The Innocents

So-o-ooo, I wanted spooky audio of a child singing for the latest Provocation™, and I remembered The Innocents.

The Innocents is a 1961 adaptation of Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw. I first saw it when I was nine years old on account of my mother thought it was cheaper to cart me along to movies than to hire a babysitter.

It is not a film that’s “appropriate” for children! Nonetheless, I’m glad I saw it when I was a child. I think the fact that I saw a lot of movies inappropriate for children contributed to my somewhat—shall we just euphemize it as “unusual” and leave it at that?—take on the world. As for example: I am never quite convinced that any situation I’m in is real because I saw The Manchurian Candidate when I was 10, so for all I know, I’m sitting in a North Korean detention camp, and the North Koreans, for some reason, want me to think I’m sitting in the sleepy suburban hamlet of Hyde Park, NY.

But I digress.

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The Innocents is a narrative about a governess tasked with the care of two preternaturally enchanting children; gradually, she becomes convinced that the children are possessed by the spirits of a pair of abusive servants who had their care before her arrival.

It’s the same plot as The Turn of the Screw, but not the same feeling at all. For one thing, Henry James uses the Conradian conceit of a story within a story; that and James’ characteristically plummy language distances the reader from the deep, deep, deep weirdness. For James, the narrative is more of an Aristotelian intellectual exercise than an effort to kindle terror: Are there ghosts, or has the governess herself gone quite mad?

That question remains in the film, actually, handled in an extremely artful manner. The still above, for example, shows the dead governess standing in the reeds next to the pond where she drowned herself, but the director cuts back and forth between the reeds and the terrified face of the present tense governess (Deborah Kerr) several times in the scene. Sometimes the dead governess is there, sometimes she’s not. Now you see it, but did you see it?

The other spectral appearances are handled in a similarly subtle fashion. Amazingly enough, the film’s director, Jack Clayton, got his start with the kitchen sink realism flick Room at the Top, and so far as I know, never ever made an atmospheric film again after he finished The Innocents.

Truman Capote wrote the screenplay, and it’s high Southern Gothic magically transported to east Sussex. Capote composed the screenplay while he was working on In Cold Blood—Capote's masterpiece as far as I’m concerned—and the terrible obsession that possessed during the writing of that book—or so we are told by Harper Lee—seeped into the screenplay.

I believe the poem in The Innocents' most singular and memorable scene is entirely Capote's invention:

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It's right up there with The Erl King!!!!

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After stripping the weird opening song from the credits, of course I had to watch the movie.

It still stands up.

It is very, very good.

And very, very unsettling.

Of course, Peter Quint, you devil! is kind of a meme for me.

Aside from that, it was an ordinary day. I tromped. I gardened. I worked. (Not enough) I figured out how to do voiceovers with music on iMovie.

Here is yesterday’s Provocation™:

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Various neighbors wandered over to beg cups of pesto. I had made an enormous vat of the stuff two days ago, and I must say, it is very good. And it’s not as though I don’t have unlimited supplies of basil. I was actually flattered that so many people wanted some.