Henry James

Benjamin Britten's haunting adaptation of Henry James' classic ghost story about a governess put in charge of two mysteriously possessed orphaned children. The tension spirals throughout this masterpiece of psychological terror. As the screw is tightened, the nerves of the governess are strained to breaking point.

“The set design by Elijah Moshinsky invokes the images of this nocturnal other-worldliness with sheer style…Indeed this production is a masterpiece of design and lighting.” The West Australian

“As the Governess, Eilene Hannan performed grippingly…The final scene, going from high drama to poignant grief, was arrestingly good.” The Australian

Featuring: Eilene Hannan, Margaret Haggart, Anson Austin, Wendy Dixon, The West Australian Symphony Orchestra.

Written in 1954, Benjamin Britten's opera based on Henry James' tale, written in 1898, is a story with a sinister undertone. In this film of the opera we return to the late 19th Century setting of the original story, Fulbeck Hall in Lincolnshire. The ghostly atmosphere of the music is perfectly re-created by clever lighting techniques and faded colours of the costumes.

Visual inspiration is from the photographic work of Julia Margaret Cameron, Munch, Strindberg and the early Spiritualists. The result is a world where the boundaries between the living and the dead are chillingly blurred.

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Terrific adaptation of Turn of the Screw about a governess who suspects her little charges are demonically possessed. Kerr's vivid performance, stunning visuals, suspenseful, claustrophobic atmosphere offer to plenty to fans of adult ghost stories.

Based on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, THE INNOCENTS is a fine chiller that builds suspense slowly, subtly, and inexorably. Kerr is on top form here, enacting a role that takes perfect advantage of her respectable facade wrestling with unspeakable turbulence beneath the surface. In Victorian England, Kerr arrives at the country estate of Redgrave, who has hired her to serve as the governess of his young niece and nephew, Franklin and Stephens. The housekeeper, Jenkins, introduces her to Franklin, an angelic little child with a beguiling smile who appears to have a mysterious foreknowledge of her brother's imminent arrival, though he is not expected. Soon a letter arrives from Stephens' school, informing the household that the boy has been expelled because he is a corrupting influence on his schoolmates. However, when Stephens arrives, he proves to be every bit as innocent and entrancing as his sister, and Kerr decides that the school officials must have been mistaken. Though the estate is a beautiful refuge, there is also an air of eeriness about the place. Kerr thinks she sees a man atop the house, is temporarily blinded by the sun, and then discovers Stephens feeding pigeons where she thought the man was. Feeling that her eyes must have played tricks on her, she calms down; later, however, she sees the specter of a woman at a window, and then sees the man again, getting a glimpse of his twisted face. When she describes these apparitions to Jenkins, she is told that the descriptions match those of the estate's late manager and his dead lover, the woman who preceded Kerr as governess. Kerr learns further that the deceased lovers had a sadomasochistic relationship, and that they had a considerable influence on the children. Are the children possessed by evil, earthbound spirits or is Kerr going mad? Filmed at Sheffield Park in Sussex, this literate and elegant gothic horror, co-scripted by Truman Capote and John Mortimer, is fairly faithful to the James original.

Plot: Miss Giddens accepts a position as a governess tending brother and sister Miles and Flora on the lush Blye country estate. But in the grounds she begins to see apparitions and comes to believe that these are the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel, the previous groundsman and governess. Quint was a cruel man who used to beat Miss Jessel, something that she eventually came to enjoy. Miss Giddens believes that Quint and Miss Jessel are possessing Miles and Flora so they can touch each other again - this being the only explanation she can find for the cruel games the two children play. The children either cannot or deny seeing the ghosts and she forces herself to make them see, believing that that is the only way they can ever be freed.

Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) has been called the first Freudian ghost story and remains a literary classic. It is a story that hovers in a delicate state of ambiguity about whether the ghosts are real or ones in which the governess is projecting her own repressed imaginings onto the children's actions. Much academic debate has centered around whether the story can be read as a ghost story or as a mundane tale of psychological repression.

The first screen adaptation of The Turn of the Screw was placed in eminent hands. The screenplay comes from no less than Truman Capote and Rumpole of the Bailey creator John Mortimer, while the direction of the film was given to Jack Clayton, then mostly known for the highly acclaimed Room at the Top (1959), as well as the producer of some of the better British dramatic films during the 1950s.

There has been much debate about whether James's subtleties are dealt justice in The Innocents, although this is very much an academic one. And certainly it is one that need not impinge on the enjoyment of the film as one of the most cerebral and subtle of ghost stories. Certainly James's dialogue is translated to the screen verbatim at times and with an uncommonly poetic sensitivity - few films lie in such subtly shaded plays of dialogue. And the ambiguities ring true and are dealt with a delicate finesse. We see manifestations and they are haunting and eerie - like the other voice that joins Diane Franklin's singing; the scene where Deborah Kerr tries to make Franklin look at the shadowy figure across the lake; or the appearance of Quint's ghost reflected in the window as Kerr plays hide'n'seek. Maybe some of these apparitions are a little more actual and less ambiguous than they would have been on the written page but as always the manifestations are as much as one wants to make of them - a window slams open, snuffing a candle out. "I'm so afraid," Deborah Kerr fearfully admits. "It's only the wind, my dear," calmly assures the aloofly smiling Martin Stephens.

This is one of the few films where the ghost story takes place mostly in daylight. The lush photography of the estate almost aches to be rendered in colour, but cinematographer Freddie Francis, who would later embark on his own career as a horror director, won an Academy Award for it anyway. Clayton and Francis have a technique of lingering on the images in a way that becomes obscene - how Martin Stephens's goodnight kiss to Kerr stays longer than something that would be innocent, or how the images of a spider crawling across the face of a statue, of bugs eating butterflies, or a dead pigeon can suggest all manner of corruptions and obscenities hidden inside the disquietening stillness of the estate. The children's faces come subtly underlit in closeup so as to seem quite sinister. As the retitling of the story suggests, this is very much a film about (non)-innocents.

The part of Miss Giddens has never been more perfectly cast than with the pale, willowy Deborah Kerr who gives a performance of intense, neurotic seriousness. She gets inside the prim, morally repressed nature of Miss Giddens in a way that none of the actresses in the subsequent remakes manage to do. Both the children give bold, yet unsettlingly mannered performances.

The Turn of the Screw has become a classic ghost story. There have been a number of sequels and remakes:- an earlier live tv play The Turn of the Screw (1959) directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Ingrid Bergman; Dan Curtis's well-regarded tv movie The Turn of the Screw (1974) with Lynn Redgrave; a 1974 adaptation for French tv; The Turn of the Screw (1982), which is actually a German-made operatic adaptation; a 1989 adaptation for Shelley Duval's Nightmare Classics starring Amy Irving; Rusty Lemorande's The Turn of the Screw (1992) with Patsy Kensit, which updated the story to the 1960s; the tv movie The Haunting of Helen Walker/The Turn of the Screw (1995) starring Valerie Bertinelli; Presence of Mind (1999), an acclaimed Spanish-made adaptation with Sophie Ward and Harvey Keitel; and a British tv adaptation The Turn of the Screw (1999) with Jodhi May and Colin Firth. Michael Winner's The Nightcomers (1972) purports to be a prequel that concerns itself with the relationship between Quint and Miss Jessel, something that in Winner's clumsy mishandling totally belies the delicate ambiguity of the original story. Of all these, The Innocents remains without any question the best adaptation of the tale.

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