Page To Screen: Evening Primrose

Page to Screen is a series of blog posts where I read a book or story and then watch a movie based on said book or story. It will be intermittent, I’m sure, like most of my “regular” features. The first, unofficial Page to Screen entry was my review of The Bitter Tea of General Yen and the classic movie adapted from it.

Evening Primrose banner.png

Okay, so this one is technically a little backwards from the intent, because I first saw the television musical version of Evening Primrose at the Museum of Television Arts in New York City back in the late 90s. I had not seen it since then. When I discovered that the episode was on DVD and that the short story it was based on was available in print, I decided it was time to read the original story and rewatch the movie. WARNING: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS, FOR BOTH THE STORY AND THE TELEVISION EPISODE. I can’t talk about the differences between the two without spoiling stuff.

STORY REVIEW

“Evening Primrose” by John Collier is a brief twelve pages, an “accidentally found manuscript” type of story. The story purports to have been found scribbled in a pad of Highlife Bond paper bought by a customer at Bracey’s Giant Emporium. What the purchaser of the notepad (a Miss Sadie Brodribb) thinks of the tale she’s accidentally purchased, we never learn. As is the nature of people, she probably thought it was some kind of practical joke by the store employees (akin to finding a “help, I’m being held prisoner in a fortune cookie factory” note in your fortune cookie). The story itself is the first person account of Mr. Charles Snell, a poet who decides the real world is no longer for him and that he’ll live in Bracey’s. He’ll hide during the day, and eat/drink/write poetry at night, deftly avoiding the store’s night watchman. He quickly discovers he’s not alone in living in the store, that this is a thing people do in stores large and small all across the city – people who for one reason or another have eschewed normal society. The community in Bracey’s has a hierarchy, at the top of which sits the regal Mrs. Vanderpant, and at the bottom of which sits a teen serving girl named Ella. Charles is warned that people who betray the community are sentenced to removal by the Dark Men, who turn the offendees into mannequins. Charles falls in love with the servant girl, who is in love with the night watchman (who remains oblivious to the community living around him). Charles decides to respect Ella’s love for another man and to help them meet and escape. Only in his emotional despair over Ella not loving him, he spills the beans to a community member he trusts. The story ends with Ella trussed up for the Dark Men and Charles determined to find the night watchman and rescue her. Charles’ final lines indicate his plan to leave his notes where a customer might find them, in case his plan to rescue Ella results in himself and the watchman also being killed. 

It’s a tightly-told story, and Collier builds the mystery of the community and threat of the Dark Men smoothly throughout the story – but the ending feels just a bit too abrupt. Charles declares his love, gets rebuffed, accidentally betrays Ella, and sets his plan to rescue her all within the final two pages of the story. I wish Collier had built the suspense of what would happen to Ella and Charles just a little bit more before the end. Regardless, I enjoyed the concept, the mood, the reveal of Charles’ character, the development of the Bracey’s community (and their relationship to communities in other stores) and eerie threat of the Dark Men.

“MOVIE” REVIEW

The television episode “Evening Primrose” first aired on November 16, 1966 as a part of the ABC Stage 67 anthology series. I would have been a whole three months old. I have no clue whether my parents watched it. Given their love of television and my father’s love of musicals, I’m going to guess they did. It starred the perfectly cast Anthony Perkins as misanthropic poet Charles Snell and Charmaine Carr as innocent, uneducated Ella Harkness, with Dorothy Stickney as more dotty-than-regal Mrs. Monday (a renamed Mrs. Vanderpant).

It’s a musical, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Goldman and directed by Paul Bogart. The creators and cast do a wonderful job translating the mood of the story to the screen – all the “free but still sort of trapped” sensibility, the rigidness of the Paul Stern (renamed from Bracey’s) store community, the threat of the Dark Men is there in the staging, dialogue, lyrics and instrumental music – and hey fix the pacing issue I had with the story, giving the romantic relationship more time to develop and giving space to the real threat of the Dark Men at the end. The songs start out character-centric and then become plot-propelling. Charles’ song “If You Can Find Me I’m Here” is one of the best misanthropic “you don’t like my art, screw you” songs ever written, while Ella’s “I Remember Sky” is a wistfully beautiful piece. The duet “When” moves their relationship along and incorporates their fears of being found out, while the duet “Take Me to the World” is the point at which the plot turns towards the big denouement.  

There are a couple of significant changes to the story, as often happens in page-to-screen adaptations. Ella is now an adult (to remove the ickiness of a poet in his late twenties falling in love with a sixteen-year-old, I assume) and her mistreatment at the hands of the older community members is made more explicit (including that they have never taught her to read, write, or do math, and force her to live in the store basement). Instead of unrequited love, Ella falls as much in love with Charles as he does with her. And in what I think is a very sensible change that heightens the drama of the last act, the couple is found out not through Charles intentionally revealing his feelings to his ‘trusted friend’ Roscoe, but because Charles accidentally turns on the store’s speaker system while they are singing “Take Me To The World” and unknowingly lets the entire store community know what they are planning (the night watchman hears too, thus revealing that there are people living in the store even if he can’t manage to find them, which puts him in danger without having to work in the awkward love triangle).

The final act is a wonderful game of cat-and-mouse through the store as Mrs. Monday and Roscoe try to delay Charles and Ella long enough for the Dark Men to catch them. The fate of the characters implied by the structure of Collier’s story is made explicit in the final scenes of the episode. I always thought it was a delightfully dark ending, and I’m glad Goldman and Sondheim didn’t decide to change it for television.

Interesting trivia: while the television episode originally aired in color, the only print remaining is in black and white. And I actually think that adds to the mood and thus effectiveness of the production. I’m kind of glad the color print isn’t available (the DVD has some test footage of Anthony Perkins in Stern Brothers and it just feels too bright for the story being told).

FINAL COMPARISON

While I liked Collier’s story well enough and I want to read more of his short stories, I think I prefer the musical in this instance.

The Collier story can be found in his collection Fancies and Goodnights. The Sondheim-Goldman musical is available on DVD and Prime Video.

SERIES SATURDAY: Sgt. Janus


This is a series about … well, series. I do so love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies. I’ve already got a list of series I’ve recently read, re-read, watched, or re-watched that I plan to blog about. I might even, down the line, open myself up to letting other people suggest titles I should read/watch and then comment on.

Cover art by Jeffrey Ray Hayes

Cover art by Jeffrey Ray Hayes

 

While I’m not as well-read in the field as I’d like to be, I really do love the “occult detective” genre. There’s a long history to it, from the Victorian (Thomas Carnacki and Aylmer Vance) to the pulp (Jules deGrandin and John Thunstone) to the modern (Simon Feximal and John Constantine), and it has seeped from the written to the filmed (Carl Kolchak among others). Jim Beard’s Sgt. Roman Janus is an intriguing addition to the genre.

Janus has now appeared in three books: Sgt. Janus, Spirit-Breaker; Sgt. Janus Returns, and Sgt. Janus on the Dark Track. Flinch! Books has recently reissued the first two books as a precursor to their release of the third (and hopefully not final) book in the series. All three have beautifully painted new covers by Jeffrey Ray Hayes that capture the otherworldly nature of the characters.

As a character, Sgt. Janus fits the mold of the occult detectives who have preceded him into print: his personal background is shrouded in mystery (at least at the start), he’s a bit aloof, he doesn’t often explain fully what’s going on (and assumes, I think, that most people believe he’s up to shenanigans and the supernatural can’t possibly be real), and he does what he has to do regardless of personal cost.

What really makes the series stand out from the rest of the field is the way Beard tells Janus’ stories. He plays with genre conventions and delivers stories that feel daring and original within a pretty well-traveled realm.

One of the tropes of “consulting detective” fiction (both occult and not), dating back to the inestimable Sherlock Holmes, is the presence of a narrator who is also usually the detective’s aide-de-camp. Most detectives have their Watson, Parker, Caldwell, etc.. In Sgt. Janus, Spirit-Breaker, Beard replaces one reliable narrator with eight sometimes unreliable narrators. Each tale in the book is told by the client for whom Janus was working, part of his fee being that the client must send him a written description of how the case came to Janus’ attention and how it unfolded. This gives far more diversity to the way the stories are related – some of the clients are happy to be doing it and believe in Janus’ abilities, while some are disgruntled and imbue their stories with a healthy skepticism. This also allows Sgt. Janus himself to remain a mystery, his personal background and that of his female assistant and the house they occupy all only hinted at in the little tidbits he drops to his clients when they ask. And while each case stands alone, they also very clearly build on each other. The reader makes larger connections the characters themselves don’t, and the final story makes those connections as explicit as possible in revealing what it’s all been building towards.

The second book, Sgt. Janus Returns, follows the more traditional trope for narrators, introducing us to Joshua Hargreaves, a disaffected young man who meets an amnesiac woman who exhibits many of Sgt. Janus’ personality traits and abilities. Hargreaves becomes her aide-de-camp and chronicler while she tries to figure out who she is and why she feels connected to the house the missing Sgt. Janus used to occupy. Similar to the first volume, the stories herein are still episodic and still build towards a climax that reveals all – and in fact reveal a great deal more than the climactic story of the first book. Beard takes a huge chance by replacing his main character in the second book of the series – and it works. Perhaps it was because I read the books back-to-back-to-back, but I was invested in discovering “Lady Janus’s” secrets and how she was connected to Sgt. Janus from the very first page. I was also interested in Joshua Hargreaves’ development as a character – and he does have his own arc throughout the stories – as well as that of two new characters, Valerie Havelock-Mayer and Wendy Jackson.

The third book, Sgt. Janus on the Dark Track, breaks again with traditional by giving us a full novel instead of a series of connected short stories. It’s not really a spoiler to say Sgt. Roman Janus is back (although I won’t reveal how) on the case. It’s no secret that I love epistolary novels, and Beard proves to be a master of the form. The events of Sgt. Janus’ ride on a very dark train are told through the journal entries, telegrams, letters, and newspaper clippings of several different characters (although  notably once again, never in the words of Janus himself) including Valerie Havelock-Mayer and Joshua Hargreaves and another interesting new character, Gabriel Butters. Dark Track is the most blatantly Gothic of the three books so far, replete with young virginal damsel in distress and unknowable supernatural entity and locations of great supernatural power, and again it all works.

Three books with three different narratorial approaches should be highly annoying to a series reader. We like consistency in the way a series’ individual entries are told. But Beard’s experimentation and willingness to take risks keeps the series fresh and keeps the reader on their toes. I really hope there are more Sgt. Janus volumes forthcoming, and cannot wait to see what new ways Beard finds to tell the tales.