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