The Innocents

My new year’s hangover was eased somewhat today by drinking tea, eating crumpets and watching The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) on the 2006 DVD release of the film by the BFI.

This was the second time I’ve seen the film, the first being a screening at the BFI a couple of years back. It’s a remarkable film, from its John Mortimer and Truman Capote scripted screenplay and eerie black and white cinematography to the performances of the actors — Deborah Kerr as the repressed governess and Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin as the precocious children, Miles and Flora. Considering the children were 12 and 8 respectively, their performances are particularly impressive, given the amount of dialogue they have.

For anyone who hasn’t seen the film, it’s an adaptation of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw in which a young, sheltered governess takes charge of two orphaned children in a country house. The governess is soon visited by apparitions of the deceased previous governess and her lover. As with the novel there is an amount of ambiguity as to whether these are “real” ghosts or they exist only in her imagination.

One of the DVD extras is an introduction to the film by Christopher Frayling which highlighted some details I’d missed, like the recurring imagery of “paradise decaying”: the shots of roses loosing their leaves, insects crawling from statues’ mouths and Flora’s opening gambit to her new governess in the garden, introducing her pet tortoise, “do you like reptiles?”.

One of the strongest things about the film for me is the way it builds and maintains its mood and atmosphere without any recourse to special effects. Early on in the film where Miss Giddens catches her first glimpse of Quint in broad daylight, the background noise of birdsong simply stops. When she sees the ghost of her predecessor, Miss Jessel, we see the spectre in the distance across the lake, slightly indistinct. Freddie Francis’ cinematography really makes the film — many of the shots feature blurred edges (created by special filters and painting the edges of the lenses, apparently) which add to the feeling of glimpsing things from the corner of an eye.

This edition is really worth getting hold of if it’s still available (The BFI DVDs tend to have limited release periods). The accompanying booklet provides a lot more background information on the film and we also get the original US trailer which shows how difficult it was to market the film. The trailer tries to tread a line between suggesting the film is both a supernatural film for adults and a traditional horror, with a tagline along the lines of “do they come back to haunt the living?” being displayed between clips. Rather bizarrely, the trailer also shows the very end of the film which does give things away somewhat. Also included is Clayton’s first film as director, The Bespoke Overcoat (1955), another ghost story based on Gogol’s story The Overcoat.

January 1, 2009 • Posted in: film • 1 Comment

Crooked House

Tumbledown cottage, originally uploaded by reynard.

I’ve just watched Crooked House, Mark Gatiss’ fantastic ghost story trilogy, courtesy of BBC iPlayer.

The stories centred on the goings-on in a stately home from the Eighteenth Century through to the Twenty-first, and were all brought together with a suitably ghoulish ending.

Gatiss is clearly well versed in the genre and a genuine fan; there was certainly no attempt at mocking or subverting it. The first two stories were told as tales by a mysterious museum curator (Gatiss) to an teacher (Ben, played by Lee Ingelby) who becomes the unwitting protagonist in the final story. Gatiss seems to have taken heed of M.R. James’ advice that the most effective ghost stories are those set (as well as in this case, related) in the author’s own time, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of descending into cliché and parody (as I thought Gatiss did to an extent in the one book of his I’ve read The Devil in Amber).