Jno.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 457, 25 March 1948, Page 24

Jno.

(Universal-International) FeOR so long as it is likely to be found in my recollection, The Lost Moment will be remembered principally for the light it threw on Hollywood’s interpretation of the word "adapted." According to the credits, the film is based on Henry James’s' short story The Aspern Papers, but I should not be surprised if acute students of James’s writings | find some difficulty in tracing the vesti- | gial remnants of the original. | The plain fact of the matter, of | course, is that Henry James didn’t know | a good story when he found one. We | have it on his own authority that he | found the plot of The Aspern Papers in Florence. Jane Clairmont, the halfsister of Shelley’s second wife (and the mother of Byron’s daughter Allegra) had actually lived there in aged seclusion in his own day and the story was current that arr American had attempted to get lodgings with her in the hope that she possessed Shelley documents to. which he might gain access. "Legend," James records, "mentioned a younger femdle relative of the ancient woman as a person who, for a queer climax, had had to be dealt with; it | flickered so for a moment and then, as | a light, to my great relief, quite went out. ... It had flickered enough to give me my ‘facts.’ Nine-tenths of the-artist’s interest in them is that of what he | shall add to’ them, and how he shall | turn them." ) It is not to be denied that Henry James turned them fairly neatly. The Aspern Papers is the well-told tale of the ancient Juliana Bordereau, one-time | intimate of the poet Jeffrey Aspern, of Bragd grand-niece, the fadeq and ineffectual Miss Tina,-and of the young American who insinuates himself into their dilapidated Venetian palazza in the hope of pocketing the Aspern love-letters. But what James was too obtuse to realise was the inevitable effect upon the unfortunate Miss Tina of a life lived in such close proximity to the Ashes of Passion-as "represented by the elderly relative and the critical mass of correspondence. Schizophrenia, as every Freudian (and,-most currently successful Hollywood scriptwriters) knows, would be a foregone conclusion. This piquant complication, quite ignored by James, comes into its own in‘the screen version. Filmgoers will discover that Miss Tina, far from being a plain dingy person, is (by day) a forbiddingly handsome young woman with a rather attractive fin-de-siécle New Look, who appeats . not only to be mistress of her fate and captain of her soul, but underwriter as well. That, of course, is where we fall in. By night a strange metamorphosis takes place’ Tina swipes a whopping big intaglio ring from the finger of her he!pless great-aunt, blossoms out in billowing taffetas (I think thet’s the word for it) and becomes herself the great Juliana Bordereau. "Tina, dead among the living, and living among the dead!" as the: young American puts it when he comes upon her. And, of course, she thinks he’s Jeffrey Aspern (or Ashton, as the ‘poet has been rechristened) come ‘back to reclaim her, thereby adding a further convolution to the* plot and an extra piquancy to the inevitable romance. For, of course, when Tina is played by Susan

Hayward, the young American (Robert Cummings) can hardly recoil in involuntary horror at the thought of marriage with her-as his literary prototype did. In this way Hollywood repairs Henry James’s gravest omission: the provision of a happy ending. True, the Aspern (sorry, Ashton) papers go up in smoke, Juliana dies dramatically and all possibility of publishing profits die with her-but what are these compared with Love? And what is Henry James compared with Fréud (as interpreted by Hollywood)? There were moments in the film when I suspected that Mr. Cummings was troubled by these wague misgivings, or that he had learned the original story instead of the script and wasn’t quite sure what was going to be sprung on him next. He had my sympathy. ; For all its intellectual pretensions, the picture is only average entertainment. In it, I found evidence of but one artist-the make-up man who transformed Agnes Moorehead "into the frail husk of old Miss Bordereau. ‘In all other Tespects Zhe Lost Moment was more notable as a lost opportunity.