Review - The Innocents (1961)

In anticipation of the release of my novel Innocent on September 7th, I will be featuring reviews of various film and TV adaptations of The Turn of the Screw, beginning with Jack Clayton's adaptation of The Innocents from 1961.

For years, I'd heard wonderful things about this film but was skeptical of the praise because I’d found the source material to be slow-moving, confusing, and frustrating. Happily, The Innocents offers an antidote to my qualms about James's novella.

While The Turn of the Screw was extremely vague about the nature of the relationship between Quint and Miss Jessel (no doubt because of the dominant Victorian mores) and left many details open to the reader's imagination and understanding of veiled references, this movie spells out their debauchery clearly. It also rounds out their characters. In the book, Miss Jessel is merely described as a wicked woman. Here, she starts out respectably enough but is soon corrupted by the magnetic Quint and sucked deeper and deeper into a masochistic relationship with him. I don't recall the book describing either how of the two characters died; the movie does.

One of the reasons the story remains so well-regarded is the ambiguity over whether the ghosts exist in reality or only in the governess's wild imagination. The movie maintains this suspense effectively. In the beginning, the ghosts appear to be legitimate, but toward the end of the film (especially at the climax) the audience must question the validity of what we have been led to believe.

The story is still not one of my favorites, but The Innocents vastly improves it. It is a beautifully atmospheric chiller, thanks largely to the many shadowy, often dialogue-free scenes, and the repetition of a haunting, ominous music box motif. Moreover, the portrayals of the children are stellar. They are perfect devils! Young Martin Stephens, who plays little Miles (and played David in Village of the Damned), is a particular delight to watch with his mixture of boyish charm and world-wise mischief.

My one gripe is that Deborah Kerr is painfully obviously too old for her part. She's no hag, but she's clearly in her 30s when the governess is supposed to be a young, sheltered woman just leaving home for the first time. I suppose after The King and I, Kerr was seen as the quintessential governess, but I think the filmmakers would have done better to find another actress to play the ingenue (maybe Clare Bloom?)