Climbing, Social and Mountain

HENRY James’s early novel Washington Square, adapted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz as The Heiress, was a Broadway hit in 1947 with Wendy Hiller and Basil Rathbone. An equally effective movie version of it (1949) was directed by William Wyler and starred Olivia de Havilland, Ralph Richardson, and Montgomery Clift. The play was successfully revived a couple of seasons ago with Cherry Jones superb in the title role. After all this, the new movie directed by Agnieszka Holland, and reverting to the original title, Washington Square, comes as an anticlimax, even though it sticks closer to James’s text. That is its first mistake.

Miss Holland, a Polish filmmaker working in the West, always struck me as overrated. Best known for such films as Europa, Europa and Olivier, Olivier (her more recent The Secret Garden and Total Eclipse were well-deserved flops), she has never made a movie that impressed me, and this feminist version of Washington Square, which might as well have been entitled with similar echolalia Catherine, Catherine, is no exception. It is the story, you’ll recall, of Catherine Sloper, the plain young heiress who falls for the dashing Morris Townsend’s impassioned wooing. But her sardonic, domineering father, Dr. Austin Sloper, warns her that the young man is only after her fortune, and says he’ll disinherit her if she elopes with him.

JS

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John Simon

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HENRY James’s early novel Washington Square, adapted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz as The Heiress, was a Broadway hit in 1947 with Wendy Hiller and Basil Rathbone. An equally effective movie version of it (1949) was directed by William Wyler and starred Olivia de Havilland, Ralph Richardson, and Montgomery Clift. The play was successfully revived a couple of seasons ago with Cherry Jones superb in the title role. After all this, the new movie directed by Agnieszka Holland, and reverting to the original title, Washington Square, comes as an anticlimax, even though it sticks closer to James’s text. That is its first mistake.

Miss Holland, a Polish filmmaker working in the West, always struck me as overrated. Best known for such films as Europa, Europa and Olivier, Olivier (her more recent The Secret Garden and Total Eclipse were well-deserved flops), she has never made a movie that impressed me, and this feminist version of Washington Square, which might as well have been entitled with similar echolalia Catherine, Catherine, is no exception. It is the story, you’ll recall, of Catherine Sloper, the plain young heiress who falls for the dashing Morris Townsend’s impassioned wooing. But her sardonic, domineering father, Dr. Austin Sloper, warns her that the young man is only after her fortune, and says he’ll disinherit her if she elopes with him.