The Innocents (1961)

[DB7]

Innocence found

Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961)

Andrew Pulver
Saturday June 4, 2005
The Guardian



Author: Henry James (1843-1916) was born in New York City, into a wealthy family. After a brief spell studying law at Harvard, he devoted himself to a literary life while travelling widely in Europe. His first novel, Watch and Ward , was written in Venice and Paris before being serialised in the Atlantic Monthly in 1871. James stayed in Europe as his writing career progressed, living first in Paris and then settling in England in 1876. Early landmarks included The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879), Washington Square (1880) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In 1898 James moved to Rye, Sussex. Here he dictated the story The Turn of the Screw . This and the novel What Maisie Knew (1897) marked the start of his great late phase. James then published a string of classics including The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). In 1905 he returned to the US for the first time in 25 years; his negative reactions are recorded in The American Scene (1907). His native country's refusal to join in the first world war motivated him to take British citizenship in 1915; he suffered a stroke the same year and died three months later, shortly after receiving the Order of Merit.


Story: James's interest in the unconscious and the spirit world is generally thought to have been inspired by family bereavements in the early 1880s. The Turn of the Screw was first published serially in Collier's Weekly in 1898. An unnamed governess, working in a lonely country estate, believes the two young children in her care, Flora and Miles, are being possessed and corrupted by apparitions of two dead former servants in the household, steward Peter Quint and the previous governess, Miss Jessel. Though the children deny the apparitions' presence, Jessel becomes obsessed with exorcising their influence, leading to Miles's death.
The film-makers: Jack Clayton (1921-1955) started as a teaboy at Alexander Korda's London Films and worked his way through the ranks, producing films such as Three Men in a Boat (1956), as well as incurring Korda's wrath by marrying starlet Christine Norden. After directing an award-winning short film, The Bespoke Overcoat (1956), Clayton broke into features with Room at the Top (1959), part of the radical kitchen-sink generation of British cinema. He took The Innocents as a way of changing artistic direction even though he was forced to film in Cinemascope, a format he disliked. Cameraman Freddie Francis had just won an Oscar for Sons and Lovers (1960), and created superbly atmospheric black-and-white images for the film.

How book and film compare: The film excises James's preface, with its description of fireside tales; instead, it begins and ends with the same shot of the governess (now called Miss Giddens) wringing her hands in apparent breakdown. Initial reaction to the book revolved around whether the ghosts were hallucinations or not (the first-person narrative encouraged this), but this is only a secondary consideration in the film. The Innocents operates more like a classic ghost story, but with more sexualised elements brought out - most notably in the scene in which Miles kisses Miss Giddens.

Inspirations and influences: The Innocents is arguably the leading product of the celebrated wave of British-set black-and-white horror films, including Night of the Demon (1957) and The Haunting (1963). Interest in the genre perked up on the back of the mid-1990s horror revival; The Haunting was remade in 1999, and The Innocents clearly inspired the Nicole Kidman vehicle The Others (2001).

[Stephen Pickard]

It was announced on the Home Theater Forum that Fox Home Video will release "The Innocents" on region 1 US DVD in early September.

[DAVID RAYNER]

That's good news. I shall order it from amazon.com when the time comes. But I hope they're going to do a wide screen transfer as it would be pointless re-mastering it for DVD if they're going to release it once again in pan and scan, as per their 1980's video.

[Clare]

Umbrella have released a region free DVD in 2.35:1 anamorphic. Special features include stills and poster gallery, theatrical trailer (which I can't seem to locate!), plus full trailers for 4 other umbrella titles; including dragonwick and topper. Running time is 95 mins as opposed to the NTSC's 100.

Taking a quick look, the opening sequence has been clipped - jumping straight in at the fox logo, consequently missing out some of the marvellously atmospheric and captivating black opening.

I got this version before I knew about the fox release. I think I'll have to grab that copy as well when it comes out in September :)

[Billy Liar]

Great news about the DVD release. I must confess that I started this thread(I was Repo Man) but my computer crashed and I had to re-sign in here under another user name because I lost all my Infomation.

It's nice to be back online and to receive this great news.

[Jim]

Originally posted by Karl Nolan@Jan 17 2005, 09:35 PM What a great and much underrated classic this is, I first watched this as a young child and it had a huge impact on me. I think Robert Wise had viewed this movie before filming The Haunting wink I dug out the video the other night and it still packs an almighty punch. Anyone else enjoy this movie?

I can't remember it. Who's in in it and what's the theme please?

[Steve Crook]

Originally posted by JIM@Jul 11 2005, 08:53 AM I can't remember it. Who's in in it and what's the theme please?

Deborah Kerr, Peter Wyngarde, Megs Jenkins, Michael Redgrave.
It's a thriller / ghost story based on the novel "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James.
See the IMDb entry.

Steve

[JamesM]

Umbrella have released this on DVD already if you cannot wait until Fox's September release.

[DB7]

Pure evil

Henry James's The Turn of the Screw has inspired novels, an opera and several films - including The Innocents, which Pauline Kael called the best ghost movie she'd ever seen. How did he make such a simple story so chilling? By Colm TóibÃ*n

Saturday June 3, 2006
The Guardian

Deborah Kerr in The Innocents
The kids aren't all right ... Deborah Kerr in The Innocents

In January 1895, when Henry James was in the depths of depression due to the failure of his play Guy Domville, the Archbishop of Canterbury told him the story that became The Turn of the Screw. James wrote in his notebook: "Note here the ghost story told me at Addington (evening of Thursday 10th), by the Archbishop of Canterbury ... the story of the young children ... left to the care of servants in an old country house through the death, presumably, of parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children ... The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions, figures return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon ... It is all obscure and imperfect, the picture, the story, but there is a suggestion of strangely gruesome effect in it. The story to be told ... by an outside spectator, observer."

Article continues
James let the story ferment in his mind for more than two-and-a-half years before he set to work on it. For most of his career he was sadly aware that his books would never attract a large audience, but there were times when he directly and openly sought popularity. This was one of them. Through his friend William Dean Howells he had made contact with a new young editor at Collier's Magazine in the United States, to whom he sold the serial rights for his new story. He made The Turn of the Screw as frightening and dramatic as he could because he needed a new audience in America. So frightening, indeed, that he actually frightened himself. When he came to correct the proofs of the story, which was serialised over 12 issues in 1898, he told his friend Edmund Goose: "When I had finished them I was so frightened that I was afraid to go upstairs to bed."

The tale, on publication, caused strong reaction. The New York Tribune called it "one of the most thrilling stories we have ever read", the Outlook called it "distinctly repulsive", the Bookman "cruel and untrue", the Independent "the most hopelessly evil story that we could have read in any literature". The American Monthly Review of Reviews called it "the finest work he has ever done ... a beautiful pearl: something perfect, rounded, calm, unforgettable". Ainlee's Magazine, however, warned its readers in December 1898 that Henry James "is by no means a safe author to give for a Christmas gift".

The story has had enormous influence, indirectly, on the structure and tone of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, begun very soon after Conrad read The Turn of the Screw, and on films such as The Others, made in 2001, starring Nicole Kidman. In 1954, Benjamin Britten's opera based on the story was first produced. In 1971, Marlon Brando starred as the evil Peter Quint in The Nightcomers, a dark prequel to James's story. In 1974, ABC Television in the US made a rather clunky version of the story with Lynn Redgrave as the governess. But it is the 1961 adaptation called The Innocents starring Deborah Kerr - scripted by William Archibald, who wrote the Broadway play of the story, and Truman Capote, with some dialogue by John Mortimer, and just released on DVD in this country - that best catches the psychological eeriness, the claustrophobia and the essential ambiguity of the original story by James.

James loved hearing half a story, which was what the Archbishop of Canterbury told him on January 10 1895. He then could fill in the rest. "I wrought it into fantastic fiction," he wrote to AC Benson, the archbishop's son, when the story was finished. To begin with, he framed the story. A man at a country house party sends home for a long-locked-up manuscript to amuse and horrify his companions. In this manuscript the story of the children - a boy and a girl - and the dead, corrupt haunting servants is recounted in the first person by the new governess arriving at a remote house where the children are unprotected.

For even the laziest reader of The Turn of the Screw, the governess's tone appears overwrought and her attitude self-regarding. Soon, however, in the light of what she begins to see and sense, this ceases to matter. There are phrases and scenes in the book written with such skill and care and trickery as to make any reader follow it with a great unease. James was right to be frightened. It is a very frightening story.

James told HG Wells that The Turn of the Screw was "essentially a pot-boiler", repeating the phrase 10 days later to another correspondent, calling it "a shameless pot-boiler". The word "pot-boiler" might thus seem a way for James to describe something less than holy, less than worthy, below the high line to which he wanted his art to ascend. But in a letter to Hendrik Andersen, written eight years later, he uses the word to mean often, as he explains, something "which represents, in the lives of all artists, some of the most beautiful things ever done by them". He was never simple, Henry James.

This lack of simplicity is what gives The Turn of the Screw its power. It is, on one level, a deeply and perhaps unconsciously autobiographical story. Because their restless father constantly crossed the Atlantic with them, the James children were natives only of the James family. They had no peer group or set of close friends as they were growing up. They were looked after a great deal by their Aunt Kate. It would not have been hard for Henry James to imagine an adolescent boy with no friends who broke rules - his brother William was like that - or a strangely wilful unprotected girl - his invalid sister Alice, who arrived in England in 1884 to be near him, was also like that.

If an aspect of James and his siblings became both Miles and Flora, then a larger part of the author became the governess. Just before he began the story, James signed a lease on Lamb House in Rye, his first house. He composed the story in London while repairs were being done, imagining with friends and correspondents what it was going to be like to travel alone to live in a house with a history. He was, like his creation, thrilled and frightened at the prospect.

By the time he wrote The Turn of the Screw, James had ceased to write in long-hand and begun to dictate his stories and novels to a secretary. His first secretary was a dour Scot called MacAlpine. He told a friend how he had meant "to scare the whole world with that story ... Judge of my dismay when from first to last this iron Scot betrayed not the slightest shade of feeling! I dictated to him sentences that I thought would make him leap from his chair; he short-handed them as though they had been geometry."

In the 20th century, the critics, led by Edmund Wilson, got to work on the story with the same cold attitude as the Scottish amanuensis. The ghosts, it was pointed out, were never actually seen by the children or by the housekeeper, but by the governess alone. Thus, it was suggested, the ghosts were aspects of the deep neurosis affecting our hysterical governess. Rather than a ghost story, The Turn of the Screw was "a study in morbid psychology", Wilson concluded in 1934. The American poet and critic Allen Tate in 1942 supported Wilson: "James knew substantially all that Freud knew before Freud came on the scene."

The problem for the Freudian reading of the story is that, while the children do not see the ghosts, the reader does. James invoked the evil and haunting presence of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel with consummate zeal and energy. Thus he managed to have it both ways. The ghosts existed, it is true, only in the mind of the governess; the ghosts, more importantly, also give the reader the creeps.

For anyone thinking of making a film of the story, this ambiguity was a godsend. All you needed was a suggestive, vulnerable and sexually repressed lead actress ("I played it as if she were completely sane," Kerr said), a lot of wild music and some special effects as the ghosts peered in windows or stood on the battlements of the remote house.

The black-and-white film, directed by Jack Clayton, is quite beautiful. It, too, is framed at the beginning by the appearance of Kerr's pleading hands and her face, wonderfully lit, filmed from the side as she insists, rather too emphatically for comfort, that she loves the children and only wants to care for them. The spooky atmosphere of the house is re-created with great subtlety, with no cheap shock tactics or easy effects. Megs Jenkins plays the deeply stupid housekeeper Mrs Grose as conscientious and kind-hearted and knowing her place. Slowly, as the camera moves from wide scenes of faded opulence to tiny and frightening objects, Grose's expression becomes permanently worried and bewildered; she unwillingly reveals that the two dead servants were less than innocent.

While in the Broadway play the children see the ghosts and in Britten's opera Miles and Flora sing to them, here their innocence is ambiguously preserved. They do not see what appears so dreadful and appalling to their overwrought governess. But they are not all sweetness and light either. The sense that they have been corrupted, or that there is an extraordinary bond between them, is carefully dramatised.

In James's story, there is no explanation given for Miles's expulsion from school. In the 1974 TV version, he is naughty and knowing, and tortures animals; he is a 14-year-old boy who flirts with his governess, kissing her in one bedroom scene. In the story, when the governess comes to his bedroom, Miles blows her candle out. (This is repeated in Britten's opera: "Twas I who blew it, who blew it, dear") And in The Innocents, even though Miles, played by Martin Stephens, looks like a nine-year-old, he is not beyond coming on to his governess, his kisses seeming deliberate and sexual rather than innocent and sweet.

This causes the governess to believe even more that the children have been corrupted, as she makes mad plans to send Flora to her uncle, played with an amused camp glint in his eye by Michael Redgrave. She wants to stay with Miles to confront the ghastly Quint. As she becomes more and more hysterical, it is clear why Pauline Kael called The Innocents "the best ghost movie I've ever seen", and it is easy to mourn the fact that Henry James, when he finally took up residence at Lamb House, did not have a DVD player in his drawing room, all the more to frighten himself so that he would, once more, be afraid to go to bed.

· The Innocents, directed by Jack Clayton, is at the National Film Theatre, London SE1, until June 15. Box office: 020 7928 3232. Then touring. Colm TóibÃ*n's The Master, a biographical novel about Henry James, is published by Picador

[DB7]

'The Innocents': Scared? You will be...
Released in 1961, 'The Innocents' is back on the big screen.Geoffrey Macnab tells the story of a British horror classic that terrified even the critics
Published: 08 June 2006


Jack Clayton's 1961 film The Innocents has a fair claim to be the most terrifying British horror film ever made. Somehow, Clayton's black-and-white adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, Henry James's 1898 novella about two children possessed by evil, retains its power even today, in an era in which horror movies have grown ever more extreme. Clayton avoids shock tactics altogether, but the glimpse of a man's face at the window or the fleeting sight of a woman across the water are as unsettling as anything in more conventional bloodcurdlers.

What makes the film doubly chilling is its ambivalence. Are we watching a real ghost story? Is this just the projection of the imagination of the repressed governess Miss Giddens (beautifully played by Deborah Kerr), or of the innocent children themselves? More than 40 years on, it remains impossible to tell.

"I often say it is the best photographed film of mine although it won no photographic awards," remarks its cinematographer, Freddie Francis, now 88, whose other credits include such strikingly shot work as The French Lieutenant's Woman and Martin Scorsese's version of Cape Fear. The co-writer Truman Capote was equally proud of his contribution, calling The Innocents his "best film script". Pauline Kael described the film as "the best ghost movie I've ever seen". The great French director François Truffaut once happened to be eating in the same restaurant as Clayton. He had never met the English film-maker but had a waiter carry him over a napkin on which he had scribbled: "The Innocents is the best English film after Hitchcock goes to America."

Despite such plaudits, The Innocents has remained relatively neglected. Neither a Hammer horror-style genre piece nor a conventional literary adaptation, the film has always been hard to classify. It must have seemed an especially perverse endeavour when Clayton started shooting it. The early 1960s were the heyday of the "New Wave."

In the UK, film-makers were busy making gritty, realist movies about the experiences of rugby league players, factory workers, pregnant, working-class girls or day-dreaming office clerks. Clayton himself had contributed one of the key "angry young men" films, his 1959 adaptation of John Braine's Room At The Top. Set in a dank, industrial, northern town, this was as far away from the rarefied world of Henry James as it is possible to imagine. The Brighton-born Clayton, one of the more contrary figures in recent British film history, knew he was expected to make another movie in "kitchen sink" vein and therefore decided to do something completely different. "After the success of Room at the Top, I was offered dozens of films but they were all carbon copies of that," he told the press.

Clayton, who had first read James's The Turn of the Screw when he was 10, decided now that this would be the perfect vehicle with which to wrong-foot the critics. An added attraction was the subtlety and complexity of the source material. "I want to do The Innocents because it is just about the most difficult story to tell on screen. And that's a good challenge," he said.

An original script had already been written by William Archibald, based on his Broadway stage play. Clayton wasn't happy with this and drafted in John Mortimer to help with the construction of the story. Then he recruited Capote, whom he had met while working as an associate producer on John Huston's oddball caper, Beat the Devil. Capote quickly knocked off his version of the script. Not that the work was easy. "I thought it would be a snap because I loved The Turn of the Screw so much. But when I got into it, I saw how artful James had been. He did everything by allusion and indirection," Capote recalled.


Clayton was an arch-perfectionist. To his intense annoyance, his backers Twentieth Century Fox insisted he use the Cinemascope widescreen process, which they owned. This was ideal for sword-and-sandals epics but less suitable for an intimate and brooding English ghost story. It was left to Freddie Francis to customise the Cinemascope equipment so that the desired effects could be achieved. "He [Clayton] wanted to film to have an enclosed and slightly claustrophobic feel and so I devised some special filters [made up by two elderly ladies in Chalfont St Giles] and these managed to blur the sides of the frame so that one was never sure if anything was lurking there. It worked extremely well," says Francis.

Most of the film was shot on sets at Shepperton. The picturesque exteriors were filmed at Sheffield Park near Brighton and on the Bluebell Railway close by. For all his craftsmanship, Clayton wasn't above resorting to trick effects. The music and sound are used throughhout to crank up the tension. The early scenes are disorienting precisely because they're shot in sunshine rather than the gloomy shadow that one associates with haunted-house dramas. In a disconcertingly distant cameo, Michael Redgrave appears as the children's uncle. The scene in which he hires Miss Giddens is unnerving because there seems to be an unstated sexual tension between them and because he is so indifferent to the fate of the children in his charge.

The film works through a build-up of small, jarring details, insignificant in themselves, but which have a sinister cumulative effect. There is the shot of the precocious boy Miles (Martin Stephens) giving Miss Giddens what appears to be an innocent kiss. The shot is held for so long and Miss Giddens' response is so nervous that the moment somehow seems indecent. And the cheery housekeeper Mrs Grose (Meg Jenkins) becomes evasive as soon as Miss Giddens asks her about her predecessor as governor. The house itself grows ever more oppressive. Whenever we see the children close to water or high up in a tower, we immediately fear that something terrible will happen to them. Perhaps Clayton's biggest coup was to make Peter Wyngarde (later TV's louche sleuth Jason King) appear to be the embodiment of evil.

When The Innocents was released in the winter of 1961, even hardbitten Fleet Street hacks admitted that it gave them the collywobbles. "It is at least 20 years since I sat in a cinema and felt the skin crawling on the back of my head through sheer nervous tension, but I felt that creepy sensation once more this week," cowered the Daily Express's veteran reviewer Leonard Mosley. "I was terrified by a film in which no blood is visibly shed and no graves are dug up."

Forty-five years on, the eerie, uncanny quality of The Innocents hasn't diminished. In the intervening period, there has arguably been only one other film that matched its understated but all pervasive sense of menance: Alejandro Amenábar's The Others. Amenábar, like Clayton (to whom he acknowledged he was paying tribute), realised that the most effective way in which to chill an audience was to play on its emotions. Yes, there was still space for dark corridors, for doors that creak ominously and even for jolting editing tricks, but that was just the window dressing. The real secret was to hone in on feelings which every spectator must have shared at one time or another: bereavement, lust, suspicion, confusion and, above all, the child-like sense of dread.

'The Innocents' is out now

[George Fry]

Absolutely agree. Have always thought "The Innocents" the most frightening of all films simply because of it's ambiguity. Was it all in her mind and was she the cause of the tragedy? And certainly the ghosts are extremely horrifying especially the woman standing in the rushes.

[stevie boy]

I remember watching this in the sixties and being quite scared, I must watch it again.

[Sid Langran]

I can remember this film "The Innocents" being one of the very few times I have thought about leaving the Cinema early, as a teenager, not because I was unempressed, but I had never been so scared in my life, and was haunted by the Rocking Horse in the nursery for years after. I don't think it was the Rocking Horse so much as the Screams from every corner of the Eros,
I will see it again if I can, I wonder if they could better the film if they ever do a re-make? I dought it! Sid

[batman]

Peter Wyngarde up to no good in The Innocents ...

[stevie boy]

Originally Posted by batman Peter Wyngarde up to no good in The Innocents ...

is that one of the Children of the Damned????