MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne’ a Passionate Experience in Acting

It’s easy to see why Brian Moore’s novel “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” has never been out of print or option as a film since its publication in 1955. Written in scenes which almost play themselves on the page, it has one of those leading roles that actresses kill for, and it has fallen into Maggie Smith’s hands, lap and, virtually, her soul. (It opens today at the Music Hall.)

Smith gives a complicated, gently shaded reading to the role of a spinster Dublin piano teacher with strength enough to resist the bottle and reasons enough to give in to it.

Where the film goes out of true is in director Jack Clayton’s underlining, which threatens to tip drama into melodrama: a scene near the close between Miss Hearne and a hospitalized old friend, almost ruined by a falling hat; a crucial scene of failing faith as Miss Hearne rushes into church, smacking the holy water at the door as she goes. These and other excesses don’t quite destroy the film’s balances, but it’s a near thing.

However, Clayton--who has had an eye on human foibles since “Room at the Top” and “The Pumpkin Eater”--has given Maggie Smith grand co-actors who are strong, resilient and funny when they need to be: Bob Hoskins as the object of her misapplied affection; Wendy Hiller is the aunt so formative in her life, and Marie Kean (the tippler’s turbaned mother in “The Dead”) as Miss Hearne’s ferociously genteel dragon of a landlady, Mrs. Rice.

The entire cast, as well as the physical production, is fine, including Ian McNeice as the landlady’s fat, pampered son, Bernard. At first glance, he brings back nightmarish visions of Kenneth MacMillan’s floating villain in “Dune,” minus a pustule or two. And for “Fawlty Towers” fans, Prunella Scales can be found as the lifelong, married friend of Miss Hearne’s.

Screenwriter Peter Nelson has applied a little lift to the ending of Moore’s novel; just enough to keep audiences from walking out of the theater and straight into the path of oncoming cars. It’s understandable, I suppose, but there was a bleak purity to the ending of the Moore novel that had grown effortlessly from all that came before.

We meet the timorous Miss Hearne as she is changing lodgings in Dublin in the mid-1950s. There is a great comic scene of prying, prissy gentility, so thick you could skate on it, in her landlady’s parlor. There Mrs. Rice shifts between trying to worm her new border’s background out of her with complaining elegantly about “the girl” (Rudi Davies), a convent-trained maid and a trial to her employer.

(The film’s R-rating is for its gross sexual scenes involving McNeice and this unwilling young housemaid.)

We understand exactly the shape of things to come as Miss Hearne sets eyes on the unattached, bluff James Madden (Hoskins) over breakfast the next morning. A Dubliner, in the hotel game in New York for 20 years, he’s staying with his sister, Mrs. Rice, while launching a new business venture in Ireland. At this breakfast, two misapprehensions are formed--Madden’s and Miss Hearne’s. For the audience, the joy is in watching the interplay of these two tough talents more than the unfolding of a relatively unsurprising story.

Hoskins, who does seem to have an Irish accent concealed under the 20-some years of Americanisms, is marvelous, and in their scenes together there is a vitality and even a possibility of hope. For Madden needs someone to stand sturdily at his side as desperately as Judith Hearne yearns to stand there.

The film calls for a variety of humiliations that Miss Hearne, who invariably introduces herself with “It’s only me,” must endure. She has a shattering speech explaining the narrowed choices that an unmarried woman faces as the years go by and “the prince” has not appeared. (It feels odd that she would deliver these words to Madden. They sound like the confidences that pass between women; not ones admitted to a “prince” himself.)

Smith’s performance is elegant in every detail as Miss Hearne’s frail psyche undergoes almost mortal shock; the actress’ virtue is in suggesting the tensile strength that Hearn also possesses.

In the past, and from her childhood, in the house of her rich and religious aunt (Wendy Hiller), that strength was fed by her strict Catholic faith--in part, Judith Hearne’s lonely passion. Its wavering is at the core of the story.

These are not problems that can be swept up with a sweetened ending, and there is an entire coda involving Madden which gives the movie the feeling of two closings. Nice as the more contemporary ending may be, perhaps niceness is not what this great, melancholy story deserves.