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The Innocents (1961)

Director: Jack Clayton

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From Time Out London

Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) isn’t a very experienced governess so she can’t be certain, but surely orphans Miles (Martin Stephens) and Flora (Pamela Franklin) aren’t like other children. They’re polite, of course, to the point of being patronising (‘my dear,’ they call her), and their dark, placid eyes defy suspicion, but there’s something unsettling in his self-possession, macabre in her delights (‘Oh, look, a lovely spider. And it’s eating a butterfly!’). Having already experienced weird apparitions on her arrival at Bly, the beautiful country estate to which the children’s indifferent uncle has consigned them, the governess learns of the violent deaths of her wanton predecessor and her cruel lover, and begins to suspect a supernatural cause for her charges’ unsettling behaviour. And so Miss Giddens’ war on terror begins; but does Bly have nothing to fear but fear itself?

Adapted (by Truman Capote and John Mortimer, among others) from Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’, Jack Clayton’s 1961 chiller lives up to the story’s title, incrementally tightening the nerves through suggestive technical artistry in a way that few contemporary ghost stories manage. The story’s profound, unsettling ambiguity is perfectly served by Georges Auric’s soundtrack of laughs and whispers and the constricting or fleeting forms at the edges of Freddie Francis’s B&W ’Scope frame (seen here in a new print). Meanwhile, slow fades and a bravura dream sequence hint at the blurring of boundaries – between life and death, rationality and imagination – that so disturbs Miss Giddens, endowed by Kerr with a frisson of hysteria from the start. Whatever is happening, she knows it is ‘something secretive and whispery and indecent’.

Author: Ben Walters 2006-05-30 10:47:25

Time Out London Issue 1867: May 31-June 7 2006

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User reviews of this film

  • Peter Martin said...
    Posted on Aug 19 2007 14:30 The main point about this flm is that contains just about the creepiest, spookiest ghost appearance ever seen in the "Old Dark House" genre. I would warn anyone living alone not watch this film....
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Cast & crew

Director: Jack Clayton

Producer: Jack Clayton

Cast: Deborah Kerr, Martin Stephens, Pamela Franklin, Megs Jenkins, Michael Redgrave, Peter Wyngarde, Clytie Jessop, Isla Cameron full cast

Genre(s): Horror

Duration: 99 mins


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