The Innocents
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.
"It is a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale" - Oscar Wilde on The Turn of the Screw.
Henry James' The Turn of the Screw may be a swift, poisonous little tale, but a cottage industry has sprung up in screen adaptations, including a 1959 TV play starring Ingrid Bergman, a 1974 TV film featuring Lynn Redgrave, plus a godawful 1994 updated version with Pasty Kensit and Julian Sands, and an admirable 1999 TV film with Jodhi May and Colin Firth.
But, 1961's The Innocents remains the best version, and possibly the best big screen ghost story (made in the West at least).
Director Jack Clayton spent his career adapting literary works for the screen, springing to immediate fame in 1959 with his first feature film, Room at the Top, having previously directed shorts and worked as associate producer on John Huston movies and the ripe-for-rediscovery chiller The Queen of Spades.
The Innocents was Clayton's sophomore movie, and stands alongside Se7en or Jaws as an instant classic follow-up film. Like Pulp Fiction, another great second film, everything in The Innocents clicked, from the perfect casting to Freddie Francis as cinematographer to Truman Capote's involvement in the fiendishly clever script.
The title came from William Archibald's stage adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, bought by 20th Century Fox for transition to screen. After working with Archibald for a month on a script, Clayton found the play too rigid in structure and, wanting something more lyrical, turned to Capote and playwright barrister John Mortimer (creator of Rumpole of the Bailey) to provide a Gothic sensibility and authentic sounding Victorian dialogue.
Shooting on large stages at Shepperton Studios and in the gardens of Sheffield Park, The Innocents is a beautiful movie, shot in black and white Cinemascope with attention to how light and shadow can conjure up the most disquieting emotions.
