The Innocents... (3)
In Focus is a new collection of articles focussing on an important film appearing on Sky Movies Classics that month. In-depth, analytical and revealing, In Focus aims to shed new light on old films. To get a seat at the table, all we ask is the film be one of the finest examples of its genre.Focus No.2 is Jack Clayton's peerless ghost story The Innocents.
"Do you have an imagination?" - The Uncle
Beating off stiff competition from Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Haunting, The Innocents is the finest cinematic example of "the fantastic", a literary term describing ambiguous fiction, where events are never fully explained as rational or supernatural.
Director Jack Clayton was influenced by an Freudian article on The Turn of the Screw written by Edmund Wilson that claimed the ghosts were merely a manifestation of the Governess' repressed sexual desire for the children's uncle.
Many scenes in The Innocents seem to adopt this view.
Deborah Kerr's wide-eyed, quaverous performance, moving from fresh-faced idealism to barely constrained hysteria, makes Miss Giddens plausibly susceptible to fevered superstitions, particularly as she is a pastor's daughter experiencing the larger world for the first time.
Kerr had been in The King and I five years previously as a wholesome governess, and this would have strongly resonated with contemporary audiences.
As well as the children, the title The Innocents refers to Miss Giddens, presumably a virgin, and Mrs Grose, who wishes to banish any discussion Quint and Miss Jessel's cavortings: "Rooms used by daylight as if they were dark woods," as she beautifully puts it.
Crucially, Miss Gidden's first view of Quint on the tower is obscured by sunlight, and she only sees his phantom clearly after discovering a picture of him. The ghosts are all seen from Miss Giddens' point of view, and on at least two occasions other characters claim they see nothing.
The governess' inexperience and ready belief in a supernatural explanation may also be due to her inability to deal with the precocious, troubled Miles. Clearly enamoured with the boy and unable to confront him about his expulsion, he begins to replace his Uncle in the governess' fevered affections.
Following a lingering kiss from him that has her in a state of hysterical rapture, she orchestrates events so she and Miles are left alone in the house, and their climactic showdown is a masterpiece of eroticism, terror and doubt as Clayton drops clues as to the ghosts' validity but never fully answers the mystery.
The Turn of the Screw is told first person by the (unnamed) governess, and Clayton cleverly creates a cinematic equivalent. The mobile camera tracks and spins around her, as giddy as she is, and fixes closely on her whenever the apparitions materialize.
Clayton (from Capote's script) generates a feeling of a corrupt Eden in the sprawling house; it is splendid but overripe, the flowers are dying, insects loll out of statues' mouths, and threatening, sexual tapestries adorn the walls, all good stuff to send a innocent pastor's daughter reeling.
But, Capote and Clayton also included one scene that seems to prove the spirits' existence. When Miss Giddens spies the phantom Miss Jessel weeping in the classroom, tears remain on a chalkboard after the visitant vanishes.
Later however, as Miles and Miss Giddens sit by the fire, the young boy suddenly appears very childlike and the horror on Kerr's face that she could be imagining the supernatural threat is heartbreaking.
Kerr's performance has been justly lauded, but Stephens and Franklin too are perfectly cast, possessing the right amounts of innocence and sly wisdom to suggest something could be happening in the house.
Stephens had played Kerr's son in Count Your Blessings two years previously, which also adds a frisson to the taboo subject of adult-child relations that appears more shocking today than when The Innocents was first released.
