Bedelia (novel) - Film Adaptation

Film Adaptation

Immediately after Bedelia had been published in 1945, Isadore Goldsmith went about to prepare a film adaptation. The screenplay was co-written by Herbert Victor and Goldsmith himself, but although Caspary was consulted as well, she could not do anything about Goldsmith's decision to relocate the action to England and Monte Carlo and to update it to the present. In the film, the Carringtons, a British couple, are spending their honeymoon in Monte Carlo, where they are pestered by a young detective who poses as a fledgling artist. Caspary pointed out that unless the action of the movie were set before the First World War, the whole point she wanted to make in the novel about women's dependence on men—and Bedelia's deviant ways of circumventing that dependence—would be lost in the film, but Goldsmith was adamant.

The black-and-white movie, which was one of the few independent productions ever made at Ealing Studios, was released in 1946. It starred Margaret Lockwood as Bedelia Carrington ; Ian Hunter as Charlie Carrington; Barry K. Barnes as Ben Chaney; and Anne Crawford as Ellen. The film was directed by Lance Comfort.

Caspary felt so strongly about the film's distorted message that she later wrote another screenplay based on her novel in the hope that it would be turned into a U.S. film, a project which, however, was never realized.