The Lost Moment

A New York publisher arrives in Venice on the trail of the lost love letters of a poet who vanished in the early nineteenth century. Under a false name he rents a room in the house of Juliana, once the poet's lover and now an old woman who never goes out. Tina, the niece who runs the household, treats him as a threat from the first moment. He is willing to use the fragility of the people in that house to get the letters, and that is the real question of the film: how much of a living person can be spent on a literary treasure. It was the only film Martin Gabel directed, and its gothic quality comes less from the streets of Venice than from the dimness inside the house. Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead are in the cast.