Another director who remade his own film (These Three, 1936, also with Miriam Hopkins). You think of Hitch, don't you - The Man Who Knew Too Much - and Leo McCarey, who remade Love Affair as An Affair to Remember. I'm sure there's others.
So - Lillian Hellman's debut play, a powerful work, in fact based on a true similar story that occurred in Edinburgh in 1810. Unlike the early version, this one honours the source and keeps the lesbian angle in, which had to be removed from the 1936 version, which therefore can't be as good. It doesn't feel play-like. Of course the performances are immaculate: Audrey Hepburn Wyler had worked with before, Shirley MacLaine fresh off The Apartment, Miriam Hopkins (I still think too theatrical), James Garner, Fay Bainter, and particularly Karen Balkin as the hideously destructive girl and Veronica Cartwright as her victim.
Despite firing him from Roman Holiday, Wyler does work with DP Franz Planer again, perhaps at Hepburn's insistence (he had since photographed her in The Nun's Story and Breakfast at Tiffany's). He gives him the deep focus that Wyler had enjoyed with Gregg Toland. Wyler's blocking is marvellous.
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| There's a similar shot to this in Wyler's Mrs Miniver |
It would be interesting to write the horrible child Mary Tilford as a grown-up.
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