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

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.

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.

As veteran screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen recalls, in the early days of Hollywood, when it came time for selecting sources for films, Henry James was an author whose reputation was too highbrow. Producers of mass films avoided him. Bodeen explains, "It's doubtful that more than a few who worked in the silent cinema ever read as much as a short story by Henry James" (1631. The neglect of James in the silent and early sound cinema, Bodeen suggests, can be linked to residual popular judgments that James suffered as a dramatist: "Producers didn't know who he was, and those who did were apt to say, `Oh, yes, that American highbrow who's trying so hard to be a British playwright-but even the English don't want him. Didn't they boo him, when that play he wrote (Guy Domville) flopped in London?"' ( 163-64). Hollywood's "reverse elitism" may at least partially explain the omission of James's name from the film's credits. As producer, Jesse Lasky needed to sell movie tickets, not send the audience to the library for James's sixteen-year-old novel, which was, after all, unfinished. From a purely commercial perspective, leaving James's name out of the film seems to have been a simple marketing strategy, in light of Bodeen's experience with the early film industry's anti-James bias.

If marketing concerns were the reason to conceal the film's connection to James, who actually did know about the source, and how was the film compared to the novel? "As everyone knows," William Troy of The Nation explained with sarcasm, "Berkeley Square is based on an unfinished novel by Henry James, The Sense of the Past, in which he apparently intended to trace out, with subtlest Jamesian analysis, the process by which a man of the present, enamored with the past, merges himself with that past only to discover that its moral values are cruder and hence less acceptable to him than those of his own time" (364). Indeed not everyone did know about the film's source. The London Times, in a rather modest endorsement, called the omission of the source's name significant and found the film to be lacking in James's artistry: ". . . if the camera has not achieved the equivalent of the shy, elusive beauty of the Henry James style or the delicacy of his fantastic conception-Berkeley Square is, after, all, founded on The Sense of the Past, although the programme makes no mention of that not unimportant fact-it has at least done its best not to vulgarize or distort" (20 November 1933, BFI microjacket cuttings file on Berkeley Square). Berkeley Square may not vulgarize James, but Bodeen suggests that Director Roy Baker's 1951 remake I'll Never Forget You does. The remake, Bodeen comments, "certainly was not Henry James, as the first version had been" (164).

Echoing Bodeen's comment on the 1933 film being close to the Jamesian source, Leon Edel, writing fifty-one years after Berkeley Square's release, published an essay in the March 4, 1984, New York Times, entitled "Why the Dramatic Arts Embrace Henry James" (II:23); here Edel argues that certain literary characters on film can "alter forever what we have imagined; or they establish fixedly certain characters nonreaders have never previously encountered." Indeed, filmgoers in the Berkeley Square audience probably never did encounter James's Ralph Pendrel in The Sense of the Past. Yet what resonates for Edel the Jamesian is the "meditative way" Leslie Howard's character Peter Standish "wandered about his ancestral home and finally encountered his ancestors in the old London house." The spirit of James's novel, Edel feels, is properly rendered by Leslie Howard. And whether or not the Berkeley Square film audience had read The Sense of the Past, Leslie Howard made the role of Peter Standish his own-even before the film-by playing the part on the stage literally hundreds of times between 1929 and 1933 in Britain and North America.

Several plot points in Balderston's Berkeley Square clearly emerged directly from James's The Sense of the Past. The central figure Ralph Pendrel, who is the source for Balderston's Peter Standish, has, as James describes him, a bookish "taste for research-which was more personally his passion for the past" (SP 47); James's Ralph has published an essay on history, Balderston's Peter on architecture. In each story the appeal of the protagonist's essay helps him to inherit a London house in the square from a distant British relative who was impressed with the American's historical scholarship. In each story, when the modern hero visits the ancestral London square house, he experiences an overwhelming "sense of the past" from the marks of generations who have lived there. In both works, this "sense of the past" becomes an obsession that leads him back in time. But unlike Balderston, James is explicit in calling these past generations "ghosts"; indeed, James's Ralph yearns "for the old ghosts to take him as one of themselves" (50) and his dream is that the house "might prove `haunted"' (53).

The macabre in James's story is diminished in the Lloyd's film, but the romance is amplified. Indeed, the novel's romance between Ralph and Nan, which is only beginning to emerge when the book stops, is something that James seemed to be squeamish about. In his early notebook entry on the story's romantic direction, James reflects, "The `romantic' of course has essentially to be allowed for, but what on earth is the whole thing but the pure essence of the romantic and to be bravely faced and exploited as such? Romantically therefore I face the music, as I say, and get over any obstacle by simply working that note or grasping, so to speak, squeezing as hard as I can, that nettle" (Complete Notebooks 506). James's thoughts about the romance in The Sense of the Past were to remain undeveloped. But his plan helped the playwright Balderston, who consulted the notebooks and finished, as it were, James's story. Just as James intended, Balderston fully exploited the story's romance.

James's friend the gothic novelist Hugh Walpole served as the inspiration for the novel's effete snob, Sir Canthopher Bland, Nan's suitor in the novel. In the notebooks, James refers to Cantopher's character as "the little H.W. man." In the play and film, Balderston calls the same character Mr. Throstle, whose taste in art as well as his professional contacts lead him to introduce Peter to Sir Joshua Reynolds who paints the American's portrait. Dwarfish Ferdinand Gottschalk plays the film's Throstle with fussy comical effect when delivering such lines as "Tsk, Tsk" to express scorn toward the American's unusual practice of bathing daily.

Gottschalk's portrayal of Throstle works as a foil for Leslie Howard's Peter: Howard seems all the more virile, young, and charming against Gottschalk who is effeminate, old, and paranoid. James's character Cantopher-like Balderston's character Throstle-is threatened by the American time traveler's ability to see into the future. He is also jealous of the affections of the younger sister (Nan in the book, Helen in the play and film). So terrified of Peter is Throstle that, near the film's end, he fearfully but comically attempts to cast a demon out of Peter by crossing candlesticks and reciting a prayer in Latin. Although James's book stops well before this scene, James does describe the gentleman Sir Cantopher's voice as "a queer fine squeak," and, in keeping with James's auditory intention, Balderston retains the humorous trait by incorporating into the dialogue James's description of Cantopher's voice. In a fit of anger, after Throstle's failed "exorcism," the film's modern Peter calls old Throstle a "dead-and-buried little pip-squeak."

The filth and squalor of the past was not a topic James explored in detail in his novel. Very little concrete period detail-except for the notion of describing characters' teeth as being "undentisted"-emerges to distinguish the "old world" in the Sense of the Past. However, Balderston, who set his old period much earlier-in 1784, maximizes the number of references in his play to early practices concerning hygiene and social customs. To establish Peter's growing disgust with the older period, for instance, the play Berkeley Square contains lines which express Peter's shock at the cruel notion of people paying money to watch a woman being burned at the stake; this graphic line, however, was removed from the film. There are also lines in the play-as well as the film-which point out that in the earlier time it was not customary to bathe daily or to use a handkerchief when blowing one's nose. Expanding on this surprising information and pronouncing the superior hygiene of the Twentieth Century, near the end of the film Peter cries out, "How the Eighteenth Century stinks!" just before he leaves the old world behind and returns to the present.

This treatment of manners cannot be found in The Sense of the Past, but for some reason these extra-textual features were falsely attributed to Henry James by the New Yorker in one of the few reviews that even bothered to mention him. Commenting on the film's lacking "actual behavior" in "robust" Eighteenth Century London, the New Yorker's film critic attributed such delicacy to Henry James: "It is the nicer side we see. After all, that is Henry James's side, for the whole thing derives from his The Sense of the Past" (75). Granted, James does not go much beyond the "undentisted" teeth when he describes the 1820 conditions. But the New Yorker falsely attributed to James what were really Balderston's "nicer" elements of Eighteenth Century costume drama. The New Yorker, however, was not alone in making such wrong attributions. A Hollywood trade paper of the early 1930s, Rob Wagner's Script credits Balderston for making the story accessible to the masses, yet Script reinforces the prevalent "highbrow" stigma of James. It should be noted that Wagner-in his otherwise favorable review-confuses James's original unfinished novel for a failed play, an error that confirms Bodeen's recollection that Hollywood neither read nor appreciated James as a source. Wagner writes, "Henry James wrote a play around that idea (time travel). Not good. Then Balderston used it successfully in Berkeley Square. Is it over the heads of the fans? The preview audience at Long Beach got every subtlety!" (8). Despite incorrect information on the source, Wagner joined a number of other critics in praising Balderston for succeeding in making a difficult, highbrow Jamesian story understandable to the masses.

Some critics and preview audiences may indeed have caught the film's subtleties and gentle humors, but apparently the masses just did not respond to it in large numbers. Even Director Frank Lloyd remembered Berkeley Square as his favorite film, but of all his dozens of projects, he said it made the least money (BFI microjacket press cuttings file on Frank Lloyd). William Troy explores the issue of class and reminds readers of The Nation that the play Berkeley Square, even if it was "simpler" than James's fragment, was still "considered one of the most definitely highbrow offerings of both its London and New York offerings" (363). Not all reviews focused on the sophistication required to appreciate the film. Rather than calling the film "highbrow," Time ignored the Jamesian source and simply called the motion picture "a happy combination of sentiment, metaphysical poetry and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (33). Most of the press was indeed favorable. Lionel Collier, critic for the British publication Picturegoer called Berkeley Square "the greatest romance of the year" (1933), and Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times said its "poetic charm" placed it in a "class by itself." Despite the lack of commercial mass appeal at the box office, the film clearly did at least appeal to the romantic tastes of the depression-era class audience-with or without anyone appreciating the source.

Sixty-seven years after its release, Berkeley Square can surely be remembered as a highbrow cult favorite. It can be remembered-as Leon Edel did-for Leslie Howard's Oscar-nominated performance (Best Actor, 1932/1933). But the film must also be remembered for its literary source. Even without his name in the credits, Berkeley Square was the very first film to emerge from a work by Henry James.

Craig Frischkorn

SUNY at Buffalo

Works Cited

Balderston, John L. Berkeley Square. New York: Samuel French, 1929.

Berkeley Square. British Film Institute press cuttings microjacket.

Berkeley Square. Dir. Frank Lloyd. With Leslie Howard and Heather Angel. Twentieth Century Fox, 1933.

Bodeen, DeWitt. "Henry James Into Film." Films in Review March 1977: 163-170.

"The Cinema: Past and Present." New Yorker 23 Sep. 1933: 74-75.

Collier, Lionel. "The Greatest Romance of the Year." Picturegoer Weekly 11 Nov. 1933: 14-15.

Edel, Leon. "Why the Dramatic Arts Embrace Henry James." New York Times 4 March 1984: II: 1, 23.

Everson, William K. Love in the Film. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1979: 108-110.

Hall, Mordaunt. "The Screen." New York Times 14 Sep. 1933: 26:3.

Halliwell, Leslie. Filmgoers Companion. Eighth edition. New York: Scribner's, 1984.

James, Henry. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Eds. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

James, Henry. The Sense ofthe Past. New York: Scribner's, 1917.

"Lloyd, Frank." British Film Institute press cuttings microjacket.

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. Selected Letters IV.- 1932-1934. Sauk City, WE Arkham House, 1976: 362-71.

Richards, Jeffrey. The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930-1939. London: Routledge, 1984.

Troy, William. "Films: Time and Space." The Nation 27 Sep. 1933: 363-64.

Wagner, Rob. "The Movies: Berkeley Square." Rob Wagner's Script 25 Nov. 1933: 8.

Copyright Literature/Film Quarterly 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved