The Innocents (1961)

              When I put together the list of movies I’d be watching for Halloween I was deliberately vague and slapdash about it. I picked a rough theme, decided on some rules and/or dealbreakers, then I just threw a bunch of movies in a pile until they added up to 31. Generally I have a vague idea of what are considered the ‘big’ movies in a particular subgenre (for example I’m looking forward to 1963’s ‘The Haunting’) and which are considered swill (I’m also looking forward to the 1999 remake, albeit for much different reasons), but although I’m more familiar with cinema history than most I still have plenty of blind spots, which is how this movie managed to sneak its way onto the list without me realizing what I’d let myself in for.

              There’s a very decent argument that I shouldn’t be including this movie at all. The only really strict criteria I’ve been adhering to is the actual existence of ghosts in the film, none of that ambiguity nonsense. Depending on how you interpret it, ‘The Innocents’ may or may not have spooky hauntings in it, so normally I’d toss it on the pile with ‘The Haunted Strangler’ but this is enough of an edge case (and frankly a good enough film) that I’m including it anyways.

              We have our second Criterion-approved film (albeit the first one I watched), and one with an impressive amount of analysis dedicated to it. It’s a prestige film directed by Jack Clayton, written in part by Truman Capote, starring Deborah Kerr, and adapted from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. There are countless articles and chunks of books dedicated to interpreting and studying both the original novella and this screen adaptation. There are deep ravines of meaning ready to be dug out of almost every scene and I could spend a very long time indeed doing things like tying the use of the extended Cinemascope frame to the portrayal of the country estate in which the film is set, or analyzing the children’s speech patterns to determine the levels of control and artifice between the various characters, but frankly I have another 27 movies to get through this month, I just don’t have the time.

              What I can get into is my personal thoughts on the film, which are unfortunately complicated. It’s a very good film, and Kerr’s performance is rightly praised as extraordinary, but the ambiguity that lies at the center of the movie is driving me crazy. It normally wouldn’t, I can swing with a sense of heightened reality in a psychological drama just fine, but specifically in the context of this month, when I’m trying to only watch genuine spookums onscreen, I’m a little torn.

              Some slight background: director Jack Clayton, after kinda-sorta helping to invent the British New Wave movement of filmmaking with 1959’s ‘Room at the Top,’ suddenly found himself on the receiving end of any number of job offers. After turning down a series of movies he felt were just copies of his previous film he found himself contracted at 20^th Century Fox at the same time as Deborah Kerr. She was just coming off of ‘The King and I’ and ‘An Affair to Remember’ and about as big an actor as there was at the time. It was Clayton who decided to pursue an adaptation of The Turn of the Screw with Kerr in the lead, which causes problems we’ll get back to in a bit.

              The original screenplay was by William Archibald, adapted from his own stage play adaptation of the novella. Clayton was unhappy with the way the adaptation treated the ghosts and the supernatural elements as real and factual, wanting to instead tilt the film in more of a psychological direction. To that end he brought in Truman Capote to do an extensive rewrite, which apparently was something you could just do in those days. Capote was in the middle of writing In Cold Blood, but took some time off to do a pass on the screenplay. He was also on hand on some shooting days. John Mortimer, of “Rumpole of the Bailey” fame, is credited with ‘additional scenes and dialogue.’ It’s stated in various places that Capote also intended the ghosts in his version to be real, although he left it vague enough that Clayton was happy with his work.

              The plot of the movie follows that of the novella very closely, with one very important difference. For those unfamiliar with the original version, it’s a story within a story within a story. The framing device is an unnamed narrator who reads a manuscript to his friends written by Miss Giddens, governess to two young orphaned children, after her death. So right from the beginning the original is taking pains to establish at least two levels of possible unreliable narrator between the reader and the events depicted. The movie does away with any such framing devices and most of the time follows the subjective experiences of Miss Giddens. If she sees a ghost, so do we. If she hears something, it’s on the soundtrack. It takes pains to contrast her experiences with everyone else, who never see or hear anything, and so much of her experiences are shown through montages and superimposed imagery that it certainly does keep the ambiguity of what’s real and what’s not, but by the very nature of portraying actual people in motion a lot of the deliberate obfuscation and ability to hide in implication that was present in the novella are simply lost in the translation from one medium to another.

Miss Giddens has been hired by the uncle of two orphaned children to manage their upbringing at his country estate. There is also a small household staff. It’s briskly established that he very explicitly wants nothing to do with them and to not be any part of their lives. This character is played by Michael Redgrave, by the way, and for this one scene he got top billing. I can see why, he manages the troubling feat of being both charming and casually monstrous. He presents his utter uninterest in the affairs of his niece and nephew so bluntly and forthrightly and with such a little twinkle in his eye that I found myself a little on his side. It was only over the course of the movie that I realized exactly how sociopathic he was being and the harm he was causing these children. Miss Giddens is hesitant about accepting the position, reminding him that this would be her first time minding children, but he frankly doesn’t care and steamrolls her into accepting.

It’s very important that we spend some time trying to figure out Miss Giddens. She’s onscreen almost every second of the movie and everything we see is from her perspective. We’re going to be spending the entire time inside of her head. Every sight and sound are going to be filtered through her thoughts and impressions. This is where I have problems with the casting of Deborah Kerr. As great as she is in this movie, she’s too old for the character. In the original novella Miss Giddens is around 20 years old and fresh from living in her childhood home with her very religious family. She’s barely an adult, was raised poor in a small house with a big family by a fairly harsh and intolerant pastor father. She’s supposed to be nervous and overwhelmed and all but smothered with a raging need to be correct and proper about everything. This is what sets her up to spin out so much when she gets to the nearly empty country estate and she’s essentially on her own.

Kerr was 40 when this movie was filmed, yet they kept the same backstory and motivations. Her exact age is never commented upon so maybe she’s playing much younger than she was, but that only gets you so far. Someone leaving her parents’ house to make her way in the world at 20 is much different than someone doing it at 40. The scenes and emotions play so much better when the character is younger than all of the staff she’s in ostensible charge of while being only ten years older than the children. It’s just different when the age gap is instead thirty years. The power dynamics are all skewed. I think Kerr is terrific in this and once you accept the basic premise it doesn’t directly affect the plot, but I think the character was originally written as young for a reason.

Age thing aside, what’s first established about Miss Giddens in the movie is that she’s very religious. The movie opens on a minute of darkness and a child softly singing. Pretty spooky. Then Miss Giddens’ clasped hands rise into frame and we start to hear her whispered prayers. She’s muttering about helping the children and when we finally see her face she’s crying, clearly in some anguish. She doesn’t pray a whole lot over the course of the movie, but she picks up a Bible every once in a while, and her piety does flow nicely into how she starts believing in the supernatural.

She’s also always dressed immaculately. Full bustle, hat, gloves, all decked out regardless of what’s going on. Out in the gazebo by the pond, completely dressed up. Packing a suitcase, looking good. Even at the end of the movie, when she’s gone fully bugnuts, her hair is perfect. The only exceptions are at night, when she lets her hair down, slips into like a four-piece dressing gown, and either lays in bed, sweatily tossing and turning and moaning, or wanders around the deserted wing of the estate with a lit candle and wild eyes. Very careful and repressed, until she’s not.

She has had a rough day, y'know.

So we have a nervous, tightly wound person on her way to being fully obsessed with properness and control suddenly plunged into a very alien world during her first opportunity to prove that she’s worth something and given a shocking amount of legal control over two minors with absolutely no oversight. Frankly I’m surprised so many people give the possibility of ghosts in this film even a moment’s thought, this was destined to spin out of control from the word go.

While skimming the wiki before watching the movie I read the part about the screenplay being rewritten to be more psychological, and I’m pretty sure in that moment I decided I was going to read the movie as having everything supernatural being in the main character’s head. Not sure if that’s actually true, but with one exception I still read this movie as one long psychotic break by Miss Giddens. Intellectually I can look back at individual scenes and understand how someone might interpret it as being the fault of ghosts or spirits, or that maybe some character actions are because of their influence, but to my eyes Kerr plays her mounting hysteria and spiraling certainty in her own delusions so clearly that I have to interpret this as a story of an overstressed woman given way too much responsibility just descending into internal madness.

When Miss Giddens arrives at the estate she meets Flora first, one of the two orphaned children. Her brother is away at school. She’s a little weird but mostly adorable, talking a little too much like an adult but also hauling around a pet tortoise, so she’s clearly fine. Then Miss Giddens meets the maid who’s been taking care of the children temporarily, Mrs. Grose. She mostly exists to alternately exposit or listen to Miss Giddens, depending on the needs of the scene. With a one-scene exception of another maid who sticks her head through a door and onto the screen, she is the only other character we meet for the rest of the movie. It’s her, Miss Giddens, and the kids. Adapted from a stage play, remember.

It’s very easy for any piece of media to get a Marxist analysis and this one was basically tailor made for it. The estate has other servants, about five of them, but they’re only mentioned, never seen. The grounds are kept, the estate cleaned, but we never see it being done. Presumably our characters eat, but we never see anyone making or consuming food. The clothes are washed. The candles are lit. Money is never mentioned. An estate as large as the one in this movie takes a small industry to keep it going, but all of that is kept both off screen and out of the dialogue. Of the two adult characters one is desperately striving to rise above her station and the other is desperately making sure she never comes close, while the two capering children of aristocracy run mad.

Along with all this is the weird quality time has in the film. It certainly passes in the movie, the seasons slightly change, but it’s almost impossible to determine the length of time between any two scenes. It could be hours, it could be weeks. We see the inside of a room set up for teaching once and at the beginning of another scene there are words on a chalkboard, but aside from that no learning seems to be going on. From all appearances the children decide how to spend their time by themselves. We see no structure set up for the children, no schedules.

Which is actually the cruelness of the uncle that I was talking about before. Not extricating himself from their lives, he can be as distant as he likes, it’s shipping them out to his almost deserted country estate and leaving them there to rot. Children need to be around other people growing up so they can learn how to navigate social systems. If you dump two kids either side of ten years old in a big empty house on sweeping acres of countryside and let them run around however they want for as long as they want you are going to end up with two asocial feral weirdos. It wouldn’t even be their fault, they’d just have been on their own for so long that they wouldn’t have any clue how to interact with other people.

One of the first things to disturb Miss Giddens is the strange mannerisms of the children, meanwhile I’m spending the movie marveling at how relatively well adjusted they are.  Neither of the kids like killing small animals! They sometimes get along great and sometimes have stupid arguments! Sometimes they’re just little shits for no reason! Sure, they’re lost in their own imaginations half the time, speak as if they’re way older than they are, and quote weird poetry for no reason, but it could have been so much worse. They admittedly do come off as creepy on first impression, which does Miss Giddens no good.

Sometime after Miss Giddens arrives Flora randomly announces that her brother Miles will be coming home soon. Since it’s the middle of the school term this seems unlikely, but then a forwarded letter arrives from the school letting them know that Miles has been expelled. Soon he’s home and being evasive about exactly what he did that merited expulsion. The dialogue for the kids, by presumably Capote, I’m not going to compare it to the novella, is just the right amount of off-putting. It’s all realistic kid thoughts but expressed elliptically and with a slightly raised vocabulary level. Like smart kids left alone too much for too long.

Meanwhile Miss Giddens has been having odd experiences. They’re presented on the screen as temporary bouts of sensory overload. She’ll hear one pigeon, then a thousand pigeons, then they’re gone. The sun will be momentarily too bright, and in the brightness she’ll glimpse some shapes, and afterwards be oddly sure what she saw. She’ll hear a voice in the distance, or maybe several voices overlapping each other. These are coupled with periodic mini-montages, stylized sequences that display visually what the sound design has been doing. Eventually she decides she sees a man on top of one of the towers. Yep, the estate has towers. She climbs the stairs to find only Miles up there, who claims he hasn’t seen anybody.

I think it's good that this person is in charge of children.

In the opening scene Miss Giddens was told that the previous governess had died. Upon her arrival at the estate Mrs. Grose warned her not to talk to the children about it because of the trauma. As the movie goes on Mrs. Grose starts letting little things slip about that governess, Miss Jessel, and her relationship with a previous member of the help named Quint. He’s played by Peter Wyngarde, by the way, who was pretty good in ‘Night of the Eagle.’ A lot of the analysis of this movie interprets these experiences of Miss Giddens as outward manifestations of her sexual repression. And I do get that, she starts forcing more and more information out of Mrs. Grose about what’s eventually revealed to be a sadomasochistic affair between Miss Jessup and Quint and gets pretty fixated on it, it does all track. Near the end Mrs. Grose admits that Quint died by falling down drunk on the front steps one night and hitting his head, and that Miles was the one who found the body. Soon afterwards Miss Jessel committed suicide by drowning in the estate’s lake. Those sorts of things will fuck some little children up. It also gets weird because it’s implied that the two were doing sex stuff around the kids. That kind of chaotic energy in a house will screw up anyone, much less children that are being set up to go completely feral.

Soon enough Miss Giddens is seeing a male face leering at her from windows and a female figure standing in the middle of the lake. She’s convinced that not only are the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessup haunting the estate but that they’re trying to possess the children so they can continue their affair. That’s not me reading into anything, that’s what she literally says. It takes most of the movie for Miss Giddens to get to that point, Kerr slowly going visibly crazier and crazier and Mrs. Grose visibly starting to deeply regret ever talking to this woman. Nobody else sees these ghosts or hears any of the noises. The children are weird but except for Flora randomly guessing her brother would be home soon the movie never even hints at anything supernatural with them.

Miss Giddens eventually pushes it too far. She’s lakeside with Flora when she sees the ghost of Miss Jessup. She demands that Flora admit she can see the ghost, even grabbing and shaking her, which freaks Flora the fuck out. She screams that she never wants to see Miss Giddens again, then just starts wordlessly screaming again and again. Cut to that night where apparently she’s been cursing and screaming obscenities. Yeah, maybe don’t get violent with a small kid about her previous mommy figure that died on her. Miss Giddens is more convinced than ever that it’s all the ghosts’ fault and decides to send Flora and the entire staff away so she can have it out with Miles once and for all.

And here’s where we run into the one big exception to my personal interpretation of the movie. Most of the rest of the movie works great with how I read it, but not this part. Miles has wandered off somewhere, so Miss Giddens spends the day alone in the house, waiting. He eventually wanders back and is all precocious kid weird at her for a while. He wonders where everyone went, and why she wanted to be all alone with him. He’s been oddly sexual towards Miss Giddens throughout the movie, and one theory I skimmed across online was that Miles is extra weird compared to his sister because he’d been sexually abused by Quint. I don’t like how much sense this makes.

Eventually even Miles starts getting weirded out by how intense Miss Giddens is being. She starts asking about the reason he was expelled, and eventually forces it out of him. He admits that he was caught yelling curse words at night and being too violent with the other students. Messed up kid trying to get attention, fair enough. She demands that he admit that Quint is the one who taught him those words. At first Miles is freaked out that his governess is insisting on talking about a dead staff member when he was the one who found the body, then he starts yelling about what a dried up old whore she is and sort of scream laughing at her. Meanwhile Miss Giddens is seeing Quint’s face through the window behind Miles, laughing as well. It’s all very effective.

Miles runs out of the house and into the garden, chased by Miss Giddens. He runs inside this ring of tall statues. As Miss Giddens approaches she sees that one of them has been replaced by Quint, leering at the two of them. She grabs Miles and starts demanding that he admit that Quint told him those things, admit it and you’ll be free, I’m trying to help you, admit it, over and over. He starts running around, almost sobbing, asking who she’s talking about and and where’s this man she says is there. Finally he yells Quint’s name. His face goes still and he pauses for a couple of moments, then he falls limply to the ground. Miss Giddens crawls over to him and hugs him, convinced he’s free. Then she notices he’s not breathing. She frantically tries to wake him, then screams. She starts sobbing, gets a very complicated look on her face, then kisses him on the lips as it fades into the end credits.

And this is where the movie loses me, because I can’t come up with an explanation for Mile’s death that only involves Miss Giddens’ mental state. The movie didn’t plant any information earlier that Miles was sickly, or that his dad had a congenital heart defect or anything like that. At a stretch I could maybe argue that Miles has just fainted and Miss Giddens is misinterpreting it as death, but no, the framing of the actual scene means death to me. At the time of the novella’s original publication maybe a reader would have bought an otherwise healthy child dying from simple hysteria, but I don’t think that would have flown in 1961, much less now. To my eyes everything as portrayed on screen up to this point communicated to me that Miss Giddens was experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations along with circular thinking patterns. I can see the nuts and bolts of the argument that everything happening really is due to the influence of the spirits, that interpretation is certainly available from the information presented, but that is not the way I was experiencing this movie. Until Miles drops dead from too much ghost.

I sometimes get vertigo from the steep quality difference between movies. To go from ’13 Ghosts’ to this gives me something akin to the bends. I keep getting surprised by well-dressed sets because I’m so used to the bare minimum. Tracking shots, hell any kind of movement is jolting. I wouldn’t say this movie is scary, but it’s incredibly tense and effective. I was genuinely scared for these kids, Deborah Kerr plays a very convincing obsessed person. I was pleasantly surprised by the previous movie having dialogue with some amount of zest in it. Here we’ve got Truman Capote assembling brittle conversations between creepy kids. I can’t even be mad at the ending, I was the one who latched on to the non-spirits interpretation so early and so fiercely. If anything I’m impressed. I’ve never had a movie take my interpretation of what it was doing and what it was about so firmly in its grip and snap it directly over its knee before.