A family portrait, set in the deep spaces of a nineteenth century home: as in a painting, its setting becomes an evocative, if not definitive, portrait of its era. An ingenious narrative structure spans many years, following the fate of the Ambersons, one of those families whose self-made riches waned, rather than doubled, with the advent of the technological age. They are viewed through the prism of an outsider, the young Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), who loses his true love, Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello) to a loveless marriage of status. Upon her husband's death twenty years later, Isabel endeavors to renew her affair with Eugene, only to be unhappily blocked by her egotistical son Georgie (Tim Holt). It is a film filled with regret: regret for frustrated love and regret for the coming industrial age which "darkened our town into a city." A more delicately rendered portrait than Citizen Kane-because it is about more delicate characters-like the strawberry shortcake which Georgie devours in a key scene it is almost sinfully rich and layered in image and sound. Welles incorporates a Greek chorus of townspeople, a circular perspective and a cubist one, still-lifes and silence, and meaningless repetitions that make non-sequiturs of simple statements. The film has a dreamlike quality with a dream's wicked comeuppance.