Customer Rating: 
Summary: A TERRIFIC BUT SOMETIMES DARK FILM
Comment: Based on Henry James "The Aspern Papers", Robert Cummings head for Italy in search of the greatest poetic love letters every written to the mysterious Julianna (Agnes Moorehead made up as a very old woman). This pseudo-mystery is filled with images of light and dark in the murky old villa where Moorehead lives with her emotionless staid niece Susan Hayward who transforms magically at night into the beautiful Julianna. Hayward is almost childlike in her unworldlyness in both roles. She is in fact a dual personality. And when she begins to loosen up with the help of Cummings, things start going all wrong. Hayward's fantasy world is shattered. And she is also the best thing in this movie. In one scene where she is standing by the window and starts to unpin her hair is a marvel to watch as she changes to the lost and loving younger Julianna. The letters are found but at a tragic price.
This is a great classic movie that belongs on DVD. It has elements of mystery, schizophrenia, it's atmospheric (something that is lost in the movies being made today) and most of all, Hayward's magnificent performance.
If you can only get the VHS, by all means purchase it. It's a keeper.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Lost Moment
Comment: This is a rare imaginative film, though not at all like the original story by Henry James. It is also a rare dramatic performance by Bob Cummings who is mostly known for his roles in romantic comedies. Agnes Moorehead is wonderful as the ancient, mysterious Juliana and Susan Hayward gives a great performance as the mentally unstable niece whose fantasies verge on madness.
I highly recommend this one.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: One of the few imaginative reworkings of Henry James.
Comment: Although Henry James' novella 'The Aspern Papers' - about an unscrupulous American publisher (here called Lewis Venable) who plans to elicit by any means the love letters from a famous poet to a now-wizened mistress, Juliana, living with her spinster niece, Tina - is superbly dramatic, full of neurotic suspense and atmosphere, one thing prevents it being adapted faithfully to the screen - the first-person narration. There is no visual shorthand for James' notoriously unreliable storytelling, its gaps, evasions, its play between subjective consciousness and authorial control. So 'The Last Moment' has to do what it can, changing or adding characters and motives, inventing incidents and crises. Compared to James, these revisions are generally inferior, and often ridiculous, dragging a sly parable into Gothic melodrama, with its mercenary crone at the dark centre, like Miss Havisham after two centuries in the grave, more a beast or lizard or horror freak than the beautiful muse who inspired celebrated lyric verse; or the vaguely supernatural subplot in which her schizophrenic niece 'becomes' Juliana at night, playing romantic piano music dressed in virginal white, awaiting the long-dead poet-lover, while being a tight-buttoned, sadistic lesbian-coded dominatrix in black by day; or the especially sensationalist introduction of a blackmail plot, involving Venable's caddish, cash-strapped friend.
On its own terms, however, 'Moment' is surprisingly effective, James' narrational complexity emerging in a gratifyingly ambiguous play with point-of-view and characters' perceptions. The dreamlike atmosphere of the scene where Venable discovers Tina's secret, drawn through maze-like corridors and stairways by the Ariadne's thread of distant music, is hushed and heady. The anti-hero, prepared to drop all moral scruples for scraps of papers (Oedipal symbol of a male potency he can only play-act), is sanitised by Hollywood's needs, but his sexual pathology is brilliantly displaced onto the narrative of the 'dual woman' and her rapacious guardian.
Best of all is forgotten director Gabel's amazing visual sense. Like James, he makes the decaying, labyrinthine Venetian mansion the real hero(ine) of the story, a House of Woman, its corridors, cramped rooms and vast spaces, serpentine stairwells and redemptive gardens, its solidity flickered with reflections of water, light or fire, as flickeringly insubstantial as Venable's male self-confidence. It is partly a figure for his mind and his warped vision of female sexuality, both ideal and real; partly the prison in which all its characters, especially its women, are held by male desire.
The slow-burning pace is too often simply slow, but 'Moment' is an intelligent, Freudian gloss on James that succeeds where most literal versions do not.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Off-beat, absorbing drama
Comment: 3 1/2 stars. This haunting drama based on The Aspern Papers by Henry James casts a hypnotic spell on the viewer and keeps him (or her) completely entranced throughout its 89 minute running time. An intelligent script, fine photography and performances and astute direction are among this film's assets. Robert Cummings, often considered a lightweight performer, comes through here with a mature, thoughtful performance. The story of a publisher who comes to a strange house in Venice to retrieve the long lost love letters of a famous poet and runs into more than he bargained for is treated with great respect for its original literary source, avoiding crass melodrama or sensational treatment. Spend an unusual and rewarding afternoon or evening with The Lost Moment.
