Professor Pervert is brought to you by Mobil Corporation (telynor's Casting Couch W-O)
Written: Aug 29 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Interesting true story told smoothly and sensitively.
Cons: Nagging sense that author Barry Werth takes a few liberties, leaves out potentially significant material.
The Bottom Line: The producers of the television version of this tale of a troubled intellectual probably shouldn't cast from the World Wrestling Federation. But then, neither should anyone else.
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| eplovejoy's Full Review: The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Li... |
Barry Werth tells his true story in The Scarlet Professor with flair and empathy. His account, subtitled Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal, has all the ingredients of a terrific BBC production.
Its central character is an academic heavyweight of the type Masterpiece Theatre viewers find intriguing. Newton Arvin was a Smith College professor who made his reputation by writing acclaimed biographies of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Arvin's biography of the Moby Dick author won the National Book Award.
Arvin was a complicated genius, the kind a talented and subtle actor could bring to life. Painfully shy, Arvin was obsessed with maintaining his privacy. But he took risks, including making his secluded apartment a haven for homosexuals and having sex with men in bus stations and bathhouses. This was during a less-tolerant time when public awareness of their "deviance" was dangerous for gay men, and even fatal more frequently than it is today.
Eventually Arvin's activities led to his arrest in September 1960 for violating Massachusetts laws against possessing pornography. In Arvin's case, this meant he owned some magazines featuring photographs of muscular men wearing skimpy bathing trunks, photos less salacious than those found in the underwear section of the Sears catalogue.
To preserve some of his treasured, even vital, anonymity, Arvin made a deal with law enforcement authorities and identified other men who could be charged with violating the pornography statutes. Eventually the courts threw out the foundations for those arrests, but by then Arvin and his colleagues had suffered humiliation and ostracization.
Arvin died in 1963, but Werth suggests that before then he had found some contentment in the ruins of his shattered literary life. As Hawthorne's fiction shows, Americans are more hostile to secrecy than to sin. Like Hester Prynne, Arvin found it easier to carry his scarlet letter publicly.
Almost four decades after Arvin died, the town in which he was arrested, Northampton, Mass., elected a lesbian as its mayor and a gay man as president of its city council.
THE TELEVISION PRODUCTION
Much of The Scarlet Professor is set in academia in the 1930s-'60s. This allows for many of the panoramic shots of ivy-covered campuses that the BBC loves. It also provides a potential showcase for the kind of attention to period detail that has characterized such British television productions as Upstairs, Downstairs and Brideshead Revisited.
The story's emphasis on homosexuality provides a touch of sensation, but nothing that will shock the audience of I, Claudius. There are no graphic descriptions in Werth's discreet account. In the television version, Arvin's homosexual activity can be alluded to with a few meaningful glances between the actors who play him and Truman Capote, which whom Arvin had a longtime affair before Capote achieved fame. Those glances would suffice to reflect a romance that once moved Arvin to write of a photograph of Capote, "There is a look in those eyes I know oh, so well, and that I decidedly hope no other human being knows in the same way."
The photographs for which Arvin was arrested could be represented by shots taken today on almost any public beach, except Speedos are too revealing.
To play Capote, it would be best to go with an unknown actor. This was decades before he turned himself into a Studio 54 caricature, and a fresh face would be appropriate. If Lili Taylor (I Shot Andy Warhol) or Amanda Plummer (Pulp Fiction) aren't available, a newcomer might also be best to play Sylvia Plath, who was one of Arvin's students, although her part in Werth's narrative is so small the producers could leave her out entirely.
Sergeant John Regan of the Massachusetts State Police, who headed the state's anti-porn crusade and who arrested Arvin, was six feet tall and weighed 220 pounds. Werth writes that Regan was "bullnecked," "exuded toughness" and "other officers thought him fearsome." Brian Dennehy could play the part sleepwalking.
For Arvin, we need an actor capable of conveying through understatement the keen and complicated intelligence of a meek man. Guy Pearce (Memento and L.A. Confidential) could suggest the complexities of a man invigorated by the world of letters but afraid of the world. Pearce would just have to avoid the flamboyance he brought to his performance as a drag queen in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
THE BOOK
Anyone unfamiliar with Arvin has to trust that Werth tells his story fully and fairly. For the most part, Werth appears to fulfill his obligations. His chronicle of Arvin's rich and troubled life is absorbing and told with great sensitivity. Although he is harsh in his condemnation of the American puritanism to which Arvin fell victim, Werth is never harsh about Arvin himself, even when Arvin betrays his friends to save himself. Werth presents Arvin as a retiring, passionately secretive man who struggled as best he could with his greatest fear: being exposed to the prying eyes of people eager to judge him.
Werth's work contains an index, the author gives no footnotes. There are passages that demand them. For example, Werth suggests without providing any documentation that Sergeant Regan distributed pornography to his State Police colleagues. This accusation of criminal wrongdoing and the suggestion of hypocrisy are too serious not to be substantiated. In this and other instances, Werth assumes trust that readers can believe he has earned. But most readers cannot be certain.
And there are nagging suggestions that Werth has left important elements out of his 303-page account. Arvin's sister is mentioned in passing only once early in The Scarlet Professor. But when Arvin is dying, Werth writes that "Ellen Zeigler was the sibling on whom Arvin had most depended." The reader is left asking, when? In what way? If Zeigler was supportive of her brother during his criminal ordeal, Werth should say so. One is left with the sense that perhaps Arvin was not as lonely as Werth writes, and this causes one to wonder what other pieces of the story Werth might have left out.
These are not fatal shortcomings, but they are serious. Werth developed The Scarlet Professor from a magazine article he published in The New Yorker. He and his publisher, Nan A. Talese of Doubleday, were right to think the story merits book length consideration, but one can't help wishing they'd made the book more complete.
What they have given is plenty for a first-rate television production made possible by the generous support of the Mobil Corporation, and by contributions from viewers like you.
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THE WRITE-OFF
This is a late entry in telynor's Casting Couch Write-Off, an effort to give Hollywood a good kick in the pants, and get some deserving books out there for folks to see on the big screen or at home. The premise was to take any novel or non-fiction book, write a review of it, and cast the characters with the folks you think would play the part the best. telynor picked the BBC, A&E and PBS since they have the best track records for not ruining books.
Other participants are: pageclot, Sundrop, machkick, telynor and arianej. Links to their reviews are on telynor's profile page.
Recommended:
Yes
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