1 Introduction: Letter from an Unknown Woman

Notes

1. Andrew Britton, ‘The Ideology of Screen’, in Movie 26 (Winter 1978/79) p.26; reprinted in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Britton on Film,Detroit,Wayne State University Press, 2009, p. 420. 2. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (New York, The Viking Press, 1972). Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago, Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 2006). John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980). Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Stan- dard and the Logic of Naturalism: Essays on American Literature (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987). Tony Tanner, Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987). 3. Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987). 4. Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999). Jonathan Bignell (ed.), Writing and Cinema (Harlow, Pearson Education, 1999). 5. Walter Benjamin, noting the appearance of the first lithographic poster in the London of 1861, writes that ‘the first drops of a shower of letters ran down the walls and houses (today it pours unremittingly, day and night, on the big cities).’ See Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla (eds), Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs (London, Verso, 2007), p. 62. 6. For this subject see Judith Buchanan (ed.), The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 7. See Robert E. Meyer, ‘Outside the Source: Credit Sequences in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and 25th Hour’ in David L. Kranz and Nancy C. Mellerski (eds), In/fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation (Newcastle, Cambridge Schol- ars Publishing, 2008). Also Georg Stanitzek and Noelle Aplevich, ‘Reading the Title Sequence (Vorspann, Générique)’, Cinema Journal 48, Number 4 Summer 2009, 44–58. 8. The ‘relationship between horizontality and verticality’ in this context is extensively discussed by Fried. See Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, p. 52 and passim. 9. A possible way of addressing this is the relatively rare use of superimposi- tion of the two images. It has the disadvantage that neither image might appear sufficiently clear. 10. The shots of Lisa/Joan Fontaine writing the final page of the letter in Letter from an Unknown Woman are an example of this. 11. An exemplary case of a long sequence of a figure writing a letter is Nana/Anna Karina writing in Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962). Godard, of

128 Notes 129

course, working with different conventions to that of Hollywood production, extends the sequence to just short of four minutes. The discussion of how we read in terms of speed and our perception of words dates back to William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890), as Fried points out in his analysis of Crane in Realism, Writing, Disfiguration. See p. 146 and notes 57 and 58. 12. Did Hollywood stars write their own words on paper, or were there pro- fessionals who were used for handwriting? Perhaps a combination of the two – there seems to be little evidence either way. 13. Ophuls’s The Reckless Moment offers examples of both of these latter effects. See Chapter 6, pp. 119–20. 14. J.M. Coetzee touches on these issues: ‘Death may indeed be the last great foe of writing, but writing is also the foe of death.’ See Age of Iron (London, Secker and Warburg, 1990), p. 106. 15. There is a wide range of writing on Ophuls, but for work specifically on this film see Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago, University of Chicago Press 1996), pp. 81–113, V.F. Perkins, ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’ in Movie 29/30 (1982), 61–72, V.F. Perkins, ‘Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman’inCineAction No. 52 (2000), 40–48. George Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 103–125. Robin Wood, ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman: The Double Narrative’ in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film (New York, Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 198–224. 16. Issues of plausibility and narrative logic in the film are probed by V.F. Perkins in ‘Same tune again! Repetition and framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman’. 17. Stefan Zweig ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’ in Kaleidoscope Two (The Hallam Edition, London, Cassell, 1951), pp. 189–230. 18. John nods when Stefan asks him ‘Did this come during the night?’ 19. The importance of using Joan Fontaine’s speaking voice as a way of engag- ing an audience at the opening of her films can be observed in both Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) where she has the famous initial speech about dreaming of returning to Manderley, and in Jane Eyre (Robert Stevenson, 1943). The latter case is the more remarkable as Fontaine’s character, the adult Jane, does not appear for some time, and the words she is reading in voice-over – on the screen is the image of the first page of the film’s novel – are Hollywood’s, not the opening words of Charlotte Bronte’s text. 20. We know that the attachment was not pinned to the end of the letter; the slip of paper has no fold corresponding to the leaf beneath it (see Figure 1.4). We can reasonably assume that Stefan has detached it and after reading it, has laid it down on the final page. 21. There are two brief inserted shots of Stefan turning over the pages of the letter as he reads, at the beginning and the end of the Linz sequence, but 130 Notes

they seem to have no further function other than to remind us of the donnée. 22. There is a fourth image briefly visible in the background, of little Stefan in some sort of group photo, perhaps at school? 23. This moment in the film is discussed a related context, that of the ‘way certain mainstream films look at photographs’, in Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen, pp. 39–41. 24. What follows was created by Ophuls and Koch; none of the detail that I am going to discuss has any similar original in the Zweig story. 25. The only obvious exception to this is the sign outside Stefan’s building which we see in the sequence in which Lisa swings and listens to his play- ing. The sign reads ‘House Regulations’ – perhaps Ophuls felt the words would stand out too much in German. The art direction on the film was by Alexander Golitzen, and set decoration was by Russell A. Gausman and Ruby R. Levitt. 26. His reading of the menu charmingly brings it into service as part of the apparatus of seduction, as he finds out that Lisa has no other engagements, or, implicitly, attachments. 27. According to the editors of the published script, there was an additional line in the shooting script at the end of Lisa’s speech on parting from Stefan at the station: ‘But not quite all of you ...the child, our son, was born in a charity hospital.’ See Virginia Wright Wexman and Karen Hollinger (eds), Letter from an Unknown Woman (Rutgers Films in Print Series Vol. 5) (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1986), p. 146. 28. It is possible to read this moment, accompanied as it is by the gloomy- sounding chanting of prayers on the soundtrack, to be implying that either the child or the mother has died, but we cannot be certain. Per- haps Ophuls wanted the sense that while new life is emerging in this place, it is also one where illness and death are not all that uncommon. 29. See particularly the discussions by V.F. Perkins in ‘Same Tune again! Repe- tition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman’ and George Wilson in Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View. 30. The third sentence of the letter as read by Lisa in the opening of the film is ‘Will I ever send it – I don’t know.’

2 Inscription and Erasure in All This, and Heaven Too

1. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 87. 2. The substantial discussion is Alison L. McKee, “ ‘L’affaire Praslin’ and All This, and Heaven Too: Gender, Genre, and History in the 1940s Woman’s Film.” The Velvet Light Trap, Spring 1995, 35–51. Catherine Jurca brieﬂy discusses the marketing of the ﬁlm as one of four case studies in ‘What the Public Wanted: Hollywood 1937–1942’, Cinema Journal, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Winter, 2008), pp. 3–25. 3. The snow globe was a prop in other movies of the period. It is famously used in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) and it appears in Kitty Foyle Notes 131

(Sam Wood, 1940). It does occur more recently in Eureka (Nicolas Roeg, 1983), a film set in the first half of the 20th century, where its use seems to be a way of referencing Citizen Kane. 4. Henriette is referring to the letter of recommendation that the Duchesse refuses at the end of the film, so this is obscure on a first viewing. 5. The details of the historical scandal on which the novel and film were based are well and thoroughly covered in the article by Alison McKee in The Velvet Light Trap. See footnote 2. 6. The matter of endless writing in texts about adultery has been noted by Tony Tanner, who also observes, in his discussion of Rousseau’s La Nou- velle Héloïse, a similar formation in which Saint-Preux is ‘forced away from the body of the loved other, and into writing’. See Tanner, Adultery and the Novel (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 14 footnote and p. 122. 7. This can be compared with Paula’s/Ingrid Bergman’s speech to the Boyer character at the end of Gaslight, which Stanley Cavell calls an ‘aria of revenge’. See Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 76. 8. There is a suggestion that the envelopes which we see here are an anachronism. This may well be so, but arguably Litvak considered that they were necessary for the dramatic force of the performance of revealing the two blank letters. 9. I shall be returning to matters of ritual in the context of reading and writing in my analysis of The Reader in Chapter 5. 10. I am also aware that it might be said to be a little like the experience of watching a Hollywood melodrama. 11. A full account of the film would need to consider the importance of scenes that occur on borders between inside and outside. For Reynald, leaving the house with his mother nearly turns into a death sentence, and the steps and hallway are also shown to be a site where the tensions between the characters become overt. I am thinking particularly of two scenes, Theo’s return with Louise from Corsica and the departure of the family for Melun. 12. See Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, p. 57. 13. The term ‘nothing’ is used significantly in several places in the film. An earlier exchange between Henriette and Theo about Frances and the unsent letter of recommendation is as follows: H: She never replied – she answered nothing. T: Nothing? Is nothing an answer? Yes, nothing would be her answer. 14. This is I think the only time in the film Theo ever addresses Henriette by her given name; he seems not to notice that he has done so.

3 Of Lessons and of Love: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

1. E. M. Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (London, Edward Arnold, 1973), Abinger Edition Vol. 13, p. 110. 132 Notes

2. There is, of course, a brief flashback within this flashback, to the true story of the death of Liberty Valance. 3. A more comprehensive sense of how the film sets up its meanings through the opening sequences can be gained from Andrew Sarris and Robert Pippin. See Andrew Sarris, The John Ford Movie Mystery (London, Secker and Warburg [Cinema One Series], 1976), p. 176–177 and Robert B. Pippin’s chapter ‘Who Cares Who Shot Liberty Valence’ in his Hollywood Westerns and American Myth (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010), particularly pp. 71–74. 4. Later in the film, as he begins his tale, Ransom underlines this by saying to Maxwell Scott, the editor of the present day Shinbone Star,andclearly an older man than Charlie ‘You’re a young man.’ He raises an arm for emphasis and repeats this, as if to stress the depth and significance for him of the gulf between them: ‘a young man’. 5. A period of suspended time perhaps, when it is too hot to be out in the open for long. That the weather seems appropriate for telling a long tale is one of several echoes of Heart of Darkness (1899), where a calm evening provides the moment: ‘The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance.’ See Joseph Conrad, Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories (Edinburgh, John Grant, 1925), p. 46. 6. Link can be understood as an example of a type of familiar buffoon com- monly present in comedy. See the classic discussion of such figures in Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 175. 7. What we might think of as privacy, for example, moments when two characters might be intimately alone, is virtually absent from the whole film. I shall return to this in my concluding chapter. 8. A more broadly based account of how we can read the film in terms of political philosophy is Robert B. Pippin’s illuminating chapter ‘Who Cares Who Shot Liberty Valence’ in his Hollywood Westerns and American Myth, pp. 61–101. 9. The connection between Tom and the Leatherstocking figure in Cooper’s novels has been previously noted by Doug Pye. See ‘Genre and History’ in Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye (eds) The Movie Book of the Western (London, Studio Vista, 1996), p. 121. Cooper’s novel cycle variously depicts elements of the plot of the unmarried hunter figure ceding his place and role as pioneer to the married bourgeois couple, presented as the next stage of American settlement. The Pioneers (1823), the first of the cycle to be published, is a good example. 10. The story told by one man to an audience of three other men, one that is implicitly ‘too dark altogether’ for consumption outside this context, seems again to invoke Heart of Darkness; see footnote 5. Suggestively both stories in their different ways turn on a crucial lie. 11. In cast lists she is sometimes named as Lietta, but she is clearly addressed as Julietta in the film. 12. There is a complementary discussion of Pompey’s presence in the schoolroom sequence in Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth, pp. 77–78. Notes 133

13. There is yet another, comedic, version of the image, in the convention for statehood sequence, when Major Starbuckle/John Carradine, the- atrically eschewing rhetoric, screws up and throws down his prepared speech. When Doc Willoughby retrieves the paper and unfolds it, the pages are blank. 14. It is true that we learn later that Peabody is alive, but this is after Ransom has made the decision that I outline in the next paragraph. 15. When Liberty and his thugs have finished their attempt to destroy print by smashing the press and type, a chair through the window has shattered the words ‘Shinbone Star’ written on the panes. It is a nice coincidence that what remains are three letters, the initial capital S and two others which could be the eighth and tenth letters of another word: the trace of Shakespeare? 16. How we might think of Hollywood movies and Shakespeare together is explored at length in Stanley Cavell’s essay ‘The Thought of Movies’, first published in the Winter 1983 issue of the Yale Review and reprinted in Themes Out of School: Effects And Causes (San Francisco, North Point Press, 1984), pp. 3–26. 17. See footnotes 5 and 10. Interestingly Robert Pippin finds echoes of the same text in The Searchers.SeeHollywood Westerns and American Myth, pp. 109–110, 117. 18. Perhaps it has not truly come about; the desert is still the same, as Link remarks in the opening of the film. It is interesting that the one image of the plenitude of nature that the film gives us is in the desert, the mass of cactus roses that surround the ruin of Tom’s house. 19. An idea of homelessness and the resonance of the term ‘pilgrim’ for American culture is memorably explored by Stanley Cavell in his seminal work on American culture, The Senses of Walden. ‘We merely sometimes forget what a land of pilgrims means, or forget to discover it’. See The Senses of Walden (New York, The Viking Press, 1972), p 51 et seq.

4 Into the Wild: The New Unreadable America

1. Penn has also directed a segment ‘USA’ of the multi-authored feature 11’09’01 – September 11 (2002). 2. Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (New York, Villard Books, 1996). 3. Possibly a dim echo of such a story is retained by the film’s opening quo- tation, for those who recall its author’s biography. Byron died a sad and probably avoidable death, in a place far from home, and at the age of 36. 4. That is to say, these events are given in chronological order in the story that Penn tells, even though this involves some reordering of them compared to the historical account given in Krakauer. The film makes this clear in its final credits. 5. It becomes clear at the end of the scene that he has been quoting an apposite poem. See footnote 11 below. 134 Notes

6. It feels as if Penn has specifically directed Emile Hirsch to act youthfully here, springing on and off rocks in marked contrast to the heavy-set figure of Rainey. 7. This is accurate in terms of the documentary background. The offence is obscure in the film, presumably as Penn has no interest in it. 8. The Slab City episode is introduced by a written title, the word ‘Family’. 9. This may also be because it is preceded by the Alaskan episode in which it appears that events are drawing to a conclusion. 10. Even in Carine’s various recollections of their childhood, we see Chris mostly outside the McCandless home. 11. In the final credits we learn that this is a poem by Sharon Olds: ‘I Go Back to May 1937’. 12. Presumably Penn may have meant to evoke the related image in Citizen Kane here. 13. The first two sentences are shown in this way – thereafter, the sentences appear fully written out, as if the point has been sufficiently made, until the final six words much later on. 14. The terms are James Fenimore Cooper’s, from his novel The Pioneers (1823). They are from the epigraph to an extensive discussion in the essay ‘Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men’ in Tony Tanner’s collection of the same name. See Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 1–24. 15. Much later we find out that Wayne, the addressee of the words, is Chris’s employer in South Dakota. Why of all people does this man receive a final message? Because he asks least of Chris, represents the social context with least expectations? 16. For a classic discussion of the difference between signs and marks see Walter Benjamin, ‘Painting, or Signs and Marks’ in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1: 1913–1926 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1996), pp. 83–86. 17. In a concealed gesture to the factual basis of the story, the role is played by the figure who had actually driven Christopher McCandless to his point of departure, Jim Gallien. 18. No reference to it is made in the film, but the choice of name may be derived from a literary source, W.H. Davies, The Autobiography of a Super- Tramp (1908). The opening chapter titles of Davies’s memoir (Childhood – Youth – Manhood) may possibly have inspired the chapter titles that Penn uses. 19. We do see the carved words once more, near the end of the film, but of course long separated from the occasion of Chris’s writing them. 20. There are a few further entries as he begins to succumb to the poisoning that will kill him, but they are brief or played over other images and not given this kind of significance. 21. The moment quoted is a revelation that comes to Lara early in the novel. See Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (London, Collins and Harvill Press, 1958) p. 76. Notes 135

22. The passage is taken from Yury’s memory of his visit to his wife Tonya in the Moscow maternity ward, towards the end of part one of the novel. See Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, p. 158. 23. A reference to the ﬁgure of the baby or infant occurs either at the end or towards the end of all three of the ﬁlms directed by Penn that I have considered here. In every case it is marked by written words. The Indian Runner concludes with a title card that quotes Rabindranath Tagore: ‘Every new child born brings the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.’ The Crossing Guard gives us the words on the gravestone of Freddy’s daughter ‘Tender Child, Rest in Heaven’. And here we have Pasternak’s words on the page, the description of the maternity ward.

5 The Reader: Embracing Reading, Denying Writing

1. Der Vorleser (Zurich: Diogenes, 1995). 2. The Reader, translated by Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997). 3. For example, the role of Michael’s father is more prominent in the novel than in the film, where he figures only in a few scenes at the head of the dinner table. The film places more emphasis on Michael’s sexual partners other than Hanna, and introduces the figure of his adult daughter, who appears only as an infant in the novel. Two substantial scenes that were based on episodes in the novel were shot but not used in the film (Hanna’s visit to Michael’s home, and Michael’s encounter with an ex-Nazi on his way to visit the camps). Neither scene appears in David Hare’s published screenplay. These are available as extras on the region 2 (PAL)DVD, issued by Entertainment In Video. 4. The music, by the American composer Nico Muhly, is also American, although it is probably more significant that Muhly had worked with Daldry before, providing the original music for The Hours (2002). 5. The screenplay is published as The Reader: A Screenplay by David Hare (New York, Weinstein Books, 2009). 6. This scene is immediately followed by Michael doing well in a session of school sports, as if to suggest his new found sense of his own capability can be extended to other physical activities. 7. The scene appears in Hare’s screenplay but has no direct original in the novel. At another moment Schlink uses a different kind of dramatic device, a scene turning on a note left by Michael that Hanna cannot read, to make a similar point. The two scenes invite comparison in terms of the opportunities available to a novelist and a screenwriter and film maker. 8. The title of Chekhov’s famous short story varies slightly from one translation to another. 9. Narrative logic might suggest that we see Michael producing the tapes before Hanna receives them, but this is not the case. Daldry introduces them by showing us Hanna receiving them, and only after this do we return to Michael making the recordings. 136 Notes

10. The final chapter of the novel contains some reflections by Michael on the difficulty of writing the story, but these come after the event, when we have read the text that he has written. 11. There are many versions of this ending, such as the conclusions of Les Maudits (René Clément, 1947), Ring of Bright Water (Jack Couffer, 1969) or The End of the Affair (Neil Jordan, 1999). Neatly Daldry and Hare use some- thing close to the opening line of the novel’s text for Michael’s opening of the story as he tells it to Julia. 12. The writing is the record of the tapes that Michael had sent to Hanna in prison in the 1970s. We see him writing some of it later on. 13. In the screenplay and credits she is given a name: Brigitte, played by Jeanette Hain. 14. This aspect of Michael’s life, central to the themes of the film, is hugely expanded from the novel’s rather different approach to it. Of the adult women discussed here, only Sophie appears there. 15. Slightly more footage, with Sophie appealing unsuccessfully to Michael to explain what is going on, was shot. Their exchange anticipates, and is answered by, the scene at the end of the film in which Michael tells the story to Julia. The longer version of Sophie’s role is available as an extra on the DVD cited. 16. Hare’s screenplay does include one presumably unfilmed scene with Gertrude when Michael returns the infant Julia to her after his trip to see his mother. 17. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Purloined Letter’ first published in Poe’s Tales (New York, Wiley and Putnam, 1845). 18. Footage of readings shot but not used in the film includes Michael reading to Hanna while he is sitting in the bath, and reading to her while she is bathing herself. The footage is available as an extra on the DVD cited. 19. See the discussion of the term in Tony Tanner, Adultery and the Novel (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 12–13 ff. 20. A scene (not in Hare’s screenplay, but in the novel) in which Michael takes Hanna to his home when his family are away was shot but not used in the completed film. Even though Hanna refuses to sleep with Michael in the house, the sequence could have diluted the sense of the couple being so largely confined to Hanna’s apartment. The footage is available as an extra on the DVD cited. 21. Daldry’s production designer, Brigitte Broch, calls the shades used ‘burnt colours’ See extras on DVD cited. 22. Sadly there is no room in this account to think at length about the subject of motherhood. I am conscious that it is an undercurrent in several places, in a film which shows us two mothers (Carla Berg and Rose Mather), and invokes another with the suggestively Shakespearean name of Gertrude, and is continually aware of the motherly elements in Hanna’s relation to Michael, expressed simply enough in her calling him ‘kid’ at intervals throughout the film. 23. The scenes of the affair are cleverly interleaved by Daldry and Hare with a narrative of Michael’s life with his friends so as to present a kind of Notes 137

counterpoint to it, a routine, unproblematic version. Thus parallel to the rituals of Hanna/sex/washing/reading is the ordinary summer that Michael might have had: Sophie/first love/swimming/schoolwork. 24. A more extended version of Hanna learning to write, which was shot but not included in the film, treats her costuming in the same terms. The footage is available as an extra on the DVD cited. 25. Lena Olin also comments in not unrelated terms on the importance of this shot to Daldry. See extras on DVD cited. 26. These encounters also evoke the final scene of Part Two of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). Here Emma’s renewal of her relation to Léon takes place at a performace of Lucie de Lammermoor in Rouen. 27. Chekhov ‘A Lady with a Dog’ The Oxford Chekhov Volume IX (London, Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 140. 28. There is never any suggestion that Hanna writes to anyone other than Michael or that writing (other than signing her name) has any other purpose for her. 29. In Hare’s screenplay, the scene in the middle of the film in which Michael takes the adult Julia out to dinner is followed by one in which he invites her to take a trip with him, implicitly to visit Hanna’s grave, the next day. In one of the relatively few major revisions to the screenplay, the latter part of that scene was dropped and the invitation to go on the trip is implicitly not made until after the conversation with Ilana Mather. The effect is to underline the point that it is only then that Michael feels he can tell Julia the story.

6 Conclusion: The Intimacy of Writing

1. This is Ransom’s letter to the officials of the railroad. See the discussion in Chapter 3, pp. 49–50. 2. There is one brief medium shot of Chris writing, but what he writes is always displayed as I describe it here. 3. It is not possible here to extend this argument by looking at the rich role of words, gifts and unconsummated love in other films starring Bette Davis; I am particularly thinking of Now, Voyager. I hope in a future project to look at a group of Davis’s films as part of a study that will examine the field of adultery and the female star. 4. In films made under the Production Code being explicit about the love letter may to some extent substitute for the limits on the treatment of the sexual act. Outside the Production Code era, film makers may choose to use the letter to express sexual issues tactfully, as Daldry does here. 5. Both films acknowledge the same source novel, Elisabeth Sanxay Hold- ing’s thriller The Blank Wall, first published in 1947. See The Blank Wall and The Innocent Mrs. Duff (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1991). 6. See particularly Robin Wood ‘Plunging off The Deep End into The Reckless Moment’ CineAction No 59, 2002, 14–19. Also Andrew Britton, ‘The Family in the Reckless Moment’ in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Britton on Film (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2009), pp. 219–231. 138 Notes

7. The presentation of the sentence here is a good example of the use of writing that can strike the viewer as unnaturally fast. See the discussion inChapter1,p.6. 8. From later shots it appears that she is wearing a cardigan over pyjamas. 9. An interesting case here that sits between manuscript and electronics is that of the treatment of the letters produced by manual typewriters in Hollywood film. There is a shot so common as to be almost a convention, an extreme close-up of the letters appearing on the paper as successive keys hit the ink ribbon. Do such shots implicitly wish to make the claim that if we see the letters sufficiently magnified, we will feel that they are individual, not just generic products? This ‘individual signature’ of each typewriter can be used occasionally to make a plot point, as it famously is in Jagged Edge (Richard Marquand, 1985). 10. Later in The Reckless Moment we see Lucia post her letter to Tom, but there is no evidence in The Deep End that Margaret sends her email. 11. I am aware that a full account of this sequence would need to consider the degree to which it relates to films which dealt with life in the absence of husbands during World War Two, for example Since You Went Away (John Cromwell, 1944) or Tender Comrade (Edward Dmytryk, 1943). This context is one which Lucia implicitly raises in saying to Tom on the telephone that he was away for three years during the war. 12. It could be argued that as the film is not made under the Production Code, McGehee and Siegel have a different kind of freedom in what they show, or might show, us of Beau’s meeting with Darby. So this might be thought of as having more potential interest for the audience. 13. A striking amount of detail in the opening minutes of the film sounds the note of things that are habitual or repeated: the son hardening his feet for track, his taking a shower every morning, his smelling like a garage every evening, his sleeping in the same room as his grandfather. In contrast Lucia’s early morning trip into Los Angeles is not a habitual action, and family members comment on its unusualness. 14. This is of course her conscious feeling. What she is repressing is discussed in different ways by both Wood and Britton. See footnote 6 above. 15. See ASingleMan(Tom Ford, 2009) for an example of this. Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter, ‘Painting, or Signs and Marks’ in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1: 1913–1926 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996) Bignell, Jonathan (ed.), Writing and Cinema (Harlow, Pearson Education, 1999) Buchanan, Judith (ed.), The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) Cavell, Stanley, The Senses of Walden (New York, The Viking Press, 1972) Cavell, Stanley, ‘The Thought of Movies’ in Themes Out of School: Effects And Causes (San Francisco, North Point Press, 1984) Cavell, Stanley, The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992) Cavell, Stanley, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996) Coetzee, J. M., Age of Iron (London, Secker and Warburg, 1990) Conrad, Joseph, Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories (Edinburgh, John Grant, 1925) Davies, W. H., The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (London, Jonathan Cape, 1949) Forster, E. M., Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (London, Edward Arnold, 1973) [Abinger Edition Vol. 13] Fried, Michael, Realism, Writing, Disﬁguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987) Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton,N.J.Princeton University Press, 1957) Grant, Barry Keith (ed.), Britton on Film (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2009) Hare, David, The Reader: A Screenplay by David Hare (New York, Weinstein Books, 2009) Hingley, Ronald (ed. and translator), The Oxford Chekhov Volume IX (London, Oxford University Press, 1975) Holding, Elisabeth Sanxay, The Blank Wall and the Innocent Mrs. Duff (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1991) Irwin, John T., American Hieroglyphics (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980) Jurca, Catherine, ‘What the Public Wanted: Hollywood 1937–1942’ in Cinema Journal 47, Winter 2008 Krakauer, Jon, Into the Wild (New York, Villard Books, 1996) Marx, Ursula, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla (eds), Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs (London, Verso, 2007) McKee, Alison L. ‘ “L’affaire Praslin” and All This, and Heaven Too:Gender, Genre, and History in the 1940s Woman’s Film’ in The Velvet Light Trap, Spring 1995

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Meyer, Robert E., ‘Outside the Source: Credit Sequences in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and 25th hour’ in David L. Kranz and Nancy C. Mellerski (eds), In/ﬁdelity: Essays on Film Adaptation (Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) Michaels, Walter Benn, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: Essays on American Literature (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987) Pasternak, Boris, Doctor Zhivago (London, Collins and Harvill Press, 1958) Perkins, V. F., ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’inMovie 29/30 (1982) Perkins, V. F., ‘Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman’inCineaction No. 52 (2000) Pippin, Robert B., Hollywood Westerns and American Myth (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010) Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘The Purloined Letter’ ﬁrst published in Poe’s Tales (New York, Wiley and Putnam, 1845) Pye, Douglas, ‘Genre and History’ in Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye (eds), The Movie Book of the Western (London, Studio Vista, 1996) Sarris, Andrew, The John Ford Movie Mystery (London, Secker and Warburg [Cinema One Series], 1976) Schlink, Bernhard, The Reader, translated by Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997) Schlink, Bernhard, Der Vorleser (Zurich: Diogenes, 1995) Stanitzek, Georg, Noelle Aplevich ‘Reading the Title Sequence (Vorspann, Générique)’, Cinema Journal 48, Number 4 Summer 2009 Stewart, Garrett, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999) Stewart, Garrett, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006) Tanner, Tony, Adultery and the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) Tanner, Tony, Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987) Wexman, Virginia Wright, Karen Hollinger (eds), LetterfromanUnknown Woman (Rutgers Films in Print Series Vol. 5) (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1986) Wilson, George, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) Wood, Robin, ‘LetterfromanUnknownWoman: The Double Narrative’ in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film (New York, Columbia University Press, 1998) Wood, Robin, ‘Plunging off The Deep End into The Reckless Moment’ Cineaction No 59, 2002 Zweig, Stefan, ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’ in Kaleidoscope Two (The Hallam Edition, London, Cassell, 1951) Index

Note: Locators with letter ‘n’ refer to notes

All This, and Heaven Too (Anatole Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944), 36 Litvak, 1940), 20–40, 114–15, Godard, Jean-Luc, 128–9n 117, 127 Golitzen, Alexander, 130n Astaire, Fred, 2 Hare, David, 90, 98, 112, 137n Back Street (Robert Stevenson, 1941), Hayworth, Rita, 2 21 Hergé (Georges Prosper Remi), 103 Benjamin, Walter, 128n, 134n Homer’s Odyssey, 91, 103, 106 Britton, Andrew, 1 Hugo, Victor, 30 Broch, Brigitte, 136n Brothers (Jim Sheridan, 2009), 125 Indian Runner, The (Sean Penn, Byron, George Gordon, Lord Byron, 1991), 61–5 65 Into the Wild (Sean Penn, 2007), 61–88, 115–18, 127 Cavell, Stanley, 20, 36, 133n Jagged Edge (Richard Marquand, Chekhov, Anton, 93, 95–6, 103, 112 1985), 138n Coetzee, J(ohn) M(axwell), 129n James, William, 129n Conrad, Joseph, 58, 132n Johnson, Nunnally, 3 Cooper, James Fenimore, 47, 132n Crossing Guard, The (Sean Penn, Koch, Howard, 9 1995), 61–5 Koster, Henry, 3 Krakauer, Jon, 66–7, 75 Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939), 21 Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert), 103 Davies, W(illiam) H(enry), 134n Lessing, Gotthard, 91 Deep End, The (Scott McGehee and Letter, The (William Wyler, 1940), 21 David Siegel, 2001), 118, 120–5 Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Dickens, Charles, 92, 103 Ophuls, 1948), 8–19, 101, 112, Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 41 114, 117, 127 Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, London, Jack (John Grifﬁth), 84 1944), 9 Love Affair (Leo McCarey, 1939), 21 du Maurier, Daphne, 3 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Field, Rachel, 21 (John Ford, 1962), 41–60, Flaubert, Gustave, 137n 115–17, 127 Fontaine, Joan, 129n Muhly, Nico, 135n Forster, E(dward) M(organ), 41 My Cousin Rachel (Henry Koster, Fried, Michael, 2, 128n 1952), 3

141 142 Index

Night of the Hunter (Charles Sisters, The (Anatole Litvak, 1938), 21 Laughton, 1955), 63 Stegner, Wallace, 76 Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), 21 Tagore, Rabindranath, 135n Tanner, Tony, 131n, 136n Old Maid, The (Edmund Goulding, Thoreau, Henry David, 76, 116 1939), 21 Tolstoy, Leo, 76, 85 Pasternak, Boris, 76, 85–6, 134n, Tovarich (Anatole Litvak, 1937), 21 135n Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Poe, Edgar Allan, 101 Clemens), 92

Reader, The (Stephen Daldry, 2008), Vivre Sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962), 3, 89–113, 115–18, 127 128–9n Reckless Moment, The (Max Ophuls, 1949), 118–20, 122–5 When Tomorrow Comes (John M. Robinson, Casey, 21, 30 Stahl, 1939), 21 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 131n Wilder, Billy, 9 Schlink, Bernhard, 89, 97 Woman Between, The (Anatole Litvak, Searchers, The (John Ford, 1956), 115 1937), 21 Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012), 126–7 Zweig, Stefan, 9