Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 32

26 Popular Culture Review In order to emphasize Tina’s personality changes, in Bercovici’s script, when the niece is “Tina” with her hair up, she is cold and cruel (“Close the drapes,” she scolds her maid Amelia [Joan Lorring], “the sun is beginning to come into the room.”). When Tina lets her hair down, she becomes the other part of her split personality and believes she is her aunt “Juliana.” This contrast. Variety com mented, is “abrupt.” In her “Juliana” states, she falls into passionate, romantic spells that seduce the American publisher, whom she imagines to be the poet Ashton. (“Hold me close, Jeffrey,” she says to Lewis when he enters her room). So irresist ible is the film’s Tina in her “Juliana” spells that she draws the publisher into joining her in what amounts to romantic role-playing. Tina becomes “Juliana” and the publisher pretends to be Jeffrey Ashton, the same poet whose letters he seeks. When she says, “Tell me why you love me, Jeffrey,” Lewis replies to Tina, “I love you because your name is Juliana and because of a thousand other things I cannot say.” In sharp contrast to the film’s glamorous Tina, James’s publisher/narrator finds the tale’s Tina to be quite unappealing: “Her face was not young, but it was candid; it was not fresh, but it was clear. She had large eyes which were not bright, and a great deal of hair which was not ‘dressed,’ and long fine hands which were— possibly—^not clean” (10-11). Obviously, Henry James is not describing someone who looked like Susan Hayward. A number of reflective voice-overs by the publisher provide the film’s point of view. Throughout the film Lewis interjects his comments on the story, and he makes these remarks from the solitude of his library—presumably in America—thirty years after his experiences with the Bordereaus in Venice. Open ing the film, a fluid camera moves through Lewis’s dimly lit library, showing the influence of Orson Welles’s tracking camera shots and low key lighting. As the camera tracks, it lingers briefly over a portrait of “the great poet Jeffrey Ashton,” which appears prominently in the mise en scene; appropriately, it is a painting of Shelley, in keeping with the original source material for James’s own tale (the story of Captain Silsbee who attempted to obtain Claire Clairmont’s personal let ters from Shelley). The camera comes to rest in front of a bookshelf containing two volumes: the collected poetry and the collected plays of Jeffrey Ashton. In close-up we see an empty space on Lewis’s bookshelf as he describes a book of love letters that never was. Both the tale’s and film’s narrators are unsuccessful in their respective quests to publish the poet’s letters. As the film’s Lewis reflects, “In that empty space there might have been a book of the greatest love letters that have ever been written.” The film does not incorporate much of James’s language, but here the narrator expresses remorse that is similar to the tale’s final scene. James’s pub lisher also considers the portrait of the poet that hangs over his writing desk and “can scarcely bear” the loss of the poet’s papers (96). Curiously, though, the film’s