Author Girard expands Barrie's fantastical little ethereal play into a full fledged gothic thriller.......ominous, creepy yet always achingly romantic and tragic. At times, you can sense Girard envisioning what a Hitchcock film might have looked like......in its theme of a man who obsessively uncovers the bizarre, otherworldly mystery surrounding the woman he adores.........even if the answers leave him terrified and grieving.
As a character in Barrie's play and Girard's novel, Mary Rose remains forever elusive, almost mythic. As a child, confounding one and all, she somehow survives a month long disappearance while with her father on a mystical little island off the Scottish coast.
When she re-appears on the island, astonishing all who searched for her, she's unharmed, untouched and with no memory of where she was or what happened to her during the weeks she was gone.
Cue the Bernard Herrmann woodwinds hitting their lowest, scariest notes........
As an adult young woman, Mary Rose entrances the man who becomes her fiance......a man who senses how tormented and haunted she is. And like a true Hitchcock hero in delirious love, he recklessly believes that the a truthful revelation of her past will release her from whatever dark forces swirl around her.
This includes, as you might have guessed, Mary Rose's return to that starkly beautiful but unsettling little island where it all started.......
In his novel, Geoffrey Girard makes a bold move that astonished us, adding an all-too-worldly, repulsive crime to the supernatural elements of the story. Though this twist screams out Hitchcock in capital letters, we can only wonder if the director would ever consider such a jarring plot turn for the gossamer fantasy that gripped his imagination since he'd seen Barrie's play as a young man.
Which brings us to the real-life sad story of 'Mary Rose'........
Over 40 years after the play's premiere, Hitchcock came as close as he would ever come to realizing his long held dream of turning 'Mary Rose' into a film. He got as far as an actual script from Jay Presson Allen, who wrote his 'Marnie' screenplay.
They even put it in their contracts with Hitchcock, specifically forbidding him to make 'Mary Rose'.
Think about that for a minute. Then think about the millions upon millions of dollars that studios (including Universal) lavished upon mediocre film directors to make their own beloved dream projects.......and belched up misbegotten movies that no one paid a a thin dime to see.
So 'Mary Rose' remains both a story and a never-made film that hold a permanent aura of sadness around them.
For J.M Barrie's play and Geoffrey Girard's re-imagining of it, 4 ghostly stars (****).....and who knows, maybe one day, some audacious filmmaker will bring the story to the screen........stranger things...(as strange as Mary Rose herself)..have happened.
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