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| Lana Turner and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. |
This was not a foredoomed project, the cast is good and the film boasts photography by Russell Metty whose work in similar melodramas with Sirk (including Imitation of Life) is dazzling. This is not the case here. There are a few nice shots of autumn foliage, but overall there are very little of the exteriors shot in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Sturges gives us a few feeble pans of Zimbalist walking across the town square, but the regional specificity of the novel is absent and the interiors are anonymous. Compare the gazebo scene here with the footage of Rock Hudson's cabin in All That Heaven Will Allow, also lensed by Metty, and it is pretty obvious which director was better at integrating soundstage footage with exteriors. The love scenes between Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman are magical, the ones between Turner and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. mundane. Sturges' camera placement is often deficient. Notice how in Thomas Mitchell's first scene, when he becomes angry, the actor's outburst is wasted because we can't see his eyes.
Besides Sturges, the other main problem with the film is Zimbalist. The success of the television show 77 Sunset Strip had made him a star on the small screen. Mirsch had hoped that the actor's TV stardust would translate onto the large screen, but it was not to be. Successful attorney Arthur Winner, Zimbalist's character, a is supposed to be bit of a prig, but needs to seem unmoored by his passion for Turner. Zimbalist has the prig part down pat, but can't evoke volcanic passion. His scenes with Turner have no fire to them and this hurts a film supposedly about the damaging power of eros. Zimbalist was too much a Ralph Bellamy, second level leading man type. He found his niche on television again as a throwback fifties style authority figure on The FBI, busting the younger and scuzzier new breed of actors who were to rise in the sixties. Turner is pretty good, but struggles with her drunk scenes.
George Hamilton and Susan Kohner play the film's young lovers and fare a bit better than their older counterparts. Kohner quit the screen after marrying in 1964 and it was the screen's loss. This film reunited her with Turner after Kohner's breakthrough role in Imitation of Life and she is once again quite effective. She and Hamilton were apparently an item offscreen as well. I think I underestimated Hamilton in my youth because of his louche image and his problem with accents in films such as Viva Maria! and Your Cheatin' Heart. He is quite good here and well displays the carriage of a man not comfortable in his own skin. Jason Robards does well enough in an impossible part: Turner's crippled husband with the handicap being the usual Hollywood shorthand for impotence. I also enjoyed seeing Barbara Bel Geddes (underutilized as usual), Everett Sloan, Yvonne Craig (Batgirl to my generation), Gilbert Green, and Carroll O'Connor.
I must admit that my primary interest in watching this film was my admiration for James Gould Cozzens who James Dickey rightly called "the least-read and least-understood of major American novelists." 💜By Love Possessed, the novel, was nearly six hundred pages long and could only be done properly if made into a eight hour mini-series. That said, Cozzens was fairly content with what screenwriter Charles Schnee did to condense the film into a feature length format. However, Schnee was so incensed with the liberties taken with his script, that he had his name taken off the credits and replaced with a pseudonym, John Dennis. Schnee streamlined the novel, jettisoning many of the supporting characters of the book, and eliminated the book's intricate flashback structure. He did what he was hired to do: take a complex novel which features a detailed portrait of a community and a profession (the law) and boil it down into a soap opera suitable for its female star.
Traces of Cozzens' book remain in the film, but only traces. After experimental and tentative novels in the 1920s, Cozzens gained recognition with such fully mature works as S.S. San Pedro, Castaway, and The Last Adam. The latter was turned into a good film, Doctor Bull, the first of three vehicles in which John Ford directed Will Rogers. The film was tailored to Rogers' folksy appeal and, like By Love Possessed, has only a tangential relationship to Cozzens' novel. Cozzens novels in the thirties still flirted with experimentalism and are more monophonic than his later output. A renewed thematic intensity and polyphonic scope emerged with The Just and the Unjust and especially, Guard of Honor, his best book. It beat out a field that included two very different novels of World War 2, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions to win the 1949 Pulitzer Prize. By Love Possessed marked Cozzens commercial high point, buoyed by a Time magazine cover, and the beginning of his critical decline. Initial criticism was highly laudatory, but Dwight Macdonald's pan of the book in Commentary led to a critical reappraisal from which Cozzens reputation has never recovered.
There is some merit to Macdonald's criticisms. I could not even begin to summarize them, but will always treasure his censure of the book's "queer strangled sententiousness". Cozzens does indeed build a thicket of Jamesian prose in By Love Possessed, but I find the novel's labyrinthine pages exhilarating rather enervating. Cozzens real art crime was his championing of elitism just when the mud tide of the Beats was beginning to rise. Like Howard Hawks, Cozzens valorizes professionals, doctor and lawyers, soldiers and sailors, not dharma bums. Now I like the Beats, but honest plural criticism should also include the occasional cranky reactionary. I highly recommend all the novels I have listed above. The film of By Love Possessed is a mangled byproduct so far away from the imagination of James Gould Cozzens that it omits the book's chief symbol: an antique French clock bearing the legend in Latin, love conquers all.
💜 See Matthew J. Bruccoli, James Gould Cozzens: A Life Apart
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