Lucy

My favorite lines of dialogue from Lucy were cut from the film; they were spoken during the "Snow Ride" scene just before the group begins singing "The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo":

LUCY: "I wonder if we really do enjoy it as much as we'll look back and think we did...I feel as if I must be missing something about it, somehow, because I don't ever seem to be thinking about what's happening at the present moment. I'm always looking forward to something...thinking about things that will happen when I'm older."

I think this dialogue is a key to understanding Lucy's character. She is always looking toward the future whereas George's desire is for things to remain as they were. She has an ideal she is projecting for her future self that George is not comfortable with; he would rather remain in the past and stay with his first relationship - his mother (part of the Oedipal subtext Tarkington worked into his novel which is reflected in Welles' film). This incompatibility results in Lucy's ambivalence. I believe Lucy's late change of heart (in the original edit, we would have learned in the film's final scene that George and Lucy are to be married) is based on her desire to fulfill her father's wish of having a relationship with Isabel. However, crucially, George no longer has any power at this point, so one can imagine that Lucy will have complete control over their future lives together.

Here is what I though for most of the film, but first a question if someone knows: Did Lucy and George know each other when they were young or not? At the ball he tells both her and her father he remembers them and Isabel says both times he does not...

So my take on Lucy: She led George along because her father wanted to marry his mother. I don't think she liked George at all. When she cries at the drug store scene (a scene I understand was added by RKO later) I think it's because his mother is going away, not because George is, and she is sad for her father. She totally tortures him over his desire for her. She even seems to enjoy torturing him. That's why I ask if she knew him when she was young, because to me she really seems to want him to get his comeuppance too.

Then later when she walks with her father and she tells about the old grove of trees named for this young Indian chief I think that kind of says everything about what she thinks of George. Of course then she can't remember the names she used two seconds later so she comes off like a con-artist too.....

This film was difficult to get the hang of in a lot of levels. The cuts and re-editing RKO did really messed up the beginning of the film making it hard to understand who was who and what was going on. But I am not sure even the original version this screenplay wasn't out of tune in many ways.

The print for the DVD was not in good shape either.
I think as with some old films a lot of techniques that were revolutionary then are things audiences are quite used to seeing now, so sometimes those are lost on viewers who don't watch with an appreciation for the era the film was made. However I also find Welles extremely heavy handed in his direction.

Anyway, my two cents on Lucy.