Annotations from the Archives: A Lost Lady Debuts
January 6, 2025, marks another important centenary in Willa Cather's career: the opening of the feature film adaptation of her 1923 novel, A Lost Lady. It was the first of her works to be made into a movie, and a 1934 film of the same name was to be the last in Cather's lifetime. Cather's growing dissatisfaction with film adaptations effectively ended any discussion of another film until both Cather and her partner and literary executor Edith Lewis were dead.
In 1924, Alfred Knopf, Cather's publisher, sold the film rights to A Lost Lady to Warner Brothers for more than $10,000. (Reported figures disagree.) The sale occurred as Hollywood struggled to reconcile its vision for entertainment with a growing movement across the Great Plains "to standardize moving picture films"—a movement that concerned itself with showing films of a high moral character and "eliminating the undesirable" (Webster County Argus, September 13, 1923). The local Sunday School Association, later in September 1923, hosted a lecture called "The Menace of the Sunday Movie."
Warner Bros., in answer to this concern over the content of films, sent several executives on a nationwide tour to ask audiences—directly—what they liked (and didn't like!) in the movies. In this clipping from August 3, 1924, (right), the Omaha World-Herald covers the tour's stop in Des Moines, Iowa, where audiences said they wanted more happy endings, better acting, and fewer "jazzy pictures." Of special interest to the audience were remarks by Pearl Keating, the editor-in-chief of the Scenario Department at Warner Bros. Keating was responsible for the purchase of A Lost Lady.
"She, according to Mr. Warner, possesses the uncanny ability of selecting future best sellers from the galley forms before the books even reach the public. Mrs. Keating reads 3 hundred novels a year! . . . 'Someone asked me today, why I bought 'The Lost Lady,' said Mrs. Keating, 'and said that he didn't think that the novel could be made into a picture. Not good picture material? . . . I am overjoyed too that we were lucky enough to get it.'" (Omaha World Herald)
The screenplay was also handled by a woman, actress and screenwriter Dorothy Farnum. "You must think with your heart and feel with your head. When I write my scenes I try hard to progress not from one thought to another, but from one feeling to another," Farnum wrote. "For the majority of people want to have their hearts excited and their minds let alone when they come into the world of low lights and soft music of a motion-picture theater."
Though many elements of Cather's novel remained in the 1924 film, some liberties were taken to highlight Captain Forrester's railroad business. Another Red Cloud native, Sidney Alden, by then an executive with the Santa Fe railroad, had negotiated a $1000 per day contract with Warner Bros. to film for one week using their cars and equipment in California. Cather's sister Jessica Auld observed some of the film's shooting, as was reported in the Webster County Argus (right). Cather said, in a letter to Carrie Miner Sherwood, "Wasn't it funny about sister Jessie playing about in the movie world with 'A Lost Lady'?" Cather herself was busy with the next book, and seemed amused by the fuss.
In January 1925, A Lost Lady made its Nebraska debut in Red Cloud, opening to a packed Besse Auditorium on Tuesday, January 6. It played again on Wednesday and Thursday, according to that week's Argus. Local reviews focused on the likenesses of actors to Red Cloud characters rather than artistic merit or moral content. The Grand Island Independent noted, "From a production point of view, the picture stands high; the direction is excellent, and so is everything else." However, the Independent continued in a way that seems to reflect the push for movie standards.
"The picture should end where the hero, thinking the heroine bad, goes away in disgust. . . . The current ending showing the heroine in South America, married to a rich man, the hero learning the circumstances from an old friend of his, is a compromise ending. It does the picture harm rather than good. . . . Because of the fame of the author of the book, "A Lost Lady" should prove a good attraction in first run theaters in big cities, but it is doubtful if it will please picture-goers in the small communities." (January 13, 1925)
It did please at least a few in the small communities, though. Willa Cather reported, in a February 2, 1925, letter to Tomas Masaryk, the President of Czechoslovakia, that she had recently taken "the living 'Antonia' and six of her many fine children to the first moving picture production of 'A Lost Lady.'"
By 1932, Cather's thoughts about film had cooled. "If you can get a very high price for the film rights of "The Song of the Lark" I'll consent to the sale," she wrote to her editor Ferris Greenslet. "But I wish you would send me a letter, signed by several members of the firm, assuring me that you will never ask me to consider a film proposition for 'Antonia.' I would like to feel entirely safe where that book is concerned." In 1934, since they still owned the rights, Warner Bros. repackaged "A Lost Lady" to star up-and-coming Barbara Stanwyck, removing Cather's name from the picture and obliterating her plot in order to meet the newly adopted Hayes Code that governed the moral content of Hollywood productions.
In 1977, Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial board member Lucia Woods had the opportunity to visit the movie's star at her home. Woods hoped to glean insights about the production and the film itself, which by the 1970s was too damaged to view (and is now considered lost). Woods wrote an account of the visit in the Fall 1977 issue of the Willa Cather Newsletter and Review:
Though the film itself is lost, the archives at the National Willa Cather Center houses a copies of several film stills and a copy of what is believed to be the script of the 1921 "A Lost Lady." We are actively collecting materials around other Cather film treatments as well. If you are interested in viewing or donating materials related to Cather's movies, please contact director of collections Tracy Tucker at ttucker@willacather.org.