Movie Biographies: The Barretts of Wimpole Street

1957 Biography

From MGM

Directed by Sidney Franklin

Starring

Jennifer Jones

John Gielgud

Bill Travers

Virginia McKenna

Jean Anderson

Susan Stephen 

Vernon Gray

Maxine Audley

In a high school literature course I had to write a paper on a poet.  We had choices and I picked England's Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  I chose her solely because of her poem How Do I Love Thee? which my grandmother used to purr tenderly to me (from memory) when I was a child as my head lay on her lap.  I could not begin to count the ways that experience affected me back then.  I had always remembered it and its author and dug in to finding out all I could about her for my paper.

I felt almost the same about this movie.  To return again to 50 Wimpole Street and the odd Barrett family was a treat for me.  Admittedly it was not her work (other than the aforementioned love sonnet) that excited me (so much of it had a religious theme that was not my cup of tea) but that family life.  I knew that was what the movie would focus on.

Elizabeth was the eldest of 12 children (nine in the film) who lived under the tyrannical rule of a cold, aloof and even ruthless father.  She had tw0 sisters and six brothers and they all are close to one another while as distant as they  permit themselves to be from their stern father.

Not only does Edward Moulton-Barrett not permit them to date, he insists that they never marry in his lifetime.  He threatens them with losing their inheritances if they cross him. 

Elizabeth was called Ba by the family.  She is her father's favorite.  He tells her she is his only child to be conceived in love.    (The movie would slyly suggest his feelings for her were incestuous but I don't think history bears that out.)  Elizabeth is a virtual shut-in.  Apparently she dresses nicely each day and takes to her lounge in her spacious bedroom with her helpful companion-maid, Wilson, and cocker spaniel Flush nearby.  Virginia Woolf would write a novel with a fictionalized Flush as the main character.

The film doesn't particularly address what Elizabeth's health problems are but claims they're hereditary (sisters Henrietta and Arabel had issues as well but recovered).  Apparently  medical science was not at the time able to diagnose her ailments.   (Later conclusions, not in the film, were that Ba suffered from intense head pain and a spinal issue that resulted in her loss of mobility.  She took opiates for pain that was problematic her entire life.)

Her room was the family meeting place.  Extended family visited her when she was feeling well enough to receive them. She didn't attend family meals.  Wilson brought them to her.

During her alone time (which was considerable) she reclined on her lounge and wrote her poems.  The gifted Ba had been writing since she was a very young child.  When her 1844 volume Poems was published, she began hearing frequently from the poet Robert Browning.  He was very taken with her, despite not having met.  I love your verses with all my heart, he wrote, adding that he was drawn to their fresh, strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought.

Jones and Flush

Language brought them together.  Each loved the way the other one spoke and they undoubtedly spoke a language all their own.  Their voluminous correspondence was kept a secret from her father... indeed, her maid or one of her sisters would post her letters.  

She seemed to rally a bit physically due to the upbeat nature of her friendship with Browning.  He was always so positive.  He knew he had fallen in love with her by the time he decided to meet her, which he coordinated with Henrietta's help.  Ba was beside herself with joy, to say the least... she decided to walk.  If this part is MGM hokum, it worked for me.

Browning comes bounding up the stairs with a fierce energy that seems more than out of place in the stodgy mansion.  To call him ebullient is an understatement.  But he immediately goes to work on her.  His love knows no bounds.  He tells her she's afraid of life (and her father) and he wants to bring a new life to her.

She wants that, too, and yet she's afraid she can't manage it.  Her father aids her in that decision after he meets Browning, whom he, of course, immediately dislikes.  He tells his favorite daughter that she'll never get better, that she's helpless and she might as well get used to it.  Even when the doctors say she has mysteriously gotten better, the old man wants to hear nothing of it.  

Travers and Jones

Browning implores Elizabeth to marry him and move to Italy and see if the sunshine and a man who cherishes her won't do wonders for her health.  She is encouraged to do so because of the fact that she's suggesting the same thing to Henrietta who wants to run off with her military man but is also afraid to make the move.

But both sisters would defy their father and marry the men they loved.  In the late evening, while Barrett was entertaining some friends, Ba, Flush, Wilson and a couple of suitcases scurried down the stairs and away from Wimpole Street.  Ba and her beloved Robert were married and all four moved to Italy.  The film ends with Mr. and Mrs. Browning walking along an Italian beach.  (They first moved to Florence.)   And true to his word, Barrett disinherited Ba and Henrietta and also one son.

Elizabeth would write her best works during her marriage.  Her two most famous are Sonnets of the Portuguese (which includes How Do I Love Thee?) and Aurora Leigh.  They would have a son, Pan, and Ba would live until age 51 in 1861.  She enjoyed 15 felicitous years with her dream guy.

The film was a resounding flop for MGM.  Bummer.  The critics said some lovely things but no one went to see it.  The movies had the youth market to thank for weighty attendance and these youths were in the throes of rock and roll and not ready for some dank, dusty and tedious British piece on two long-dead poets they cannot recall.  

If only this movie had been made in those heady days of Victorian romances with folks like Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Anthony Hopkins, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, Kenneth Branagh, Kiera Knightley, ticket sales would have soared.  But in 1957 there was little interest.

Gielgud admonishing McKenna

A burr got under the saddles of quite a number of Hollywoodites, however.  The Barretts of Wimpole Street was first made in 1934 starring Norma Shearer, Fredric March and Charles Laughton.  It was successful.  It, too, was directed by Sidney Franklin.  What was discovered is that the remake was line-by-line the same as the former.  Not a word was changed.  I say... and your point?

So what?  Who cares?  Is there a crime here or something?  Why change things simply to do it?  Naysayers carped why see the remake?  I say why see the original?    With this version we get a fresher cast and it's actually filmed in the English locales where it really took place not on the MGM soundstages as the former had.  Because of those locations the filmed is opened up and visually more appealing.

Producer Sam Zimbalist insisted on the English location and also the all-British cast with the exception of Jennifer Jones whom he thought perfect for the role.  Jones very much wanted to play Elizabeth.  She felt she understood her, languishing in sickness as they both had, being shut-ins and being under the thumb of powerful men. (Jones was married to the controlling and much older producer David O. Selznick.) 

I thought she was wonderful as the poet, though she made no attempt at an accent.  She was also thrilled that she was working with Gielgud, an actor she'd admired from afar from her earliest days as a drama student at Northwestern when she saw him in a Shakespearean play.  Happiness spilled over, too, because Selznick, who usually interfered in her films and caused her much stress, was preoccupied with the pre-production on their next film together, the generally poorly-received A Farewell to Arms.

Boy, did Gielgud ever impress me as Daddy Dearest.  I had never even heard of him when I saw this film and I was truly blown away.  Here was a character so easy to hate.  I have never forgotten his inscrutable expression, his lack of love and feeling, his uncompromising ways.  He brought decay to the lives of his many children.  I gave myself over to him and found acting that was such quality... textured, nuanced, sincere. 

This may have been my introduction to Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna as well.  In real life they married the same year this movie was released.  I admired them both and have said so earlier.  This is one of my least favorite of his roles.  I thought he overplayed it and sucked the air right out of the room.  Perhaps if someone had dropped a valium in his tea.

McKenna is Henrietta, an attractive blonde and the only one in a family of brunettes.  She's the rebellious, vivacious one and provides the film's lighter moments.

Jean Anderson has a large role as Elizabeth's devoted maid, Wilson.  The brothers, while in a number of scenes, are actually given little to do.  In real life, they turned their backs on Ba because she disrespected their father.

Travers and Jones with their director

Franklin, of course, does a nice job bringing it all under control, but then why wouldn't he?  It was his second time.  It was also his final directing job.

One John Dighton is credited with writing the screenplay.  Really?  If the screenplay is taken directly from the former film and since he didn't write that, what was his job here?

Regardless, the words in this movie are as intelligent and well-spoken as they should be in a film about poets.

                  How Do I Love Thee? 

How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints.  I love thee with the breath,

Smile, tears, of all my life, and if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

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