The Lost Moment

“As long as I stay here, I’ll never die.” The reason for noir fans to seek out The Lost Moment, director Martin Gabel’s only feature film, is its stunningly sensory Gothic atmosphere: a centuries-old palazzo overlooking a Venetian canal; a colossal interior hall with a multi-story, cobweb-coated spiral staircase ascending as if to heaven; an ornate galleria connecting private quarters to the main house; the shriveled hand of a veiled old woman grasping onto the arm of her chair; a moody, spooky musical score with subtle soprano voices from a distant, otherworldly chorus. Loosely based on a novella by American-British author Henry James, and with significant thematic and aesthetic parallels to Terence Young’s Corridor of Mirrors (1948), the film stars Robert Cummings as Lewis Venable, a greedy American writer on the hunt for the stash of old love letters written by famous 19th-century poet Jeffrey Ashton to his beloved Juliana Bordereau (Agnes Moorehead), who is still alive at the age of 105 and, it turns out, may have murdered Ashton and buried him in the backyard. Venable wants to steal and publish the letters for a sensational profit, so when he learns that the Bordereau estate is in desperate need of cash, he offers an exorbitant rate to rent a couple of rooms in the palazzo to gain proximity to the coveted correspondence. The main obstacle is Juliana’s grand niece Tina (Susan Hayward), who questions Venable’s intentions and guards the decrepit Juliana, all while having her own mental health problems that create a sort of time warp in the house (“It’s only being with people that makes one lonely,” she says). With Venable’s occasional voice-over adding a further storybook quality, the film is slow-paced by design and bathed in endless visual style, but it’s a viewing experience no noir fan should miss.