The Bell Jar Movie: Would You Sue Too?

Donna Mitchell and Marilyn Hassett in The Bell Jar (1979)

In some databases, Hollywood's The Bell Jar (1979), viewable on YouTube, is classed as a horror movie. I watched it for its portrayal of the heroine Esther's mother, "Mrs. Greenwood," based on Aurelia Plath. Tony-Award-winning and Oscar-nominated Julie Harris acted the thankless role of a ditz whose hobby is Tyrolean folk dancing. The actors are good but the script and direction, ruinous: When "Buddy Willard" drops his pants the room's electricity and lights happen to go out. Esther confidently tips a New York cab driver, and she is sexually aroused by the antics of Lenny and Doreen at Lenny's apartment. On her last night in her hotel room Esther strips to her knickers, bellowing while throwing her clothes out the window.

Critics hated it and star Marilyn Hassett's career never recovered: another Bell Jar casualty, one of many. Sylvia Plath knew the novel was toxic, and although she worked all her life for recognition did not want her name on it. It was the only such request she ever made and it was not honored. Ted Hughes sold the movie rights in the mid-1970s for $60,000 ($250,000 today) and had no part in the result except for starting it.

Donna Mitchell plays "Joan," Plath's fictional fusion of two real-life Smith College classmates. A bit player in the novel, "Joan" in the movie is Esther's best friend and smolders to seduce her. When Esther edges away from clingy Joan at the mental hospital and does not say, as in the novel, "You make me puke," Joan proposes a romantic double suicide. That's not in the book. Esther runs away and later finds Joan's body hanging in the woods. That's not in the book either. We get a horror-movie closeup of Joan's dead face.

Julie Harris as the tasteless and exasperated Mrs. Greenwood.

Jane Anderson in 1986 sued the screenwriter, director, Hughes and others for defamation, asking for $6 million and withdrawal of the film from circulation. In 1979 Anderson, Plath's classmate and fellow patient at McLean but never her good friend, saw the movie but said nothing. By 1986 it had aired as a made-for-TV movie and Plath's biographers had identified Anderson as one of the models for "Joan." The Harvard professor of psychiatry found she had a growing reputation as a suicidal lesbian (she was neither) when those were bad things to be. She said she couldn't teach and couldn't write.

My takeaway from watching was that Anderson, a private citizen, had good reason to sue the filmmakers who had exploited "her" character.

Anderson settled for having been "unintentionally defamed" and $150,000, enough to pay her lawyers. Since 2012, Bell Jar remakes have been announced but never made. It's now said it will be a TV series on Showtime, but no other news has emerged as of late 2023. Probably to the good.