Books, Arts & Manners: Winged Victory

I HAVE always had problems with Henry James. Good Henry James strikes me as inferior Marcel Proust, and bad Henry James as not worth pursuing down its labyrinthine ways. But our concern here is with James on film. There the high points were the rather free adaptation of Washington Square as The Heiress (1949) and the no less free version of The Turn of the Screw as The Innocents (1961). The several others are not worth mentioning, least of all Jane Campion’s odious Portrait of a Lady, whose opening sequence alone is enough to turn a Jacobite into a Jacobin. The current remake of Washington Square, as reviewed here (Nov. 10), does not wash either.

Now, however, comes The Wings of the Dove, which, for the aforementioned reasons, I have been unable to read, but which, on screen, proves a rare delight. James readers inform me of oversimplifications, omissions, and crude additions; still, even they concede that Iain Softley’s film, with a screenplay by Hossein Amini, is a notable achievement. To be sure, anyone can find some flaws here; how, for instance, does the impecunious journalist Merton Densher manage to leave London and his job for a protracted, nonworking stay in Venice? Some changes result from the filmmakers’ updating the action by a decade, but those strike me as altogether to the good.

JS

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John Simon

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I HAVE always had problems with Henry James. Good Henry James strikes me as inferior Marcel Proust, and bad Henry James as not worth pursuing down its labyrinthine ways. But our concern here is with James on film. There the high points were the rather free adaptation of Washington Square as The Heiress (1949) and the no less free version of The Turn of the Screw as The Innocents (1961). The several others are not worth mentioning, least of all Jane Campion’s odious Portrait of a Lady, whose opening sequence alone is enough to turn a Jacobite into a Jacobin. The current remake of Washington Square, as reviewed here (Nov. 10), does not wash either.

Now, however, comes The Wings of the Dove, which, for the aforementioned reasons, I have been unable to read, but which, on screen, proves a rare delight. James readers inform me of oversimplifications, omissions, and crude additions; still, even they concede that Iain Softley’s film, with a screenplay by Hossein Amini, is a notable achievement. To be sure, anyone can find some flaws here; how, for instance, does the impecunious journalist Merton Densher manage to leave London and his job for a protracted, nonworking stay in Venice? Some changes result from the filmmakers’ updating the action by a decade, but those strike me as altogether to the good.