Jack Clayton (1961)
Deborah Kerr’s portrait of the governess Miss Giddens is much admired but I think it’s eventually the reason why The Innocents (adapted by William Archibald, Truman Capote and John Mortimer from the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw) isn’t a fully satisfying film, although it’s a very good one. From the first scene – when she’s being interviewed for the job by the wealthy, uninterested uncle of two orphaned children who live on his country estate (called Bly) – Kerr suggests Miss Giddens’s suppressed neuroticism. You can see that Kerr understands the character and it’s that understanding, rather than the character itself, that she conveys insistently as the film progresses. There are some really good bits – especially the moments when Miss Giddens registers spinsterly embarrassment – but Deborah Kerr pre-interprets the governess’s predicament: she always looks as if she’s read the next page of the script and the passionate quality of the performance is willed. Miss Giddens is thrown off balance by her perceptions of supernatural activity in and around the house at Bly, and by the sexual miasma begotten by the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel that she sees. Quint was the valet of the children’s uncle and Miss Jessel her predecessor as their governess. Both died suddenly, and more or less mysteriously. Miss Giddens gradually learns from the housekeeper Mrs Grose that Quint used and abused Miss Jessel, that she was in thrall to him, that the pair performed sexual acts in plain sight – of the children Miles and Flora, as well as the other servants in the household. It’s the kinship – the nature of the kinship – between the ghosts and the children which increasingly obsesses Miss Giddens, and which drives her crazy (in both senses of that phrase).
The estate surrounding the house is very beautiful but the teeming natural life of the place is overwhelming. At the start of the film, the cinematographer Freddie Francis gives the gardens and the lake a paradisal quality yet the synergy of the plant life, the insects and the birds creates a sensory overload: everything is intensely alive – nature seems both satiated and insatiable. Flowers are in bloom, vegetation is poised between ripeness and rot. A bee is seen emerging from the mouth of a stone cherub: as it crawls down the statue, the fat, furry insect looks drugged and stupid. The doves’ cooing is so rich it sounds indecent. There’s nothing unrealistic about any single element but their accumulation produces a disorienting hyper-reality. There are also plenty of familiar ghost story details – creaking doors and banging windows, a music box playing an eerie melody. It’s the conjunction of these details with the sexualised atmosphere that makes The Innocents distinctive, and the fact the children are at ease with both aspects of the world that they inhabit – while these are beyond Miss Giddens – that makes it so remarkable. It wouldn’t be fair to suggest that all the supernatural stuff is familiar (although those facets which are get slightly overused in the second, less strong half of the film). There are some very imaginative elements too: the appearance of Quint’s face at the window (he’s also seen as a distant figure at the top of the bell-tower in the grounds) – and especially its gradual disappearance, so that only the fiery lights of his eyes remain; the manifestation of Miss Jessel at the lake, photographed at a distance so that, like Miss Giddens, we have to peer to try to make the figure out (and can’t); an unaccountable tear that the ghost of the old governess leaves on a blackboard in the children’s schoolroom.
In visual and aural terms, The Innocents still feels original whereas the actors’ speaking voices, with their clipped diction, seem to belong to a vanished era of cinema. Yet hearing them half a century after the film was made gives the piece an odd authenticity: because the voices belong to a bygone age it’s easier to be convinced that they belong to characters from an earlier bygone age (The Turn of the Screw was first published in 1898 and the story appears to be set around that time). This gives the whole cast an authority even though you’re well aware that some aspects of this performing style are undistinguished. For example, the opening scene between Michael Redgrave as the uncle and Deborah Kerr is rather stiff – yet it makes, in effect, a double-edged contribution: the set rhythms of the exchange are familiar from British-made films of the time and (we think) give us our bearings – so that the texture of the world Jack Clayton then goes on to create is all the more surprising. The same is essentially true of the conversations between Deborah Kerr and Megs Jenkins as the housekeeper: the lines are read precisely but unsurprisingly, and Jenkins is (from other roles) a comfortable, reassuring presence. She’s good at suggesting Mrs Grose’s quiet determination to maintain an amiable domestic front and, because this is Megs Jenkins, we somehow participate in her doomed attempt to pretend things are nice and normal.
The two children, however, are a very different matter. Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin may superficially look and sound like the upper middle-class youngsters we’d expect to see in an English period piece made in the early 1960s but there’s nothing standard about their acting. Clayton achieves some great things in The Innocents but best of all are the performances he gets from these children. Stephens and Franklin do seem innocent and vulnerable in their innocence; at the same time, they’re effortlessly in tune with a world that isn’t innocent. When Flora’s pencil screeches down the tablet she’s working on, the little girl seems weirdly, contentedly sadistic; yet when Miss Giddens tries to force Flora to admit she sees Miss Jessel, Pamela Franklin’s screams are gruellingly real and upsetting (we then hear from Mrs Grose that the screams have been accompanied by obscenities the like of which the housekeeper’s never heard). The sense that Miss Giddens has a suppressed passion for the children’s uncle is telegraphed but Franklin brings the idea to life again when she observes how pleased the governess seems to have received a letter from him (and Deborah Kerr’s flushed reaction is good). Martin Stephens’ clear, simple reading of the poem with the opening verse:
‘What shall I sing to my lord from my window?
What shall I sing for my lord will not stay?
What shall I sing for my lord will not listen?
Where shall I go when my lord is away?’
– is both affecting and disturbing in its seeming reference to Miles’ allegiance to Quint. Miles often treats Miss Giddens with a precocious, amused condescension (he might be a middle-aged male chauvinist calming down a woman who’s getting hysterical). It’s partly because Stephens does this easily that makes the moment when Miles gives Miss Giddens a long kiss on the lips so strong. Martin Stephens is really uncanny at convincing you that Miles is psychically much older than the governess. (Franklin was making her debut here and went on to other good things. Stephens, who made films before and after, gave up acting in the mid-1960s and, according to Wikipedia, became a successful architect.)
The Innocents has a small cast – nine, including Eric Woodburn (who played Dr Snoddie in the BBC’s Dr Finlay’s Casebook in the 1960s), who’s uncredited as a coachman. Isla Cameron appears momentarily as the maid Anna, although she also sings – beautifully – over the opening titles. Michael Redgrave as the uncle has just the one scene. We never see the face of Clytie Jessop as Miss Jessel; we see nothing but the (extraordinary) face of Peter Wyngarde as Quint but hear only occasional menacing breathing and laughter from him. (Except for Anna’s appearance, we never see any of the other servants, although the conversations between Miss Giddens and Mrs Grose make clear that they’re around the place, and that the governess has met them. This enriches the motif of presences seen by some but not others.) Some astonishing words and music were written for The Innocents, including the song ‘O Willow Waly’, by Georges Auric and Paul Dehn, which Isla Cameron sings at the start (over a black screen initially). I assume that Miles’ poem was also written for the film although a quick Google search hasn’t confirmed this. The brilliant art direction is by Wilfred Shingleton and the costumes by Motley. Jack Clayton does a fine job of mining the ambiguity of the title. At one point, Miss Giddens refers, with horrified sarcasm, to Miles and Flora as ‘the innocents!’ and we come to see that, in some respects, it’s the governess herself who’s an innocent compared with them. But we come to see also that she’s not only on the receiving end of the horror, she administers it too.
31 December 2010
