What's in a Name: Two Films Titled Moll Flanders

Abstract

230 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:2 What's in a Name: Two Films Titled Moil Flanders Moll Flanders, directed by Pen Densham, screenplay by Pen Densham. Moll Flanders, directed by David Atwood, screenplay by Andrew Davies. "The book is, like, a total classic." According to the Los Angeles Times (14 June 1996), this remark was the only evidence that Defoe's novel had been read by anyone attending an opening-night party in Westwood for the stars of MGM's "Moll Flanders" along with about seven hundred of their most intimate associates. The Los Angeles Times also reports that nothing was said about the film's setting beyond expressions of surprise by several guests who "weren't aware that Wonderbras were so commonly available in eighteenth-century England ." Live and learn. Given the level of literacy and historical insight thus displayed by MGM's finest, it is easy to see why the film "Moll Flanders" is, like, a total disaster. The pace is excruciatingly slow. Robin Wright miscast as Moll is a pouting, stony-faced woman too old for her initial scenes, too matronly for plausibility at the story's conclusion, and insufficiently alluring to sustain interest in the various states of dress and undress through with the plot's tedious erotic adventures take her. She would do better as Joan of Arc in some version more lugubrious than Shaw's masterpiece. John Lynch's unnamed artist, the great and only true love of Moll's life in the film, is equally earnest, equally dreary, and equally uninteresting in a part to which a better actor with a better script might have given some life and wit. But wit is in very short supply throughout Pen Densham 's screenplay except for his heavy-handed stroke of naming the evil madam of Moll's brothel Mrs Allworthy. Those who know their total classics must admit that Densham named the film's sneering villainess with totally awesome irony. Otherwise Densham's work, which is modestly advertised as "based on the character from the novel by Daniel Defoe," displays mostly bigotry, moments of third-rate Gothic horror, cloying sentimentality, bizarre nostalgia, and timid political correctness. The film's bigotry is aimed at Roman Catholics. It is manifested in scenes depicting harsh treatment culminating in sexual abuse that Moll suffers in the convent to which she is consigned upon upon being removed from her birthplace in Newgate Prison, where her mother was hanged immediately after Moll's birth. The hard-hearted nuns who run Moll's convent along with a salacious depraved priest assigned to hear its inmates' confessions all seem like escapees from a staunchly anti-Catholic Gothic novel set amid the claustrophobic wickedness of an imaginary Renaissance Italy, not the landscape of Defoe's England. When a thirty-something-looking but supposedly adolescent Moll arrives one day in the confessional box outside of which she has been standing in line and placidly knitting like some would-be Madame Lafarge waiting for a revolution, the drooling priest opens the grill and sticks a hand through to fondle Moll's breasts. Duly outraged, our heroine skewers the offending hand with a knitting needle (atta girl!), only to find herself evicted after the ensuing brouhaha to wander homeless through London's mean streets. REVIEWS 231 Attracted by a cosy red lantern (get it?) hanging outside Mrs Allworthy's establishment , Moll finds shelter there, eventually understands and accepts its purposes, then sells her body (at what seem inflated prices for the merchandise ) to a series of extravagant but disgusting old rakes with shabby underwear, unseemly impatience, and evidently (there is no other explanation) failing eyesight . Mrs Allworthy's brothel, no less than the creepy convent which it replaces as Moll's place of confinement, seems designed mainly to evoke Gothic terror. The hackneyed scenes in these places might have been marginally effective instead of unintentionally self-parodic if only the producers had gone the whole hog and hired as scriptwriter Stephen King. Cloying sentimentality is the prevailing mode. Moll's early adventures are framed within a narrative of how her poor little abandoned daughter Flora is discovered, rescued from a dismal orphanage, and restored to her...