Frank Lloyd's Berkeley Square (1933): Re-adapting Henry James's The Sense of the Past

Literature Film Quarterly, 2000 by Frischkorn, Craig

Director Frank Lloyd's romantic fantasy film Berkeley Square (Fox, 1933) holds a strange but nearly forgotten place in cinema and literary history: It is the first film based on a work by Henry James. For several reasons, this position is something of an oddity; the basic story of romance and supernatural time travel derives from a source that has remained obscure-the second of James's two unfinished novels, The Sense of the Past (1917). This unpopular posthumous fragment of science fiction provided the basis for what would become a popular depression-era costume drama, Berkeley Square ( 1929) as well as the critically acclaimed film by the same title, both written and adapted by John Balderston. Thus, like The Heiress and The Innocents, the film Berkeley Square is not a direct translation of James to celluloid. Rather, it is a film adaptation of a stageplay by a modern playwright whose drama was suggested by a Jamesian source. But when we remember James's own failed attempts in the medium, the success of these play adaptations is ironic. Lloyd's film Berkeley Square represents what we might call a "re-adaptation" of James-from fiction to stage and finally to screen. Such complexities of authorship yielded to the commercial urgency of promoting the film as a popular romance; lobby cards billed it as `The most beautiful love story the screen has ever told." But marketing this essentially "class" picture to the mass audience was a challenge, and I will suggest that the "highbrow" reputation of Henry James and the obscurity of the source novel led Twentieth Century Fox and producer Jesse Lasky to conceal Henry James's name from the film's credits. Quite unlike The Heiress and The Innocents in this respect, the film Berkeley Square's connection to James was-and has continued to beoverlooked.

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Like the play, in its time the film Berkeley Square made a number of memorable impressions. In the early 1930s, H. P Lovecraft saw the film three times and said in a letter to J. Vernon Shea that it packed an "uncanny wallop" (364). In "Limits Not Frontiers of Surrealism," Andre Breton called it a "remarkable film" that clarified his meditations on surrealism and gothic castles (BFI press cuttings microjacket on Berkeley Square). In 1951, Twentieth Century Fox even produced a commercially unsuccessful remake entitled I'll Never Forget You (starring Tyrone Power). In 1979, film historian William Everson called Berkeley Square a "landmark in the romantic film" ( 108). The influence continues: Leslie Halliwell (61 ) suggests that Berkeley Square is the uncredited source for Richard Matheson's novel Bid Time Return and its film adaptation Somewhere in Time ( 1980, starting Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour). Each of these traces back to The Sense of the Past.

Leon Edel, one of few to note Berkeley Square's Jamesian source, wrote in 1984 that Leslie Howard's performance in the leading role of Peter Standish-which received an Oscar nomination in 1933-was a thing of "lasting beauty" (II:23). Ironically, though, what has not lasted are the actual prints of the film. Except for a few silver-nitrate non-viewing prints in museum vaults, Berkeley Square has become all but lost.

By 1933, few talkies had yet presented romantic fantasies about time travelers. By 2000, however, the story's premise seems all-too-familiar, even cliched, to contemporary audiences who have grown weary of such films as Back to the Future and their many sequels. In its day, however, Berkeley Square was fresh. Following the plot of James's novel, the story is this: Twentieth Century Peter Standish (Leslie Howard) of America develops an obsession with 18th Century Britain-his acute "sense of the past." He reads old diaries and meanders by candle light around his ancestor's old London house. His obsession with the past allows him to exchange places with a character in a portrait-an ancestor who shares his name and likeness. Yearning to exchange periods with the figure in the portrait, he escapes to the neo-classical elegance of the age of enlightenment. Peter thus transports himself back in time.

Very quickly, however, he begins to shock and scare the people around him with his knowledge of their future. Alienating the first Peter's fiancee Kate, he instead falls in love with Kate's sister Helen, who is the only character not spooked by Peter's being from the future. Helen understands Peter and longs to join him in his time. The tragedy of this sentimental but strange romantic fantasy, though, is that the lovers-Peter and Helen-are separated by 150 years in time and cannot stay together in either time. To reinforce the sad romance, there is a tender moment at the film's climax when Eighteenth Century Helen (Heather Angel) says to Twentieth Century Peter (Leslie Howard), "We'll be together, Peter, not in my time, nor in yours, but in God's." Then Helen gives Peter a gift-an Egyptian cross (crux ansata) symbolizing eternal life; the cross stays within the house and crosses the 150-year-gap. And to amplify the love theme-quite beyond James's intentions-in the final segment, Helen's same audible promise of reunion recurs in the soundtrack as Peter hears Helen's voice-over repeat it; he looks upward and drops the paper on which he has copied her epitaph: the strings swell and the credits rollpresumably leaving hope for their reuniting in the afterlife. But pushing the melodrama of the final scene to this level was a mistake, at least in the opinion of the London Times critic who bluntly stated that the line should be cut immediately. Nevertheless, the general concept of such mystical romantic love transcending time and space was "enshrined" in Berkeley Square, as British film historian Jeffrey Richards remarks; however, such rarefied romance has quickly "gone out of fashion steadily since World War II" (239-40). Between the wars, there was a period of time when the popular taste ran in this direction. Berkeley Square (both play and film) did temporarily experience a good deal of "class" popularity-as a literate and romantic fantasy costume drama-but not, on its face, as a James adaptation.

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Frank Lloyd's Berkeley Square (1933): Re-adapting Henry James's The Sense of the Past

Literature Film Quarterly, 2000 by Frischkorn, Craig

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