Spend Friday Night At the Flicks with Elizabeth Ellen Carter
Friday Night At The Flicks is a crossover classic – The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins. Published in 1859 it has been described as one of the earliest detective fiction stories but it is, at its heart a romance.
The film adaptation I love is the 1948 film starring Alexis Smith, Eleanor Parker, Sydney Greenstreet, Agnes Moorhead and Gig Young.
Agnes Moorhead has been over shadowed by her later role of witchy/bitchy mother-in-law Endora in Bewitched, but her film and television career was first rate – right from her debut in the 1941 classic Citizen Kane – and her ability in this film to nuance the pyscho-sexual BDSM subtext inherent in the relationship of her character with malevolent Fosco played brilliantly by Sydney Greenstreet is a testament to her talent.
Oh yes, it’s all there in the book which Wilkie reveals in a most engaging way by telling the whole stories in blocks of POV changes told as one might give evidence in court.
For those not familiar with the story, let’s jump straight to the IMDB Description:
A young painter stumbles upon an assortment of odd characters at an English estate where he has been hired to give art lessons to beautiful Laura Fairlie. Among them are Anne Catherick, a strange young woman dressed in white whom he meets in the forest and who bears a striking resemblance to Laura; cunning Count Fosco, who hopes to obtain an inheritance for nobleman Sir Percival Glyde, whom he plans to have Laura marry; Mr. Fairlie, a hypochondriac who can’t stand to have anyone make the slightest noise; and eccentric Countess Fosco who has her own dark secret. The artist also finds himself drawn to Marion Halcomb, a distant relation to Laura whom the Count also has plans for.
One of the most striking aspects to the book is not just Collins’ ability to drive the action along, but the way that the real heroine of piece is not the girl the hero falls in love with. In fact our hero Hartright, in the first instance describes her as ugly!
Then, readers get the first glimpse of Marian through Mr. Hartright’s eyes. He sees her as a beauty, at first. She is the right height with a nice figure that catches his eye. She is dark and young. From a distance, he sees her as the most beautiful creature alive and longs to sculpt her.
But when she moves close to him, he says that she is ugly. She has “a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair.” Her lip has the start of a mustache on it.
Marian’s beauty is on the inside, as Mr. Collins shows so well. He makes her a very talkative young woman. She speaks her mind, yet also allows her listener to speak.
The film poster gives the impression that the film is somewhat of a noir and in some respects it is.
Marion becomes the obsession of Count Fosco who admires her spirit but longs to dominate it has he did with the woman who became his Countess.
One can only speculate on the reason why Collins has done this, I personally think there is a clue in the author’s complex domestic arrangements, secondly the romantic heroine Laura Fairley is such a wilting wall flower that to have her as the heroine alone would have made the story unreadable.
As it is, Marian Halcomb is a wonderful heroine in her own right, intelligent, brave, resourceful and while bemoaning (just a teensy bit too much IMHO) her limited capacity to act to protect her half-sister because she is but a mere woman. I love the character of Marion and I have to confess to having her in mind when I wrote my Moonstone Obsession heroine, Selina Rosewall who herself is strong and capable but very much of her time.
The Woman In White is an unconventional romance. It certainly does a happily ever after with the hero (interestingly absent for the middle third of the novel) marrying the beautiful heroine but getting his intellectual fulfilment from Marion who contentedly lives with the happy couple.
It’s a fascinating novel on so many different levels and if you ever get a chance to see the film, then do make that your Friday Night At The Flicks.