So 'The Last Moment' has to do what it can, changing or adding characters and motives, inventing incidents and crises. Compared to James, these revisions are generally inferior, and often ridiculous, dragging a sly parable into Gothic melodrama, with its mercenary crone at the dark centre, like Miss Havisham after two centuries in the grave, more a beast or lizard or horror freak than the beautiful muse who inspired celebrated lyric verse; or the vaguely supernatural subplot in which her schizophrenic niece 'becomes' Juliana at night, playing romantic piano music dressed in virginal white, awaiting the long-dead poet-lover, while being a tight-buttoned, sadistic lesbian-coded dominatrix in black by day; or the especially sensationalist introduction of a blackmail plot, involving Venable's caddish, cash-strapped friend.
On its own terms, however, 'Moment' is surprisingly effective, James' narrational complexity emerging in a gratifyingly ambiguous play with point-of-view and characters' perceptions. The dreamlike atmosphere of the scene where Venable discovers Tina's secret, drawn through maze-like corridors and stairways by the Ariadne's thread of distant music, is hushed and heady. The anti-hero, prepared to drop all moral scruples for scraps of papers (Oedipal symbol of a male potency he can only play-act), is sanitised by Hollywood's needs, but his sexual pathology is brilliantly displaced onto the narrative of the 'dual woman' and her rapacious guardian.
Best of all is forgotten director Gabel's amazing visual sense. Like James, he makes the decaying, labyrinthine Venetian mansion the real hero(ine) of the story, a House of Woman, its corridors, cramped rooms and vast spaces, serpentine stairwells and redemptive gardens, its solidity flickered with reflections of water, light or fire, as flickeringly insubstantial as Venable's male self-confidence. It is partly a figure for his mind and his warped vision of female sexuality, both ideal and real; partly the prison in which all its characters, especially its women, are held by male desire.
The slow-burning pace is too often simply slow, but 'Moment' is an intelligent, Freudian gloss on James that succeeds where most literal versions do not.
