Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 28

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Popular Culture Review

marketing campaign had nothing to do with Henry James; rather it involved pro
moting Susan Hayward’s marquee strength and a non-Jamesian romantic story line.
At the start, producer Walter Wanger did not even intend to film a work
by Henry James; his original plan was to produce a Civil War-era film called Wash
ington Flyer. But when that project fell through, Wanger replaced it with The Lost
Moment, designed as a star vehicle for his protege, Susan Hayward, who was un
der contract with him. Wanger had just visited Europe and wanted to produce new
films to appeal to European tastes (Bernstein 233).
Nearly all of the film’s action takes place in a gloomy Venetian house,
built on a Hollywood soundstage. Although The Lost Moment can still be seen on
television as a “late show” light horror feature, it was no B-film: the cost was
$ 1,313,775 (Bernstein 444), and the studio boasted that the set featured Hollywood’s
longest spiral staircase and the largest fire to be filmed on a soundstage. Camera
man Hal Mohr created a Gothic mood that is described in the melodramatic theat
rical trailer this way: “The house of the Bordereaus in Venice—mysterious, for
bidding. To this house comes a young man—daring dangers he cannot fathom,
challenging forces he cannot understand” (theatrical trailer, laser disc. The Lost
Moment). The film’s look consists of a combination of deep focus photography,
low key lighting, and tracking cameras—^revealing the influence of Orson Welles
and contributing to the film’s eerie cinematic atmosphere.
The much-altered script version of James’s tale was written and sold to
Wanger by free-lance writer Leonardo Bercovici, who retained only James’s sur
face similarities: the Venetian setting, the three central characters, and the general
premise: a publisher’s quest to obtain a romantic poet’s old love letters. There can
be no doubt that Bercovici’s characters of The Lost Moment are not those of James’s
tale. The popularity of Susan Hayward’s name was the starting point for the film;
the immediate task was to find her a star vehicle, not specifically to try to adapt a
work of Henry James to film. Indeed, Hayward biographer McClelland remarks
that Henry James would have never envisioned Hayward, “a carrot-top from
Flatbush,” as Tina Bordereau. Film historian Charles Higham agrees that the cast
ing was strange; he imagines—like McClelland—^how surprised James himself
would be if somehow the author could see her cast in The Lost Moment. Amused
by the juxtaposition of mass and class elements, Higham parodies James’s own
style in this remark: “Can one in fact imagine James, eye glassily fixed, eardrum
quivering to the sound of peanut bags, seated, perhaps, in the loggia, gazing upon
the performance, say, of Susan Hayward as his protagonist in The Aspern Papers,
Miss Tina Bordereau? The thought, as it were, stuns” (95).
But by the mid-1940s, Hayward had stopped posing in swimsuits for ad
vertisements, and she was becoming more selective about her movie roles. Just
prior to The Lost Moment, she earned the first of her five career Oscar nominations