Henry James on film: A critical survey, 1933--1951

The popularity of the works of Henry James on film in the 1990s has indicated that the author is anything but a liability at the movie box office. But it has not always been this way. No silent films were adapted from James's literature, and there was only one James-based sound film produced in the 1930s, two in the 1940s, and one in the 1950s. These four films comprise a kind of "lost history," the history of the first phase of the cinematic versions of Henry James's fiction.; This dissertation surveys and examines the earliest films to be adapted from Henry James's fiction during the studio era of Hollywood. The approach is to evaluate each critically neglected film's production details, visual style, relationship to the source, and critical reception. Chapter One discusses director Frank Lloyd's Berkeley Square (1933), an early sound film based on John Balderston's hit play by the same name; his source was James's The Sense of the Past. Chapter Two examines director Martin Gabel's The Lost Moment (1947), a film loosely suggested by James's The Aspern Papers; it is the only film in this study that was not a successful stage play before it was a film. Chapter Three evaluates director William Wyler's The Heiress (1949), a critically acclaimed screen adaptation of Ruth and Augustus Goetz's popular Broadway play The Heiress; their source was James's Washington Square. Chapter Four considers director Roy Baker's film I'll Never Forget You (1951), a weak remake of Berkeley Square and a typical product of the declining studio era.; By investigating Hollywood's marketing strategies and production records of these four Henry James film adaptations, this study argues that---although Henry James's literature offered a wealth of raw material for cinematic adaptations---the author had such a reputation for being a highbrow that Hollywood resorted to alternate promotion strategies in order to try to "sell" these movies to the mainstream movie audiences of the early 20th Century.