Released on 15th December 1961, the film unsettles through half-revelations, the idea of possession, and the damage inflicted by the helpers. Cinematographer Freddie Francis fills every corner of a CinemaScope presentation with half-shapes, allowing two faces to occupy the screen at the same time and shifting focus as new implications are uncovered. Manual dissolves from editor Jim Clark evoke the uncanny, claustrophobic, and forbidden – melting living and dead, imagined and mundane into one untrustworthy gaze. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While The Turn of the Screw <\/em>cloaks a Christmas Eve ghost story in ambiguity (are the ghosts real or imaginary?), The Innocents <\/em>offers explanations and motives before undercutting them in the next scene. The film comes down strongly on the reality of the ghosts – or at least, on their very real power to ruin lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tale unfolds through the eyes of Deborah Kerr\u2019s Miss Giddens, immersed in her horror as she is drawn through past depravities to her own. Kerr balances a radiant belief in goodness and the terrible confusion that results from suppressed human darkness – certainly within herself. She sees herself as separate: \u201cI like a boy with spirit but not in the degree to contaminate\u2026 to corrupt!\u201d The last word becomes a blasphemy, spat out like a rotten grape. She repeatedly insists she will help the children, save the children, but it becomes hard to tell whether she believes these hand-wringing monologues or whether they merely distract from reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The figures of Peter Quint on the tower and in the window, and Miss Jessel among the weeds, are almost corporeal. As Miss Giddens implores the children to see these silent, watching figures their nonchalant responses are too measured. \u201cThey haven\u2019t been good – they\u2019ve been easy to live with, because they haven\u2019t been living with us,\u201d Miss Giddens exclaims in desperation. The children have arguably not been easy to live with. One minute they embrace, the next Flora scrapes a chalkboard with a maniacal smile and Miles calmly, almost flirtatiously refers to Miss Giddens as \u201cmy dear\u201d, calling her \u201cfar too pretty to be a governess.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here, The Innocents<\/em> catapults itself beyond the supernatural to the haunting plausibility of abuse. Perhaps, as Miss Giddens guesses, the children are possessed by Quint and Jessell, conduits for their sordid romance (\u201cRooms… used by daylight… as though they were dark woods,\u201d shudders Mrs Grose). But child psychologists often note mirrored behavior in grooming victims: statements, gestures, and touches of an uncanny maturity. Did Miles learn from watching, or were the children – particularly Miles – victims of Quint\u2019s abuses? Miss Giddens becomes obsessed with \u201cthe innocents\u201d – Miles and Flora, Mrs Grose, and to a lesser extent the abused Miss Jessell – and marches her charges towards tragedy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n She wanders Bly at night, voices (\u201cThe children are looking!\u201d) echoing in reflective windows and ominous carvings. When she bursts into Flora\u2019s room, the girl is unhurt, merely watching Miles in the hedge garden below. There are no ghosts, just restless, ill-behaved, unknowingly traumatised children. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The following sequence earned the film an X rating upon its UK release. As Miss Giddens tucks Miles into bed, she finds a pigeon with a broken neck under his pillow; a tragedy, says Miles serenely, that he will bury tomorrow. Miles then sits up one last time, kissing Miss Giddens directly on the lips, her own being frozen. When he breaks away, the camera lingers on her unmoving mouth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is apt that James\u2019 work lends itself to psychoanalysis: his brother, William James, is called \u201cthe father of American psychology\u201d. William\u2019s work may be more grounded in biology and behavior than his European counterparts, but the brothers worked in an era dominated by the Freudian unconscious. In 1934, literary critic Edmund Wilson posited that The Turn of the Screw<\/em>\u2019s ghosts were hallucinations of the sexually repressed governess, who was the true haunter of the children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Film scholar David J. Hogan claimed that sexual repression as ghosts were key to both The Innocents<\/em> and Robert Wise\u2019s 1963 The Haunting<\/em>, based on Shirley Jackson\u2019s The Haunting of Hill House<\/em>. The Haunting <\/em>is less disturbing, relying on cheap scares that muddle a reading of unspoken lesbian desire. The Innocents<\/em>, conversely, overtly emphasises quasi-pedophilic connctions between Miles, Quint, and\/or Miss Giddens. Interestingly, both James\u2019 and Jackson\u2019s novellas inspired Mike Flanagan\u2019s two Haunting <\/em>series, turning ghosts and deaths into life-affirming, family-centric tales of unifying shared memory. Flanagan misses the terrifying reality that family is often the first to abandon, that some childhood traumas will never be survived, that secrets cannot be solved with a hug but must be screamed from the highest window, across a lake, in a shadow-filled hedge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end, Miss Giddens demands to know if Miles speaks with Quint; Miles replies with laughing obscenities. She manages to corner him in the garden and sees Quint balancing on a statue. One last time, she begs Miles to see – and for the first time Miles loses composure. He looks about, a real fear staring from his eyes and catching in his voice, almost whispering \u201cPeter Quint, you devil!\u201d. Then he dies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Miss Giddens does not realize, thinking he has collapsed from the moral victory. Cries of celebration turn to grief when his head rolls back in her arms, and she kisses him – once again on the lips – a blasphemy masked as salvation. The film ends with a black screen save for Miss Giddens\u2019 hands folded in prayer. The only sound is bird noises, but Miss Giddens\u2019 opening lines take on a new connotation:<\/p>\n\n\n\n All I want to do is save the children, not destroy them. More than anything, I love children. More than anything. They need affection. Love. Someone who will belong to them, and to whom they will belong.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps this immolating obsession with innocence stems less from predation than from repression, confusion, and loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Innocents <\/em>refuses to romanticize English gentry and gentility, and instead finds the rot in minds and hearts. Bly Manor decays as Miles\u2019 childhood is stripped away. It is an adaptation that expands upon the original, finding new language yet remaining as terrifying, dark, and twisted in the 21st century. Its primal transgressions and corruptions transcend any one reading, as its shadowy wide screen reveals haunted houses less damaging than hollow convictions. The children are lost.\u00a0 “The Innocents” is streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/innocents-1024x428.jpg\")
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