Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 36
30
Popular Culture Review
was “so misunderstood at the time as to have had no issue” in 1947 (170).
The film’s harshest critic was Susan Hayward herself, who said in 1972,
“Their name for it may have been The Lost Moment, but after I saw it, I called it
The Lost Hour and a H a lf (qtd. in McClellan 88). At least one reason she was
soured on the film was her incompatibility with Martin Gabel. According to Hay
ward, Gabel—experimenting as a Method-style director—annoyed and angered
her when he secretly instructed the cast and crew not to speak to her on the set in
order to achieve his idea of an ideal performance from the star. Gabel’s plan
failed. She recalls how his “methods” affected her moods: “At one point, I lost
my temper and crashed a lamp over his head, and to this day I’ve never felt sorry”
(88). After The Lost Moment, Gabel returned to acting, never to direct another
film. As critic Philip Jenkinson said of Gabel, “In a way it was his lost moment,
too” (17). Despite its flaws and ambivalence, as an acknowledged James adapta
tion, The Lost Moment had no precursors; it preceded all radio, television, stage,
and operatic adaptations of TheAspern Papers as well as all acknowledged James
adaptations to film.^ It is currently available on video tape and laser disc—over
fifty years after its theatrical release. Indeed, The Lost Moment stands in film
history as an odd harbinger, marking an early point in the history of the cinema’s
taste in Henry James.
Jamestown Community College
Craig Frischkom
Notes
The author would like to thank Alan Spiegel, Amy Rupp, the Film Study Center and Film
Still s Archive o f the Museum of Modem Art, the British Film Institute Information Service,
the Katharine Jackson Carnahan Fund for the Humanities, and the Mark Diamond Research
Fund of the Graduate Student Association at the State University o f New York at Buffalo.
1. Berkeley Square playwright and screenwriter John Balderston— a Henry James enthu
siast— inspired Michael Redgrave to write his 1959 play based on TheAspern Papers.
See Sir Michael Redgrave’s In My Mind’s I: An Actor’s Autobiography, New York:
Viking, 1983. Since its debut, Redgrave’s The Aspern Papers has been revived a
number o f times in America and Britain.
2. What was gaining popularity in late 1947 was a stageplay based on James’s Washing
ton Square: Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s play The Heiress opened on 29 September
1947 (280 performances). Two years later William Wyler directed a film version for
Paramount in 1949, starring Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift, and Sir Ralph
Richardson. See “Adaptations of Henry James’s Fiction for Drama, Opera, and Films.”
American Literary Realism 4 (Summer 1971): 268-78 and J. Sarah Koch’s “A Henry
James Filmography,” Henry James Review (19) 1998: 296-306.