Stars:  Three out of five stars

 

With the occasional deadly seriousness of "Dragnet," Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Story of Esther Costello exposes the corruptive nature of charitable institutions and the public's need for collective emotion that feeds such exploitation; it also exposes a gratuitous prurience on the part of the author that makes it all a bit icky and revealing (no pun intended) in more unintentional ways than one.  As in the film version, the story begins with an irritating recreation of how Esther Costello became blind, deaf and dumb in her impoverished village of Cloncraig in Ireland and picks up momentum as the attractive figure of wealthy American and benefactress Mrs. Bannister comes on the scene to rescue Esther from appalling neglect.  Belle Bannister’s motives are originally compassionate and fueled by philanthropy and good faith mixed with uncertainty, although the village, sensing a chance to assuage its collective guilt over Esther’s abandonment, also conspires to force her hand to relieve them of responsibility for Esther’s care.  Soon Mrs. Bannister, doubtful and uncertain over her own decision to take Esther under her wing, finds herself pleasurably championed and idolized by the public for her good deed and her commitment snowballs.  Devoting herself to a year of hard work in which she and Esther learn the deaf and dumb language and make inroads towards “civilization,” she becomes more isolated from friends and more deified by the media and public.  Simultaneously the public, as had the villagers, feeds its ego and charitable need by fevered giving.  At first conflicted, Mrs. Bannister eventually accepts these donations as security for Esther, charity for the blind, and to ensure her own financial security and defray her considerable expenses for Esther’s care.  She still struggles to keep that fine line between good intention and exploitation, but as the thing becomes larger than she ever expected, former husband and no-good scamp Captain Charles Bannister forces his way back into her life to throw all selfless intention to the wind.  By a combination of blackmail and his power as a man to weaken her better instincts, he makes her a tool in his amoral ambition regarding Esther, forcing Mrs. Bannister to support him as he had in the past.  The dark tide continues as huckster Jack Lett (presented in the book’s occasional sledge hammer fashion as veritable carney barker with his card reading “Jack Lett- Novelties”) becomes third party in the unholy alliance.  Mrs. Bannister, powerless against the tide, tries to protect Esther from harm initially, but she is ultimately dictated by fear and increasingly complicit in keeping the monster alive.  When a reprehensible deed restores Esther’s senses, the truth is hidden and fear of exposure by a young newspaper man leads to an ultimate evil act.

 

Apart from what author Monsarrat intended, there is something smarmy and loathsome about the novel, beginning with the gratuitous whispers among Cloncraig villagers regarding “handsome” visiting American Mrs. Bannister’s lace nightgown “you could see half a mile through,” “paint” and “scent.”  There are numerous references by various male characters to Esther’s beautiful body and smug allusions to Mrs. Bannister’s affairs.  (If her “sleeping with the devil” is a metaphor, it’s a heavy-handed one as is the general moralistic tone of the story.  How outraged should anyone be by meant-to-shock absurdities like these reflections of a jaded newspaper editor:  “In France, a woman took a lover on the kitchen table while her children looked on, and told her twelve-year-old daughter:  ‘You can watch, but you oughn’t to start till next year.’”)  The most telling scene of all is when so-intentioned hero, cub reporter Harry Grant, who loves Esther yet loves his job a little more, to my mind, climbs a fire escape to enter Esther’s bedroom, peeping into windows en route and observing an illicit, possibly adulterous scene in one.  Responsible for initiating media fever for the Esther Costello story and ultimately choosing to expose it as a scam when it tips full throttle in that direction, Grant strikes me as one of the biggest hypocrites in the story.  As he later waxes indignant about innocent Esther’s exploitation, one can’t help remembering his earlier smarminess:

 

When [Esther] sat down, smoothing her dress, [Grant] winked at Charles Bannister, and said:

 

“She really is a honey, isn’t she?  Just look at that figure!”

 

When Charles Bannister retorts, “You oughn’t to talk like that about her,” Grant, angered “to be thus rebuked by this second-rate, drunken hanger-on,” counters roughly:  “What the hell?  She can’t hear, can she?”  Later, torn between exposing the Esther Costello scam and love for its heroine, “he knew that the story would win, because he was that sort of man, in that sort of job.”  Evidently all characters are all-too-willing to sacrifice ideals for their own personal advancement and gain.  And what if Esther were not such a “glowing beauty?”  What if she was plain or homely?  Would her story be less sympathetic?  The scene when Grant enters Esther’s bedroom rankles further as Esther’s “innocence” seems to hinge on her purity not only in the Costello machine but as a woman as he explores why Jack Lett said he, Grant, wasn’t the only one “who’d like to lay [Esther].”  Are blind people necessarily so naïve, innocent and “untouched?”  Isn’t this a condescending view of the blind?  Are they so less “normal?”  Must a girl be a virgin to be a victim?

 

The fine film does a commendable job in adapting the source story, making it less distasteful, although the distasteful aspect leaks through in some of the ridiculously exploitive outfits chosen for actress Heather Sears who plays Esther Costello, such as a jumpsuit that over-emphasizes her breasts.  The dress is as ridiculously inappropriate as the short dresses child star Erin Moran was forced to wear way past her growth spurt on “My Three Sons.”  In most respects, the film improves on the book by altering it to make Mrs. Bannister a wholly noble character, unsurprising since Crawford wanted audiences to like and identify with her film roles.  As a result, Mrs. Bannister comes across more in keeping with the way I felt the book should have gone with her rather than turning this three-dimensional, principled woman into primary villainess.  However, removing the element of blackmail from the script makes it much less believable in the film that a smart, capable cookie like Belle Bannister would so quickly welcome her errant husband (played by Rosanno Brazzi) back into her bed and invite destruction.  The self-sacrificial ending, sanctifying Mrs. Bannister in the extreme, is also a great misstep.  In the novel, the “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” theme used to hawk Esther Costello could also apply to Mrs. Bannister’s fall from grace.   

 

As Belle Bannister, Joan Crawford gives one of the finest (and most underrated) performances of her career.  She is attractive (as befits the character), subtle and poignant.  Her scene in which she first becomes aware of oily hubby’s less-than-fatherly interest in Esther is stunning.  She had a talent, nurtured in the silents, for expressing everything with her face and particularly eloquent eyes.  As is tiresomely par for the course with Crawford, however, her detractors seem hell bent on negative distortion when assessing her, fond, for one, of unfairly painting her as somehow more narcissistic than the average film star, which only underscores that sanctimonious self-righteousness the public has and their need for blood that the story of Esther Costello partially addresses.  Truth and balance are always sacrificed for sensation, as they are in this case, when Crawford is faulted for being ridiculously glamorous while walking around the ruins of Ireland at the start of the film as if this had been arranged by her in the script solely out of vanity.  In actuality, it is faithful to the story where the worldly woman (as the leering villagers see her) is described as being “in black, with furs:  her stockings were of fine mesh, her heels (by Irish village standards) wonderfully high.  She looked ‘for all the world like a French whore,’ said Paddy Finane, who had never seen a whore of any nationality.”  Furthermore, I am hard pressed to understand why Crawford's desire to present herself as a star would be considered a negative and not the positive it is, since more than most stars, she was committed to her public and often did things solely to give her fans what they wanted.  She had also grown up in a star system at MGM that demanded its stable to look and behave a certain way and Louis B. Mayer was one of her respected father figures whose dictates she largely obeyed.  Certainly that old-style Hollywood glamour is sorely missed, but her appearance here is in fact faithful to the source story.  Her good looks, charm, charisma and sensitive face (and yes, the smart way she dresses) makes her well cast as a public relations ambassadress, the role she was successfully playing for her Pepsi exec husband’s company in real life.

 

In sum, The Story of Esther Costello is fairly well written, but it more than errs on the side of stodgy moralism and heavy-handedness.  While widely distributing its criticism to indict more than the central villains in greed and corruption, it errs by placing the primary blame in Mrs. Bannister's lap ultimately, a woman who began with dimension and sympathy, a sympathy it would have been wise to continue rather than shifting heroism to the ambitious reporter.  The film version is reasonably faithful to the original text, tendencies to floridness included, and contains a fine and vastly underrated performance from Joan Crawford as Mrs. Bannister.  - D. Nowak