What I watched: A second-season episode of the anthology series Studio One, created by Worthington Miner. This episode stars Mary Sinclair, John Baragrey and Richard Purdy. It was directed by Franlkin J. Schaeffner and written by Joseph Liss based off the novel by Nathaniel Hawhtorne. “The Scarlet Letter” aired on April 3, 1950 at 10 PM on CBS. It is available to watch on YouTube.
What happened: We open with a visit from Worthington Miner himself, who is here to mark the special occasion. This episode is part of the Hawthorne Centennial celebrations marking 100 years since the publication of The Scarlet Letter. The scholar presents a plaque to Hawhtorne’s elderly granddaughter Hildegaard Hawthorne, who wonders what her famous ancestor would have made of “this barbarous thing” Miner is doing with his most famous work. It doesn’t really seem like a gag.
We open in Boston 300 years ago, with Hester Prynne (Sinclair) making her way through a crowd carrying a baby. They’re not very fond of her. She’s already wearing the eponymous letter A, which people think she made too fancy. Hester is placed in the stocks. The Minister and Governor come through as an old hag demands that Hester and the man she had a baby with be hanged. She’d probably be a Trump voter today. Minister Arthur Dimmesdale (Baragrey) is asked to make her repent, and seems pretty reluctant about it. Hmm. He asks Hester to reveal her lover, but she stays mum.
Two men are discussing the case, talking about how good it is that iniquity is punished in New England. Well, not on the football field. One man, a foreigner, wants to talk to her directly. Hester was married to a doctor from Amsterdam who has been two years lost at sea, hence the sin of bearing a baby. But whoops, the foreigner is actually said Dutch doctor. He gives the baby some medicine, which Hester is suspicious of. They have a big blow-out argument about how she never loved him. He tells her to promise not to tell anyone they were married, to avoid him looking like a cuck, and infiltrates the colony as Roger Chillingworth (Purdy).
Time passes, and the child is now a precocious young girl named Pearl, who is being interrogated by a town elder. He is aghast to discover that Hester has been embroidering clothes for the Governor, and that the daughter doesn’t go to school and doesn’t know of her mother’s shame. In the town square, one woman is willing to forgive Hester, but the rest shout her down. The Governor thinks Pearl is beautiful, which is just a bit creepy. He calls Hester and Pearl in and not-so-subtly suggests that she give up her child to the town to raise. The elder quizzes Pearl to see if she has appropriate teaching. Things go badly when Pearl says that she was not born but plucked from a bush of roses. Well, that’s true with sufficient euphemisms. Arthur interferes, agreeing that “God gave her the child.” Roger again swears to figure out who the real father is.
Things take an abrupt turn into an internal monologue, as Arthur reflects on the guilt and torment he feels, although he’s still vague about it. Come on Worthington, you’re not going to pull a plot twist. Roger is doing some alchemy stuff with beakers and chemicals. He discusses the nature of confession and guilt with Dimmesdale. Chillingworth gives him a draught of “medicine” to drink, and he promptly passes out, allowing Roger to search his person. When he wakes up, Arthur is struck by the nearness of death and the hypocrisy of his sermon, and begs for forgiveness at the stocks. Fortunately, it’s a rainy night, so nobody hears him.
When he gets done writhing in guilt, Arthur learns that the Governor has died, with Roger at his side. Hester and Pearl come across him, and he acts super-weird, holding their hands to their chest. Chillingworth looks on, which really freaks Dimmesdale out. Roger visits Hester, telling her that he’s received the magistrate’s permission for her to remove the letter. She’s not interested, instead castigating him for hounding Arthur and becoming a “fiend”, and promising to tell Arthur that Roger is her husband.
After the break, Arthur receives a letter from Hester. (Ah, that must be the letter in the title.) He reads it and promptly burns it. Later, Hester meets Arthur in the woods, and he once again collapses from guilt. She tells him Roger is her husband, and Arthur pleads for God to forgive them, but says that Roger is a worse sinner than him for violating the human heart. Sorry, that’s not how Puritanism goes. Hester pleads for him to leave town, but Arthur says that he is dying. Hester hugs him but calls him “Roger”, which I’m pretty sure is one of those live-TV flubs.
Later, Hester takes Pearl to a holiday, where everyone is waiting for a procession to board. Hester has booked passage for Arthur on a ship, but Roger has volunteered to come with him. Arthur gets up in front of the town and admits that he is Pearl’s father. He pulls open his shirt to reveal the letter “A” carved out in wounds on his chest, and collapses. And that’s the plot of The Scarlet Letter, all right.
What I thought: The Scarlet Letter was one of the first significant American novels, and has had pride of place in the American literary canon and high-school reading lists for at least a century. Despite this, it feels as though there’s no definitive on-screen version of the story. Wikipedia lists a dozen film versions, including one adapted by Wim Wenders and another starring Demi Moore, but all seem to have instantly faded into obscurity. Probably the best-remembered is the 2010 teen comedy Easy A, a loose adaptation at best. The Studio One rendition of the story is not that definitive version, although it is an interesting curiosity.
Unlike many other of the novel adaptations on Studio One, “The Scarlet Letter” gets almost all of the novel’s story in without seeming crammed or confusing. Outside of some clumsy exposition in the early scenes, the story more or less works as a one-hour teleplay. It was always a slim novel, and one more focused on introspection than plot. It does leave out the very end of the novel, where Hester dies in the wilderness and is buried in a pauper’s grave, but perhaps that was too depressing even for Worthington Miner.
Mary Sinclair is first-billed for playing Hester Prynne, but she sometimes feels like a secondary character in Liss’s adaptation, which foregrounds Dimmesdale as a kind of tortured, Byronic hero. John Baragrey definitely has a kind of steely charisma which makes this interpretation work, but he seems altogether too masculine and fit to play Arthur, who comes across as fairly pathetic in Hawthorne’s original text. Richard Purdy as Chillworth and the uncredited young actress playing Pearl are easily the stand-outs of the cast.
Today, The Scarlet Letter is taught in large part as an account of just how oppressive and brutal Puritan society can be. Certainly American society in 1950 was far from the Puritans, and often more rough around the edges than the media would suggest. But there were probably still plenty of people in that time who would shun a woman who had a child as a result of adultery, as there are today. The Studio One version avoids the still-existent strains of moralism by making the story primarily about Arthur’s guilt, and how it destroys him.
“The Scarlet Letter” was clearly a prestige project for Studio One, with Miner himself making an appearance and connecting the story to the novel’s centenary celebrations. Schaffner does his best to add a sense of drama to the small set. But I’m not sure anyone who was skeptical of television’s ability to create great art would be persuaded by this competent but somewhat dry run-through of a century-old classic. Ultimately, The Scarlet Letter may just be too introspective a novel to make a great film or television program. But I have a feeling that people are going to keep trying anyway.
Coming up next: Suspense offers us 1000-to-1 odds. Never tell me the odds!
The Eternal Couch Potato 