True Art?

The Welles films are examples of true cinema art. I don't pretend for a moment that I understood the implications of Journey into Fear—it was a difficult film—and consequently I thought that The Magnificent Ambersons was slightly the better film. Each, of course, depended strongly upon atmosphere, and got it over, too. As in Kane, the story was subordinate to the acting, and the acting, by the Mercury Players, superb. Welles himself appeared in Journey into Fear, playing a dipsomaniacal, cunning, Turkish police chief. Incidentally, the story concerns the endeavours of the Turkish Government to get an American munitions man out of the country without assassination by Fascist agents—seems rather lacking in point at the moment.

The Magnificent Ambersons, a strong psychological drama, is in very different vein. The story is the old one about the woman who has to choose between son and lover, but it certainly is not trite. The technique, again, is that of atmosphere; some of the individual frames in the early part of the film might have come straight from your grandma's photograph album.