But still, they didn’t elect another chief in his place. They didn’t want him back, of course, and if he’d been able to manage it, they’d have put him in another canoe and shoved him out into the river again. They took him down to the river, and put him in a canoe, and pushed him out from shore and then they ran along the bank and wouldn’t let him land, until at last the current carried the canoe out into the middle, and then on down to the ocean, and he never got back. He was always killing people that way, and so at last the tribe decided that it wasn’t a good enough excuse for him that he was young and inexperienced-he’d have to go. “He was so proud that he wore iron shoes and he walked over people’s faces with them. “Vendonah was an unspeakable case,” Lucy continued. On one occasion, Lucy tries to explain to Eugene, by using a supposedly Native American legend, why she’s so attracted to George, even though he’s a character that the reader mostly wants to strangle: George forbids Isabel (his mother, remember) to see Eugene, and she dies without having had a chance to say goodbye to him. When Eugene, now a widower, and his daughter, Lucy, return to their “Midland town,” Eugene falls in love with the now-widowed Isabel, and George courts Lucy, who loves him but is exasperated by his behavior. Isabel spoils George outrageously, as the town predicts she will. His adoring mother, Isabel, had married George’s father, Wilbur Minafer, out of pique when her suitor, Eugene, showed up drunk one night and serenaded her. The protagonist is George Amberson Minafer, as insufferable a character as you’ll ever meet in fiction: proud, pig-headed, wielding class privilege like a whip–sometimes literally.
Put rather too simplistically, it’s the story of a declining family, the Ambersons, in a gradually industrializing town that’s passing them by.
Holt was good, but I still think that the young Welles could and should have played it. I didn’t know at the time that it was a brilliant film by Welles much altered in the editing room, or that Tim Holt played the part. Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersonsis a book I used to read and reread years ago, so much so that when I heard there was a movie with Orson Welles, I assumed immediately that he was perfect casting for George Minafer.
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