Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

Seraherrera The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

HotToastyRag Robert Cummings is a literary publisher who would love to get his hands on the lost love letters of a famous fictional poet. The recipient of the letters is still alive, but at 105 years old, she's a recluse in her Venice home. Bob travels to Venice, pretending to be a mere lodger in their home, but secretly hoping to find the letters, steal them, and then publish them. The woman's young niece, Susan Hayward, is extremely strict, cold, and suspicious of Bob. There's definitely something strange about the house, which was the last place the poet was seen alive. . .The Lost Moment is definitely creepy, a film to be added to Halloween movie nights for those of you who don't partake in the blood-and-guts franchises. Agnes Moorehead plays the old woman, and for most of the film, all you see of her are her ancient, gnarled hands. She's filmed in shadows or from behind, but the expression on Bob's face shows how decrepit and horrifying she must look. There's such an element of mystery and spookiness about the house, from the moment Susan Hayward opens the door. Prepare to get goosebumps! You won't know who to trust, or what they're hiding. For fans of Suzy, she looks very beautiful in this one; it'll come as no surprise she vied for Scarlett O'Hara!

secondtake The Lost Moment (1947)A highly romanticized version of the dark and complex story by Henry James called the Aspern Papers. It's glorious in many ways, ultra moody and mysterious. It lacks some of the delirious gloss and superb acting of, say, "Rebecca" though the similarities are clear. The leading actor, an American in Venice, is maybe the weakest link, because he comes off as more of a naive innocent than a slightly lost and duplicitous conniver, one who gets seduced by his own mission (a common James theme). But Robert Cummings has the advantage of letting the story and the scenes dominate. The leading woman, playing a complex role, is Susan Hayward, a better actor though the main side of her role is to be steely and lifeless, which she does very well. Agnes Moorehead plays the old woman, and you won't recognize her, she's so heavily made up.It's 1947 and still the studio era, so the entire film was shot in Hollywood, but the sets are fabulous, and the photography and lighting makes the most of it. It's beautiful, above all.But what about the story? A great and somewhat fantastic love story. Or is it so fantastic? It seems some of the time that there is something magical happening, a crossing of time zones. But our protagonist discovers the truth, and falls in love, and the problem gradually changes. The original goal, of discovering some key lover letters from fifty years earlier, seems secondary, though it rears its head (suddenly) at the climax.Some people might find this film "old fashioned" or a little false, somehow, with the actors playing types rather than real people. I mean, they are convincing, and compelling for sure, but they only have the qualities needed for the plot. But other people will be able to buy into all this as style, which it is, and let it take over. It's a curious and beautiful enterprise, whatever its flaws.

James Hitchcock Henry James, with his interest in minute psychological examination of his characters and his complex, ornate prose style, has never struck me as being the most cinematic of writers, but in fact there have been some decent film adaptations of his work, such as William Wyler's "The Heiress", based upon his "Washington Square", "The Innocents" from his "The Turn of the Screw" and three Merchant-Ivory productions, "The Europeans", "The Bostonians" and "The Golden Bowl"."The Lost Moment" is, as far as I am aware, the earliest James adaptation for the cinema, made two years before Wyler's film. It was the only film ever directed by Martin Gabel, better known as an actor, but not particularly well-known even for that. It is loosely based upon James's "The Aspern Papers" and is set in Venice in the early 1900s. Lewis Venable, a publisher, arrives in the city in search of the love letters written by the poet Jeffrey Ashton, believing that if he can secure them and publish them he will make a fortune. Ashton (Jeffrey Aspern in James's story) was an early-19th-century Romantic poet, an American contemporary of Keats and Shelley, who disappeared mysteriously in 1843. Venable discovers that Ashton's mistress, Juliana Bordereau, is still alive at the age of 105 and concludes that the letters must still be in her possession. Using a false name, he rents a room in her palazzo.Living with Juliana is a strange young woman, Tina, whom she describes as her niece, although there must be more than one generation between them. Tina is beautiful but austere, dressing in black and wearing her hair severely scraped back, and makes it quite clear that she does not trust Venable. Yet there is another side to her character. One night Venable finds Tina with her hair loose, wearing a white, old-fashioned dress of the mid-nineteenth century, playing the piano. She declares her love for Venable, but calls him "Jeffrey" and clearly believes him to be Ashton and herself to be the young Juliana.Ever since at the early seventies, the era of Visconti's "Death in Venice" and Roeg's "Don't Look Now", it has been virtually obligatory for films set in Venice to celebrate the city's visual beauty. In the 1940s, however, even after the war in Europe had finished, tight budgets often precluded location shooting, and "The Lost Moment" is not a film of that sort. It is made in black-and-white rather than colour, with most of the action taking place indoors inside Juliana's gloomy palazzo. The atmosphere is one of claustrophobia, of Gothic melancholy reminiscent of that found in a number of other American films from the forties and early fifties, such as Hitchcock's "Rebecca" and "Notorious", Max Ophuls's "Caught" and Robert Wise's "The House on Telegraph Hill". (As in "Rebecca", the house turns out to be hiding a dark secret).Although there is a rational explanation for the strange events surrounding Tina- namely that she is suffering from some psychiatric illness- other, unearthly, explanations might suggest themselves to the viewer; at times it seems that Tina is not an individual in her own right but rather the young Juliana, somehow caught in a time-warp and co-existing with her older self. It is notable that the late forties also saw a number of films on the subject of psychiatry, of which "Spellbound" is perhaps the most famous, as well as supernatural fantasies like "A Portrait of Jennie". Although no psychiatrist appears in the film, there is a Catholic priest, who plays a somewhat similar role.There are some weaknesses in the film; the subplot involving Venable's associate Charles is not well integrated into the film, and Charles's motivation is never made entirely clear. Robert Cummings as Venable is a rather bland and unconvincing hero. Overall, however, the film is a good one. There is one particularly good performance from Susan Hayward as Tina. Hayward was always an unpredictable actress; at her best she could be very good, but she had the infuriating ability to give bad performances not only in bad films (e.g. "The Conqueror") but also in otherwise reasonably good ones (e.g. "Demetrius and the Gladiators"). Here, however, she is excellent, coping brilliantly with the difficult challenge of playing what is effectively a double role, the severe, repressed "Black Tina" and the free, uninhibited "White Tina". Agnes Moorehead, unrecognisable beneath her make-up, is also good as the aged Juliana.Apart from Hayward, the film's main asset is its brooding atmosphere of mystery and Gothic menace. It is not quite the story that James wrote- indeed, in many ways it is closer to M R James than Henry, and closer to a mixture of Charlotte Bronte, Daphne du Maurier and M G Lewis than either. It is, however, a remarkably effective piece of cinema. I am surprised that Gabel did not go on to direct more films. 8/10

theowinthrop The basis of this movie is a Henry James novella entitled THE ASPERN PAPERS. In the story, the narrator is a publisher who is trying to find a trove of love letters that were supposedly written by one of early 19th Century America's great romantic poets, Jeffrey Aspern. His search takes him to Venice, where he ingratiates himself into the household of Aspern's still living lover and her niece. He succeeds better than he expects, because the letters do exist - but to get to them he has to be nicer and nicer to the niece. Eventually he does read some of the letters, but his success is cut short - the niece is expecting the publisher is in love with her, and will marry her. This was not planned, and (reluctantly) he gives up his search. Then, a few years later, he returns after the aunt has died. The niece is still there, but realizing why he had been so interested in her she decided on her revenge (reminiscent, in it's way, to the the revenge of Catherine Sloper to Morris Townsend. in THE HEIRESS / "Washington Square"). She tells she burned all the letters. End of story.The movie expands the part of the aunt (Agnes Moorehead), making her the keeper of a grave secret. Susan Hayward properly shows the emotional problems of an attractive woman facing spinsterhood. And Bob Cummings is able to show that, for all his business interest in the literary find, he is not without a human side.Oddly enough the story was based on a true one, that is discussed by Professor Richard Altick's classic book THE SCHOLAR ADVENTURERS. The actual incident involved a cache of love and private letters of George, Lord Byron. Regretfully, they too were burned.