The Lost Moment

The Lost Moment

By

  • Genre: Drama, Thriller, Romance
  • Release Date: 1947-11-21
  • Runtime: 89 minutes
  • : 6.5
  • Production Company: Walter Wanger Productions
  • Production Country: United States of America
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6.5/10
6.5
From 21 Ratings

Description

In a long flashback, a New York publisher is in Venice pursuing the lost love letters of an early-19th-century poet, Jeffrey Ashton, who disappeared mysteriously. Using a false name, Lewis Venable rents a room from Juliana Bordereau, once Jeffrey Ashton's lover, now an aged recluse. Running the household is Juliana's severe niece, Tina, who mistrusts Venable from the first moment. He realizes all is not right when late one night he finds Tina, her hair unpinned and wild, at the piano. She calls him Jeffrey and throws herself at him. The family priest warns Venable to tread carefully around her fantasies, but he wants the letters at any cost, even Tina's sanity.

Trailer

Reviews

  • CinemaSerf

    7
    By CinemaSerf
    When opportunistic publisher "Lewis Venable" (Robert Cummings) sets out to track down some long-lost love letters from recently re-discovered poet "Jeffrey Ashton", he ends up in a Dickensian-style mansion house where the writer's former mistress, the very elderly "Juliana" (an almost unrecognisable Agnes Moorhead) dressed in black, sits in her chair most of the time with frustrated daughter "Tina" (Susan Hayward) tightly wound up living the life of a caged bird. Rather than come clean about his motives, "Venable" poses as a novelist to ingratiate himself with the women - but soon, is embroiled in a complex intrigue involving the two ladies and the letters. Hayward is super - she exudes an eeriness and almost schizophrenic charisma as the young woman who seems caught in a time loop unsure as to whether she is "Tina" or her own mother. The haunting music from Daniele Amfitheatrof (and a tiny bit of Caruso too) helps build the tension carefully and effectively as the significance of the letters becomes more evident and poignant to the predicament of the women - and increasingly, their guest. Cummings is OK, he has an innate blandness about him to watch, but he has a good script to work with and good to foil to act with, and the pot stays boiling til very near the end.

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