The Golden Bowl

This is a masterpiece....essential viewing for anyone examining the translation of Henry James to film, theater, or television. The screenplay is excellent, the production is impeccably cast. So far superior to the movie version in the later 90's it's not worth comparing. Gayle Hunnicutt BECOMES Charlotte Stant in an exquisite performance that can't be surpassed. Uma Thurman's feeble attempts in the movie version are pathetic in comparison. Cyrill Cussak in the narrator role as Bob Assingham is brilliant. Barry Morse may lack Nick Nolte's sex appeal, but that is a benefit when it comes to to this production. If you are an English or Theater teacher looking to assign excellent film adaptations for analysis and review, you can't o better than this production.

Masterpiece Theatre productions of the 1970s get a lot of kidding, most of it no doubt deserved, these days. But this one gets high marks from me for taking on a novel that's extraordinarily difficult to film (how to build a nearly six-hour drama around a series of events that hardly add up to a story?) and getting it amazingly right.

Jack Pulman, the BBC's longtime great books adapter, does a sturdy job creating credible scenes out of sparse dialog, too much dialog (in other cases), and sometimes yards and yards of descriptive prose that burrows into the characters' minds in ways that would seem impossible to make clear on film.

The result is wordy, with an intrusive narrator, but I can't imagine how else it could be done. As a tale, the novel stands on James' ability to convey the slowly evolving, almost imperceptible changes in the characters' attitudes towards each other. The fact that it took 6 hours to spool out with much of James' intentions intact makes me wonder about the Merchant Ivory version we're about to be graced with: how could they possibly squeeze it all into less than 2 hours without making the whole thing seem like a trivial, almost implausible love affair of little intrinsic interest (although very well dressed!)? This version makes it all seem predestined, almost uncanny, full of wider meaning.

Direction serves the script well, given obvious limitations in production values. One real flaw: acting is perhaps too low key, even from a couple of distinguished veterans as Barry Morse and Daniel Massey. The female leads are passable, and Gayle Hunnicutt as Charlotte has some vivid, passionate moments, but overall their performances come off as less than fully fleshed out. Could be the director's fault: subtle doesn't necessarily mean dampened-down. Best - fortunately - is Cyril Cusack as the narrator, Bob Assingham. Without his witty delivery, the narrative-driven script would feel leaden.

Kudos for a fine adaptation that had me running back to the book.

Alistair Cooke, in introducing a re-broadcast of this six-hour series, called it the finest ever shown on Masterpiece Theater, and he'll get no argument from me: it was superb. I quite agree with my fellow commentor's perception that it was the slow unfolding over six hours that made the material mesmerize (the novel is very long too), so I share his concern about the Merchant/Ivory production, but I suppose we'll see. In any case, do not miss this version if you get the chance to view it. Following James's subtle analysis of human motivations is, Cooke memorably said, like "entering the mind of Sigmund Freud," and the greatest compliment I can pay this adaptation is that it does justice to that subtlety. I find the performances excellent, too (whatever happened to Gayle Hunnicutt, who shows such talent here?). And there's a memorable use of Ravel on the soundtrack.

If you find reading Henry James tedious for his endlessly spun-out and inconsequential sentences, you need not fear. This production is subtly habit-forming throughout its inveigling four episodes. Especially, as other reviewers have commented, for everything that is not said in the text. Perhaps not too sinister, by contemporary standards, it nevertheless treats infidelity, not simply as an extracurricular activity for the lazy rich, but also as a labyrinth of quiet deceptions and undercurrents running through 19th century propriety, presented in a suave and 'delicate' manner. I watched all the episodes several times, sometimes twice in one evening. You too, perhaps, when you 'get caught' by the disquieting and ominous dialogues wafting from scene to scene.

Henry James is not one of my favorite authors to read, but he's one whose works I enjoy through either movies or miniseries, as is the case with "The Golden Bowl".

While I feel the whole story could have related in 4 episodes instead of 6, I still enjoyed watching it, one of the reasons being Jill Townsend (Maggie), who has a way of acting both with her voice and her eyes, that expresses her emotions without going overboard. Even when angry, she never overdoes it.

I also liked having the narrator (Cyril Cusack) also be a part of the story, and the symbolism of the golden bowl, almost forgotten until near the end, had the perfect subtle impact.

Despite their behavior, you still couldn't help feeling sympathy for Charlotte and Prince Amerigo (Gayle Hunnicutt and Daniel Massey), though you can't help but feel that, had they been free from the start to be together, the rosy picture of romance would probably have faded. And had Maggie and her father (Barry Morse) not been so close, keeping everyone else at a distance (whether aware of it or not), Charlotte might have been more content with the choice she made, and Amerigo may have realized sooner that there was more to Maggie than he thought.

The best part of this story is the way Maggie's character develops from a daddy's girl to a happy bride, then a loving wife and mother as well as a devoted daughter with a best friend for a stepmother, to a mature woman, disillusioned, her romantic blinders fallen, as she views the real scene, but determined to keep as much of the former landscape as possible, in whatever way she can.

Worth watching.