1947’s The Lost Moment opens on an odd zoom-in on a gap between books on a shelf, as the narrator tells us about a book that wasn’t published, a collection of the love letters of the poet Jeffrey Ashton.
This information comes to us from Robert Cummings, a fellow writer who, decades after the death of that poet, goes to Venice to see if the object of Ashton’s love has those letters. Cummings is prepared to pay a great deal of money for them, but he is also prepared to get them through other means, though I think he would draw the line at murder. That said, I wouldn’t want to give him the benefit of the doubt should that opportunity arise.
His cover story is he is renting a room in the villa so he can write his novel. The love of Ashton’s life is now very old, but rather capricious. She is played by an unrecognizable Agnes Moorehead, and I mean that more literally than usual, as I don’t think we ever see her face behind the veil she wears.
At least she is less uptight than her niece, played by Susan Hayward in a remarkably high-strung performance, even when compared to high society women in similar dramas placed in the mid-1800’s. I don’t think I have ever seen anybody stand more upright, and I found myself conscious of my own slack posture while watching her.
She immediately changes the terms of the rental agreement, making Cummings pay five times the agree-upon amount, to be paid three months in advance and in gold. Man, Airbnb’s were messed up back then.
There is a third woman in the house, a young Joan Lorring, who is smitten with Cummings. He is ready to exploit that attraction so as to learn about the location of hidden passages and nooks around the estate. It is no surprise Hayward is always bossing her around, chastising her for such infractions as opening the curtains since “we don’t want any sunlight getting into the house.” Heaven forbid anything break the gloom.
One starts speculating early on about how much such restrictions are mandated by Hayward without even considering her aunt’s interests. That she signs documents for Moorehead in a perfect forgery of her signature is telling.
What I didn’t expect is, at night, Hayward seems to either become her aunt back at the time of her dalliance with Ashton, or she is simply delusional. This seems par for the course for Henry James, author of many a ghost story. He wrote the novel this film is based on, except this has the novelty of somebody possibly being the reincarnation of somebody who isn’t dead yet.
This is a deeply gothic work, and fans of the genre will largely know what to expect.
One element which surprised me is a bird flying around a darkened room. I was suspicious as to whether this was an effect, as I was confused by how the camera could anticipated where the bird would next move to. Watching this moment frame-by-frame revealed it was at least partly animated, and I smiled with pleasant surprise at the discovery.
Other than that, there wasn’t much I found particularly engaging about The Lost Moment. It is solidly of the genre I think of as “Gaslight”, and fellow fans of such works will find it a solid, if largely unremarkable, entry.
Dir: Martin Gabel
Starring Robert Cummings, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead
Watched on Olive Films blu-ray