A flop redeemed by time, The Lost Moment was too gothic, too excessive for 1947 but here in the 2020s it fits quite snugly in alongside the likes of The Vourdalak, Uninvited, The Girl with the Needle, The Maid or either of the recent takes on Nosferatu.
An adaptation of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, it tells the story of a publisher posing as a writer inveigling himself into the Venice palazzo of ancient Juliana Bordereau, the onetime love of famous poet Jeffrey Ashton (as the Byron/Shelley composite Jeffrey Aspern is called here), hoping to lay his hands on the love letters Ashton left behind. It’ll be the publishing event of the century, Lewis Venable (Robert Cummings) reckons. That’s if the letters exist. Even if they do, will he be able to wrest them from the grasp of old Juliana (Agnes Moorehead), and her even more formidable niece Tina (Susan Hayward)?
Venable’s quest is complicated in several ways. The Bordereaus have opened up to take a paying visitor because they are broke, but that doesn’t mean Venable has the run of the house. He’s in a sectioned-off corner of it with its own door onto the city. At 105, the old lady is hard to read – dementia may be fraying her memory, though she seems sparky and takes to Venable more than Tina would like. And then there’s Tina, imperious and fickle, who seems far too young to be the niece of a 105-year-old woman, Venable remarks at one point. What is Tina’s real connection to Juliana, and how does she intersect with the past?
David Lean’s Great Expectations had come out the year before and the producers are clearly aiming this film in that direction. Juliana is an obvious Miss Havisham figure, old and mysterious and treated cruelly by fate and time, and Tina is an Estella – beautiful and haughty and obviously a romantic Everest for Venable to climb, should he wish to, which of course he does.
This is great casting. Cummings makes no effort to play the hero, presenting Venable as a venal liar, a creep who is slightly caught out by events, and by growing feelings for Juliana and Tina. Agnes Moorehead, only 47 at the time, is excellent as “the ancient hooded skull”, encased in latex but not letting it overwhelm her performance. Hayward, her super slender waist a part of her character, bewitches and confounds as Tina and is particularly good once it’s revealed that Tina might not be entirely sane.
They are gothic characters in a gothic house in a gothic movie. Venice itself is one of the great gothic locations, full of beauty and watery decay, but director Martin Gabel also makes sure we get enough guttering candles, long flowing gowns and cowering servants to get the idea, that’s if the themes of madness, the weight of the past on the present and the unruliness of nature hadn’t already done the work. There’s even a sage old priest rattling around in the background in case that wasn’t enough.
It is in a sense a bookend movie to The Innocents – another Henry James adaptation – which came along in 1961 and is now considered a classic. The Lost Moment bogs down in story detail a touch too much to be ranked alongside the later film but it is undeniably a good story well told, full of atmosphere and captivating performances and photographed in a luminescent monochrome by Hal Mohr (of Rancho Notorious and Captain Blood fame) setting up an ambience which must have influenced cinematographer Freddie Francis’s work in in The Innocents.
The ending is way too much. And yet isn’t that what gothic is all about – death, fire, destruction, a climax of madness and hysteria. Mad, gothic excess. Too too much.
The Lost Moment – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
