No matter how delicate James’s observations, his insistence on the hard facts of money, power, influence, and property fuels the engine of his stories. Like The Europeans, which was published in 1878, Washington Square, from 1880, combines humor and an acute and sometimes merciless perception of the way the world works. But The Heiress, despite certain alterations of James’s drama, has a concentrated beauty and potency that has never been equaled by any other adaptation of James. Watching the opening scenes of The Heiress, one feels a certain exasperation: All this conventional busy-ness (Olivia de Havilland, as Catherine Sloper, throws her formal gown over her head and then runs down the stairs like a sixteen-year-old) seems wrong for James’s study of domination, submission, love, and rebellion, an intense drama built on blunt exchanges and pages of psychological analysis. In 1949, the great Hollywood director William Wyler ( The Letter, The Best Years of Our Lives) mounted an adaptation not of Washington Square itself, but of The Heiress-the theatrical version of James’s novel which the writing team of Augustus and Ruth Goetz had brought to Broadway in 1947. Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie”), all of which is a slightly cloying and over-insistent setting of the period for the American audience. At the beginning of the first and best movie adaptation of Washington Square, we see the following: a petit point of the square itself, which fades into a photograph and then a kind of tableau vivant-carriages moving before a handsome townhouse, a boy corralling some fowls, life bursting out all over and we hear the familiar French song, “Plaisir d’Amour” (“Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment.
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