by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched an intriguing episode of
the short-lived (one season) TV series Screen Directors’ Playhouse, an adaptation of a radio show that had featured
potted versions of famous films (a competitor to the Lux Radio
Theatre), though the TV version, produced
by Hal Roach, featured famous movie directors doing original stories. This one
was called The Bitter Waters and
was supposedly set around the turn of the last century (though the “period” was
unstressed and only the oddly unfashionable clothes the characters were wearing
gave it away), based on a story by Henry James called “Louisa Pallant.” It
takes place at a seaside resort featuring a casino (it was pretty obviously
supposed to be Monte Carlo but that too was unstressed), where Louisa Pallant
(Constance Cummings) and her former flame Charles Ferris (George Sanders, older
and heavier-set than he was in his prime but with his world-weary detachment
gloriously intact) run into each other after 20 years apart. Louisa, an
American who relocated to Europe to “hook” a rich man, dated the then-impecunious
Charles but then abandoned him to marry Pallant, a British industrialist, for
his money — and then got screwed when Pallant suddenly died two years later and
his biological family got what was left of his fortune. Since then Louisa has
lived on a small income from the States and raised her daughter Linda (Cynthia
Foster), who has attracted the interest of Ferris’ own traveling companion, his
nephew Archibald Parker (a young and rather callow-looking Robert Vaughn). For
mysterious reasons, Louisa doesn’t want Archibald to marry her daughter, though
if anything that just makes Linda more alluring to the young man on the
Romeo-and-Juliet principle that if her mom is standing in their way, then she must be worth marrying. Midway through the show — right
after what was originally the commercial break — the big surprise (though it’s
not that much of a surprise)
occurs: Louisa tells Charles the reason she doesn’t want his nice young nephew
to marry her daughter is that the daughter has become a totally spoiled bitch,
heartless and avaricious — in some ways this story comes off as a sort of
prequel to Rebecca (whose film
adaptation also featured George Sanders), though it ends with Charles spiriting
off his lovesick nephew to some other European resort city to break off the
unwelcome engagement.
The Bitter Waters is a quite literate tale that gives some fine actors plenty to chew
over, and the director is John Brahm, while the writer who adapted James’ tale
is Zoë Akins. In case that’s not a name you remember, she wrote the scripts for
two of Katharine Hepburn’s earliest films, the underrated Christopher
Strong and the overrated Morning
Glory (which started the tradition of
Hepburn winning Academy Awards for the wrong movies: the Academy gave her the
Oscar for Morning Glory when the
two films she made on either side of it, Christopher Strong and Little Women, were both far richer and more complex, and gave her
roles of greater depth and multidimensionality). Brahm had worked with George
Sanders before on two major credits from the 1940’s, the remake of The
Lodger and Hangover Square (probably Brahm’s best-known films as director) and,
being able to work on film and with a multiplicity of locations, he turned in a
superb job, ably staging James’ dark tale and getting it told in the 26 minutes
he had available even though there’s one flaw in Akins’ script: we’re told that Linda is a bitch well before we get to see her doing one. Perhaps if the show had been longer —
either an hour-long TV show or a short feature — the point could have been made
more subtly by dropping little hints of Linda behaving meanly so the big reveal
didn’t have the kind of left-field desperation it does in the version we have,
but even with the limited running time director Brahm and screenwriter Akins do
an excellent job with a nice little drama of manners, good and bad.
