The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

This is one of the most haunting and chilling sequences ever committed to film. The comeuppance of George Amberson, an event much anticipated throughout the course of Welles’ superior film, rings foul and hollow. George is reduced to just a fraction of his former confident, assured self, and now just the ghost of arrogance past, drifting through the emerging city in a state of gruesome disenchantment.

Welles dissolves between shots dreamily, the interlacing of the structures weaving a hideous complexity, truly a glimpse of things to come. The stark silhouettes look forward to the opening of Othello some years later, striking the very same funereal tone – but this is an unceremonious conclusion of some kind of life.

As George kneels, he isn’t so much praying, as clinging – to the bottom rung onto which he has tumbled. He grimaces his plea in the same exasperated wince as another George – Bailey that is, of It’s a Wonderful Life – and as Welles sneaks back, almost out of shame, George’s comeuppance doesn’t give us the satisfaction we imagined, so naked and comprehensive has his dismantling become. Welles has pulled the wool over our eyes here, as he so often tends to do. He makes us desire something so strongly, something that, when it is handed to us – splayed, humiliated, ripe for mockery – we are the ones who deserve admonishment ,we are the all George Amberson now.

Paolo Cabrelli