An "attendance upon . . . gentlemen": The B.B.C. Video Adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract

An "attendance upon . . . gentlemen": The B.B.C. Video Adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady by Anthony J. Mazzella, William Paterson College Five years before he wrote his impeccable video adaptation of Henry James's last completed novel, The Golden Bowl, Jack Pulman assayed for B.B.C. television James's first acknowledged masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady. The six-part video adaptation began its initial B.B.C. telecast on January 6, 1968; and like The Golden Bowl, it was directed by James Cellan Jones. It has since been edited by Margot Eavis, the wife of Cellan Jones, for a four-hour home video release, which has been available in England since the first quarter of 1991. It was never telecast nationally in the United States. The home video release, in its various versions, is the subject of this paper.1 For viewers who may have seen both The Golden Bowl and The Portrait of a Lady, echoes and reverberations will be apparent between the two. For example, several actresses perform in both works: Kathleen Byron appears as Countess Amy Gemini in the Portrait and as Fanny Assingham in The Golden Bowl, while Sarah Brackett plays both Henrietta Stackpole in the adaptation of the earlier James novel and Mrs. Ranee in that of the later novel. In addition, the programs' musical themes are by Maurice Ravel; in the Portrait production, it is his Α-Minor Piano Trio.2 Also, the verbal cadences of James as incorporated in dialogue may be heard in both productions. But there the similarities end. Pulman apparently had not yet discovered the key to adapting James, for there is no equivalent to the narrative function performed by Cyril Cusack as Colonel Assingham in The Golden Bowl. Without this narrative voice, James's voice tends to be diminished. The Portrait video production is an effective, at times moving, passage through the James novel that is its source, but it is not as profound a rendering of the original as was the video Golden Bowl A number of reasons may be adduced to account for the differences, including the casting of the leads and Pulman's apparently as yet still conventional approach to video adaptation. Among the principal performers, several would The Henry James Review 14 (1993): 179-187 © 1994 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 180 The Henry James Review have been known to audiences in the late sixties while several others have come to be known through later productions telecast on Masterpiece Theater. For example, though he is not James's hirsute and imposing landed aristocrat Lord Warburton, who is described by James as having "a noticeably handsome face, fresh-coloured, fair and frank, with firm, straight features, a lively grey eye and the rich adornment of a chestnut beard' ' (NY III, 5), Edward Fox would soon be known internationally for his role as the hired assassin in Fred Zinnemann's 1973 film The Day of the Jackal, based on Frederick Forsyth's novel. And Rachel Gurney as Serena Merle would eventually come to be remembered as the ill-fated Lady Marjorie on Upstairs , Downstairs, who perished when the Titanic sank. (One element of appropriate casting in the Portrait was that of Sharon Gurney as Pansy Osmond, the unacknowledged daughter of Madame Merle. Unaware of her maternal parentage, Pansy nevertheless dislikes Gilbert Osmond's friend. In real life, Sharon Gurney is Rachel Gurney's daughter.) Best known to American audiences, of all the members of the cast, was Richard Chamberlain, the actor chosen to play Ralph Touchett. He had had an enormous success in the long-running, 1961-65 television series Dr. Kildare, and he has since come to dominate major productions in the mini-series format, from The Thorn Birds to The Bourne Identity. Chamberlain in the pivotal role of Isabel Archer's tubercular cousin comes to dominate this production as well.3 With the unknown (to American audiences at least) Suzanne Neve as James's titular heroine , and the absence of two crucial scenes in which she is the central if not the only focus, the home video adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady becomes a picture of gentlemen (an "attendance...