bkoganbing As the great Frank Sinatra song says, "if you could survive to 105 look at all you'll derive out of being alive". Well in The Lost Moment Agnes Moorehead does survive to that advanced age, but she truly looks like she's not deriving much from her continued existence.The Lost Moment casts Robert Cummings as a book publisher who goes to Venice on a mission to get some rumored love letters of a famed poet who mysteriously disappeared in the last century. The great love of his life was Agnes Moorehead and she's survived him considerably. She lives in a decaying mansion with a many generations removed niece played by Susan Hayward. Cummings comes there with a ruse to rent a room from the ladies who are in genteel poverty, not that Moorehead is exactly a spendthrift at this point. Cummings pretends he's a writer trying to soak up some Gothic atmosphere, but he wants those letters to publish. The late poet wrote some of the best romantic words ever and these would be a find. Like a lost play of Shakespeare.The film is based on a Henry James novel and James would have to wait a bit for The Heiress for one of his works to get a really great screen interpretation. Everyone tries hard, but the emphasis in this film is on atmosphere and that seems to overwhelm the players.However fans of Cummings, Hayward, and Moorehead will approve.

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

didi-5 This turned up on tv and, having recently seen another James adaptation, The Innocents, I thought I'd take a look. This is quite a sweet little film, despite its sinister content and ghostly images of Venice. Cummings, Hayward and Moorehead are all excellent. "Venice" looks as good as the real thing, and the film has that watchable quality which sits with the very best of the 40s. One I'll certainly go back to.

negevoli-44 I now own this movie and can say it basically still stands up for me as an adult, with the caveat that I first saw it as a child, when it seemed wonderfully mysterious to me. Seeing it recently did not have quite the same effect, but I still enjoyed it very much. One reason is that as an adult I fell in love with Venice and found it to be the most beautiful and colorful of cities, whereas the film, though set in Venice, is dark and noirish. I am sure that has affected my appreciation of this movie. That aside, it is still an effective romantic mystery and manages not to be a tear-jerker. I loved Robert Cummings, both in movies and on TV, and this is one of his best. There was just something about those old-time actors that the new generation(s), by and large, seem to lack. I think maybe the old guys took their work more seriously and maybe the new guys are only interested in the big bucks, nose candy, fast cars, and you fill in the blanks.