Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 27
Rewriting Henry James’s TheAspern Papers:
A Study of Martin Gabel’s The Lost Moment
The popularity of the works of Henry James on film in the 1990s proves
that he is anything but a liability at the movie box office: three features based on
his works were produced within twelve months in 1996, and the budget for Jane
Campion’s The Portrait o f a Lady reached $24 million. As film critic Helen Meany
of the Irish Times comments: “With the titles of 19th century novels blazoned
across every cinema foyer this autumn, we could be forgiven for thinking that
going to the pictures has become a good opportunity to catch up on some reading”
(16). But it has not always been this way. The first film to acknowledge a Jame
sian source and to use commercially the name of Henry James in its marketing
campaign was Director Martin Gabel’s film The Lost Moment (1947)*. Produced
by Walter Wanger in Hollywood for Universal-International, it was a loose adapta
tion of James’s tale The Aspern Papers. Pitching this Jamesian “class angle” to
theater showmen and moviegoers, however, was never simple. Indeed this early
film’s production and promotion were surrounded with nervous risks and compro
mises; The Lost Moment's casting, production, story, and subsequent critical re
sponse were full of artistic evasion and commercial ambivalence.
In the “exploitation” materials for The Lost Moment that Universal-Inter
national supplied to theater showmen, the new Jamesian “class angle” is explained
this way in the press book: “What you have to stress is that this is the first film of
the distinguished books by Henry James.” One comer of the lobby cards and film
posters features a drawing of a book with the title TheAspern Papers on the cover
and a caption that reads “adapted from the world-famed novel by Henry James.”
But James’s works were really not famed among the popular audience,
especially not The Aspern Papers. James himself was “hardly a household name
among moviegoers” in 1947, as Hollywood historian Matthew Bernstein notes
(235).^ The James connection between The Aspern Papers and The Lost Moment
could not, therefore, be the only thmst of Universal’s ad campaign. UniversalInternational assured theater showmen that The Lost Moment could be marketed to
both class and mass audiences, but the two campaigns needed to be kept separate.
Tension between class and mass appeal is addressed in the press book’s
advertising strategy: “Class angle: You don’t have to be afraid of ‘highbrow’ or
‘literary’ angles provided you can segregate themfrom your main campaign" (ital
ics in original). The “highbrow angle” suggested by the studio for reaching the
“class” audience was to write letters to literary groups and to ask book stores and
libraries to set up displays of James’s books. In contrast, the separate “mass”