The Innocents

In Brief: Though highly regarded in some quarters, I have always found Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) a well-produced bore with literary pretensions of the stupefyingly trapped-in-amber kind. But I thought it was time to give it another try when this screening popped up. I wish I could say another viewing of this film version of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw convinced me of its greatness, but, if anything, it had the opposite effect. What had seemed to me an altogether handsome, but too-reverential, ghost yarn now seems to me like a high-end TV drama with occasional flashes of visual panache — and some striking imagery from cinematographer Freddie Francis when the dialogue subsides. Most of the interior dialogue scenes — pretty much any time Deborah Kerr isn't wandering around the Old Dark House — are blocked like a high school play, and the acting isn't much better. Kerr spends most of the film looking apprehensive or terrified. The children do manage to suggest a degree of incipient depravity that — at least in Martin Stephens' case — is disturbingly unwholesome, but the film mostly comes across as overwrought.