Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 35

The Aspern Papers and The Lost Moment

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Several reviewers pointed out that Bercovici had vulgarized James’s tale.
The critic for Newsweek said, “Frankly, the admirers of Henry James will have
cause for complaint and the average moviegoer will probably complain of bore
dom” (69). Reviewing for Time, Brad Darrach accuses Bercovici of substituting
James’s “perfect” plot with an “extended charade”; he writes that as a critic James
would have “delicately strangled” the film if he himself were reviewing it. Darrach
also addresses the class audience (“the few who know James well”) and warns
them that they will not find the horror elements “divertingly atmospheric” as some
non-Jamesians might. Other critics who disliked the film itself expressed their
appreciation of Wanger’s bold attempt to adapt a James work to the screen and
market it. Motion Picture Herald applauded Wanger for going “all out for art” and
appealing to the “over-30” age group (3894). In a 1977 essay for Films in Review,
Bodeen called The Lost Moment a “really bold stab at Henry James” (164) even
though it was miscast and unsuccessful.
In an otherwise negative review that finds the film to be “dull,” “lifeless,”
and “verbose,” Hollywood Reporter weakly tried to acknowledge Walter Wanger’s
intent: “To catalogue it now as a dud would be to discount ruthlessly the consider
able effort that went into the preparation of this first filmization of a James work”
(6). Like Film Daily, the Hollywood Reporter concludes that the problem with the
film is really a problem with the Jamesian source, a source that the film critic only
pretended to have read. Once again confusing Bercovici’s melodramatic story of
a sensual, schizophrenic niece with James’s cerebral tale of a cold, obsessive pub
lisher, the critic remarks vaguely: “A literate, beautiful, and compelling book (The
Aspern Papers), its plot line tends to become ridiculous under the cold scrutiny of
the camera.” Like so many others, the critic unwittingly reveals that he has not
read James’s tale when he attributes Tina’s “mental quirk” to James. Her mental
illness, of course, was an invention of Bercovici’s, as was Tina and the publisher’s
romance. Hollywood reviewers of The Lost Moment, then, simply tried to write
about the source without reading it. Hence, James was blamed for Bercovici’s
flaws, and this ignorance surely reinforced the common belief among the masses
that a book by Henry James was a “hard read.”
In Films in the Forties (1968), Charles Higham admits that Hayward and
Cummings were miscast, calling them a “preposterous pair” (106). He grants,
nevertheless, that the film is “pleasurably civilized”; The Lost Moment, he writes,
deserves to be appreciated, along with its flaws, as “one of the most exquisitely
made of all Hollywood’s misguided forays in ‘art’” (115).^ Tom Milne of the
British Film Institute wrote one of the most recent and insightful responses to the
film in 1983. Milne appreciates its “spirit of Poe” and the way that “its psychiat
ric basis is richly embroidered with Gothic resonances” (171). Milne’s essay ap
peared in the BFI bulletin’s “Retrospective” section, where he notes that the film