, "Riffraff!"

Eugene Morgan reads about George's accident in the paper while on his way to New York on business. His bitterness toward George is unchanged by the young man's misfortune, but somehow in his reverie he senses the presence of Isabel, and can see her wistful eyes, more than at any time since her death. In New York, on an impulse, he goes to see a spiritual medium, a woman he had visited once before and dismissed as a fake. Now, however, the woman gives him an ambiguous reading that faintly suggests a message from Isabel: A beautiful lady, she says, wants him to "be kind".

Has Eugene subconsciously fed cues to the woman that enabled her to lead him on this way, or was she really in touch with Isabel? Eugene can't be sure, but when he returns home he goes straight from the station to the hospital where George is convalescing. He isn't surprised to find Lucy already there.

Nor is George surprised to see Eugene. "You must have known my mother wanted you to come, so that I could ask you to -- to forgive me."

Eugene takes George's hand, and Tarkington's novel ends thus:

But for Eugene another radiance filled the room. He knew that he had been true at last to his true love, and that through him she had brought her boy under shelter again. Her eyes would look wistful no more.

 *                     *                     *

That, in a large nutshell, is the novel Orson Welles undertook to film in the autumn of 1941. It was not the first screen adaptation of Tarkington's book; there was Pampered Youth from Vitagraph in 1925, with a title change that suggests they were trying to lure the Clara Bow and Colleen Moore fan clubs. The picture evidently survives only in fragments, two of which you can see here and here on YouTube. The letter and spirit of the novel were evidently low priorities for writer Jay Pilcher and director David Smith; the picture climaxes with Eugene Morgan saving Isabel from a burning building, resulting in reconciliation with George and happily-ever-after all around. 

Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre took a different tack. I have illustrated this post with pictures from Welles's movie, but the synopsis is of the original novel. I have gone into considerable detail for reasons that I think will become clear as we discuss what happened when Welles brought his version to the screen. We'll move on to that in Part 2.

To be continued...