The Innocents 9781838713584, 9781844573431

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Introduction: The Perils of Pauline Pauline Kael called The Innocents ‘the best ghost movie I’ve ever seen’, and what is more, one ‘that honours its sources’: the beauty raises our terror to a higher plane than the simple fears of most ghost stories. It is the great virtue of the men who made this movie that they perceive the qualities of the [Henry] Jamesian method: we are not simply being tricked, we are carried to a level where trickery – that is to say, master craftsmanship – is art.1

To describe the film as ‘the best ghost movie ever’ in some ways was not saying very much. In 1961 when The Innocents was made, the list of Hollywood back numbers included haunted house comedies with Bob Hope and Abbott and Costello; screwball ghosts such as those in Topper (1937), Blithe Spirit (1945) and The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947); a recent shock-fest from William Castle called The House on Haunted Hill (1959) and assorted cinematic equivalents of a ride on the ghost train at the funfair. But the list also included more grown-up films such as The Uninvited (1944), Dead of Night (1945), Portrait of Jennie (1948), Rebecca (1940) and Vertigo (1958) (sort of), Night of the Demon (1957) – while Psycho (1960) had reinvented the traditional haunted house as the gingerbread Gothic Bates mansion. Kael went on to regret the confused reaction of the first American reviewers to The Innocents. Some, she noted, thought the ghosts should never have been seen at all – especially in daylight: ghosts were much less effective when seen than when described, so the ideal medium for ghost stories was, apparently, radio rather than film. Others, on the contrary, thought the film was not frightening enough for audiences accustomed to shock-horrors: it was too well mannered and ambiguous. The New York Times had concluded, for example:

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Folks who have never seen a movie set in a scary old house … should find themselves beautifully frightened and even intellectually aroused by Jack Clayton’s new picture … But we fear that old hands long familiar with the traffic and tricks of horror films will feel a bit bored … so mild and ingenuous it is alongside others of the genre.

Other reviewers had written that Henry James’s theme of the reality of evil, and the corruption of innocence, had been submerged in an interpretation of the material that was too ‘psychiatric’ and an adaptation that combined technical know-how with sumptuous period art direction. Time reckoned that profundity had been sacrificed to saleability. These reactions mirrored a debate about the aesthetics of horror that went back at least as far as the origins of the Gothic novel in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Should the horror appear subtly, in the corner of the retina as it were, as shadows and impressions, leaving readers/viewers to project their own anxieties onto them? Or should it appear more explicitly, in the face, as mangling and shock effects, leaving less to the readers’/viewers’ imaginations? The works of Mrs Radcliffe were thought to exemplify the subtle approach, M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) the gore. Henry Fuseli, painter of The Nightmare (1782) – the most famous visualisation of the Gothic – gave a celebrated lecture on the subject at the Royal Academy. And the debate continues today. David Thomson, in his biographical entry on Jack Clayton, argues that The Innocents sacrifices shock tactics for a ‘neatly wrapped up and faintly realised’ exercise in literary emotion: the film is an ‘Arts Council-like piece of Jamesiana’.2 Others agree that a truly satisfying ghost story needs much more than the careful creation of eerie atmosphere through design, camerawork, lighting, acting and a heritage location; and they go further, adding that the only approach is the one in which Hammer had come to specialise since 1957. Pauline Kael concluded that The Innocents was much more than just a ghost story – and that in treating the film as a ‘scary old

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house’ movie, reviewers had missed much of the point. It was a remarkable piece of work on many ‘interpretative levels’: full of the pleasures of ‘elegance and literacy’; a classic example of adaptation which interpreted a literary source rather than slavishly trying to transpose it; dialogue that, like the visual image, contained ‘beauty and ambiguity’ – which she attributed to Truman Capote, the coscreenwriter and ‘one of the finest prose stylists … this country has ever produced’; performances with just the right note of suppressed hysteria – and in the case of Deborah Kerr, a ‘performance [that] should really be called great’, controlled yet flamboyant in the grand manner; an anatomy of a ‘tortured Puritan mind’ and a study in female sexuality; ambiguities which were fascinating rather than maddening; a film full of examples of ‘deliberate mystification’, a piece of ingenuity which allowed us to scare ourselves; and ‘the best ghost I’ve ever seen’ in the form of the forlorn Miss Jessel half-seen standing in the reeds, in the distance, ‘like the memory of an old photograph’. It was a pity, wrote Kael, that so many reviewers ‘have kept people away from the movie’ with their misgivings. The Innocents had taken familiar material and done a very difficult thing with it – made it fresh. The fact that The Innocents had irritated reviewers who were coming at it from so many different perspectives was a mark of its special quality. It wasn’t an art film, she wrote, but represented commercial creativity at its best. The Innocents was not a commercial success. Studio executives at Fox had been worried about the dark, unhappy ending (or was it?) from the moment they saw the script, and they did not know how to market the film to audiences who might be expecting a ride on the ghost train. Let’s face it, a film about an impressionable governess, a homely housekeeper, two irritating children and some half-glimpsed ghosts – set in deep Victorian England – was never going to bust the block. One executive suggested to Jack Clayton that to improve the film’s chances he could perhaps turn the children into juvenile delinquents, or add a scene at the end when the Uncle returns to the house and says sorry. Another wanted Clayton to cut the final image

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of Deborah Kerr kissing the child on the lips. Thankfully, all such suggestions were ignored. Since 1961, the reputation of The Innocents – among filmmakers, writers and the DVD generation – has gradually grown, a prime example of a cult being discovered rather than manufactured. Not through remakes – Governesses played by Lynn Redgrave (1974), Amy Irving (1989), Patsy Kensit (1994) and Jodhi May (1999) have long since faded from memory – but first, through the judgments of film-makers. In a note handed to Jack Clayton in a restaurant in the early 1980s, François Truffaut wrote that The Innocents was ‘the best English film after Hitchcock goes to America’.3 Hitchcock’s penultimate film before leaving was, of course, The Lady Vanishes (1938). William Wyler is reputed to have said, ‘Jack, if you can make the pigeons act like that, just imagine what you can do with actors.’ Martin Scorsese has called The Innocents one of the eleven scariest movies of all time, while it regularly appears on peer group lists of the twenty greatest British films of all time. And also through films such as The Woman in Black (Nigel Kneale’s 1989 TV adaptation), The Others (2001), The Orphanage (2007) – even franchises of The Omen, Nightmare on Elm Street, and assorted Amityvilles, Poltergeists and Blair Witches. An audiotrack sample from The Innocents found its way onto the deadly tape of the American version of The Ring (2002). With horror films now mainstream, rather than the guilty pleasures they once were, serious contributions which do not rely on cheap scares are a little less scarce than they were in 1961. And then there are writers such as Susan Hill with The Woman in Black (1983, play 1987), Joyce Carol Oates with The Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly (1994, from the point of view of the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel), and A. N. Wilson with A Jealous Ghost, about an impressionable young American research student studying Henry James. Even the haunting Kate Bush song ‘The Infant Kiss’ (1980), with its refrain of ‘Let go!’ Moral panics about bestial behaviour committed by small children and about paedophilia have if

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anything made the film seem even more frightening – by implication – than it did fifty years ago. It has recently been argued that, at the time it was written, The Turn of the Screw would have been recognised by late-Victorian readers as a story about two ghosts who were also child molesters: hence the reviews which complained about ‘defilement’. This is disputed – rather like the debate about Lewis Carroll’s photography – but any viewing of The Innocents today is certainly refracted through heightened awareness of sexual abuse. I first saw The Innocents in the week of 14–20 January 1962 when it was released to ‘South London’. Luckily, it was in a double bill with a compilation of Hollywood silents called When Comedy Was King – because at the age of fourteen, the main feature scared the pants off me. To clear my head and calm down, I stayed to see When Comedy round again; but still, those images would not leave me: of Miss Jessel standing impassively in the reeds; of Quint through the condensation of the conservatory window; of the creepy gentility of the two children Miles and Flora (especially Miles’s demonic hymn ‘What shall I sing/To my Lord from my window’); of a beetle crawling out of a stone cupid’s mouth; of Deborah Kerr struggling to mask her terror under a civilised veneer – and of a tortoise being hurled through a plate of glass. They still haven’t. At the time, I saw it as a superior ghost story. Over the years, I have come to understand it as a great deal more than that. Then in a glass darkly, now face to face – as this little book is intended to show. In 2006, I filmed and recorded the DVD extras for the BFI release of The Innocents in December of that year – partly in Sheffield Park Gardens, which Pauline Kael had called ‘so magnificent they’re rather unreal – unreal in a way that’s right for The Turn of the Screw’. I interviewed cinematographer Freddie Francis and dialogue writer John Mortimer; I had already filmed a long conversation with Deborah Kerr for BBC television in 1986. Sadly, all three are no longer with us, so I can’t thank them here. Warm thanks, though, to Haya Clayton, who generously gave us access to her late husband’s archive, which she has since donated to

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the BFI National Archive’s Special Collections; to Caroline Millar, then of the BFI (who directed the extras); to the staff of the BFI library, especially Jonny Davies of the BFI’s Special Collections; to members of the Ghost Club at whose Christmas lunch I discussed the Hinton Ampner apparitions; and to Brian Hannan, who delved into his statistical files for me. Above all, to Jack Clayton, whose masterpiece was not only worthy of its famous literary source, at times – sacrilegious as it may seem to say it – even managed to improve on the Henry James original. All films become ghost stories, after the actors have died. But The Innocents remains the finest ghost movie based on the finest ghost story ever written. The best English film since Hitchcock left for America? Well, one of them anyway.

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1 A Canterbury Tale On the late afternoon of Thursday, 10 January 1895, sitting by the fire in the drawing room of the ‘grand old’ country residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson at Addington Place, near Croydon, South London, the novelist Henry James was told a ghost story.4 He was feeling depressed about the fate of his play Guy Domville, which had had a humiliating first night at the St James Theatre. The two men, author and archbishop, had been lamenting the fact that ‘the good, the really effective and heartshaking ghost stories appeared all to have been told’. True, there was the ‘new type’ of story, the ‘“psychical” case’ as Henry James put it, ‘washed clean of all queerness as by exposure to a flowing laboratory tap’, but this showed little promise as literature. The more the story was given respectability by psychical researchers, ‘the less it seemed of a nature to raise the dear old sacred terror’. At this point in the conversation, the Archishop recalled – ‘in the spirit of recreation’ – a story which had made a deep impression on him as a young man, many years before, when he’d heard it from a lady to whom ‘it had been reported’. The story was garbled and disjointed, the shadow of a shadow – ‘my friend’s old converser had lost the thread’ – the Archbishop had forgotten some of the details, and it was told at third hand, but to Henry James that made it all the more appealing. As listener, he could fill in the many gaps with his ‘unbridled imagination’, and reflect on whose voice to trust. Two days later, he wrote in his private notebook: Note here the ghost story told me at Addington … the mere vague, undetailed, faint sketch of it – being all he had been told (very badly and imperfectly) by a lady who had no art of relation, and no clearness: the story of the young children (indefinite number and age) left to the care of servants

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in an old country-house, through the death, presumably, of parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children; the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions, figures, return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon, whom they invite and solicit, from across dangerous places, the deep ditch of a sunk fence, etc. – so that the children may destroy themselves, lose themselves, by responding, by getting into their power. So long as the children are kept from them, they are not lost; but they try and try and try, these evil presences, to get hold of them. It is a question of the children ‘coming over to where they are’. It is all obscure and imperfect, the picture, the story, but there is a suggestion of strangely gruesome effect in it. The story is to be told – tolerably obviously – by an outside spectator, observer.

Ever since Henry James’s Notebooks were first published in 1947, commentators have been searching for the origin of this mysterious story, or half a story. Some have suggested that it was just as likely that James was inspired to write his own ghost story by articles in Archbishop Benson giving Henry James the original idea for ‘The Turn of the Screw’, from a drawing by Max Beerbohm (© National Trust/Charles Thomas)

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Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research – with which his brother William was closely associated at the time. Others that the Canterbury tale must be lost in the mists of time. Others still that the tale was a cover for the author’s own inventiveness – and that he was slightly ashamed of creating his own ghost story from scratch, especially one about the corruption of children. The novelist E. F. Benson, the Archbishop’s son, could not remember his father ever telling it – which may have been because he was thought to be too young and impressionable. But in 2010, in his study A Natural History of Ghosts, Roger Clarke made the plausible suggestion that it originated with the haunting of a remote Tudor manor-house at Hinton Ampner in Hampshire, in the early 1770s.5 This haunting took the form – among other manifestations – of knocking at the doors, the recurring sound of a woman’s silk dress in the corridor and lobby outside the nursery, heavy footsteps, the sighting of a man in a ‘drab coloured suit’ prowling outside and at the window – a man who resembled the late Lord’s dishonest steward (or butler) – a loud murmuring, and someone, presumed to be a woman, trying to push open the nursery door. The tenant of the house, Mrs Mary Ricketts – whose husband was often away on business in Jamaica, leaving her in charge of a complicated household – put up with all this for six years of interrupted sleep, then moved the family out. The manor-house was demolished in 1793. Everyone there claimed to have heard the sounds, and some to have glimpsed the two apparitions – though not everyone had seen or heard the same things – except Mary Ricketts’s three children, all under ten, two boys and a girl. They said they had seen and heard nothing, and had no idea what their mother was experiencing. She saw it as her prime duty to protect them – from whatever or whoever was haunting the entrance of the nursery. Eventually, Mrs Ricketts carefully wrote down as many of the details as she could remember, for the private benefit of her children and grandchildren. She also confided in various friends, senior figures in the Anglican Church with whom she was close at the time. An edited version of the Hinton Ampner documents found its way into the

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Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research of April 1893: the commentary concluded that the apparition at the window did indeed seem to be that of a dead, dishonest servant. So by January 1895, the story had become a ‘psychical case’ as well as being a strangely gruesome yarn, and there were various routes by which it could have reached Archbishop Benson in garbled form. Henry James revisited the Canterbury tale some two and a half years after he first heard it. As he later recalled, he had been ‘asked for something seasonable by the promoters of a periodical dealing in the time-honoured Christmas-tide toy [and] bethought myself at once of the vividest little note for sinister romance that I had ever jotted down’.6 The periodical in question, Collier’s, had a new editor, and was keen to reverse falling sales by commissioning well-known writers. The ‘sinister romance’ was still on Henry James’s mind, ready to be ‘wrought … into fantastic fiction’. What had particularly fascinated him about it, to judge by his Notebook, was why the apparitions of the wicked and depraved servants wanted to ‘get hold of’ the children ‘from across dangerous places’. What might really have been going on? The Turn of the Screw was first published as a twelve-part serial in the American Collier’s Weekly (27 January–16 April 1898), then in slightly revised book form in The Two Magics (October 1898), along with another novella called Covering End. As Henry James was to recall: it is a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette [piece of child’s play] to catch those not easily caught (the ‘fun’ of the capture of the merely witless being ever so small), the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious.

Literary critics, who are indeed on the whole ‘not easily caught’, have been arguing about the meaning and purpose of The Turn of the Screw, and its place in Henry James’s oeuvre, ever since it first appeared. Precision was never his purpose. It, too, opens on a storytelling session on a Thursday night, round a fire in an old house

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in winter – this time on Christmas Eve.7 Someone has related to the assembled company a story about a ghost that appears to a little boy. ‘If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw,’ asks a man called Douglas (we don’t know if it is his first or surname), ‘what do you say to two children?’/‘We say of course that two children give two turns. Also that we want to hear about them.’ Douglas reads the story from a manuscript bound in faded red (he will not trust his memory), written by his sister’s governess, a woman ‘awfully clever and nice’ – the youngest of several daughters of a country parson from a ‘poor scant house’ in Hampshire – who has been dead for twenty years. The manuscript recalls events that she claimed happened to her long before, when she was twenty. Douglas was clearly attracted to her, even though she was ten years his senior. The Turn of the Screw is written from a transcript of the manuscript made by the narrator (of uncertain gender) much later. This elaborate explanation takes up the whole of the first instalment, a third-hand narrative based on memories from around forty years earlier: ‘The shadow of a shadow’ – a phrase that reappears in the story. So the standard ‘discovered manuscript’ prologue to a Christmas ghost story becomes, in Henry James’s version, an essay on the nature of authorship, on the point of view of the writer and the narrator, and indeed of the story itself. Does the story tell us as much about the narrator as about anything else? The prologue also makes clear that after the events described in the manuscript, the nameless governess became ‘the most agreeable woman I’ve ever known in her position; she’d have been worthy of any whatever’. And yet, at the time, she had convinced herself that the two children at Bly in Essex – Flora aged eight, and Miles aged ‘scarce ten’ – were being possessed by the evil spirits of the dead valet and the previous governess. Curiouser and curiouser.

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2 Ghosts and Critics The publication of The Turn of the Screw led to strong reactions. Early reviews treated it as a straightforward Christmas ghost story, with a repulsive though not gross theme, redeemed by Henry James’s polite and graceful prose style: ‘that art of suggestion’, said The New York Times, ‘which Mr James has employed before so fantastically that it has been more irritating than a flood of words could be, here plays its part with consummate effect’.8 Instead of observing the drama at arm’s length, said others, the reader became subtly enmeshed in it. This story was in a different league to those vulgar ghost stories ‘with sudden shocks, with clanking chains and veiled ladies in white, and clammy atmospheres’. It was a ‘spiritual adventure’, ‘profoundly ethical’ about ‘the problem of evil’ and ‘spiritual defilement’, illustrating ‘a profound moral law’. Henry James had succeeded against the odds in making it even seem sadly beautiful: He creates the atmosphere of the tale with those slow, deliberate phrases which seem fitted only to differentiate the odours of rare flames. Seldom does he make a direct assertion, but qualifies and negatives and double negatives, and then throws in a handful of adverbs, until the image floats away upon a verbal smoke.

Others, while admiring the literary style – and the welcome lack of precision – were put off by the theme: the possession of two angelic children by evil spirits who want to relive their sensual relationship through the children. James ‘is by no means a safe author to give for a Christmas gift’, said Ainslie’s Magazine; while The Bookman added, ‘we have never read a more sickening, a more gratuitously melancholy tale’. Also, it was felt by some that the elaborate

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portico of the story, the prologue, was ‘needlessly awkward’. The Independent saw The Turn of the Screw as ‘an outrage upon the holiest and sweetest fountain of human innocence’, a nasty insult to the ‘pure and trusting nature of children’. But the consensus was that, like it or not, this story ‘does indeed give an extra “turn of the screw” beyond anything of the sort that fiction has yet provided’. And that Henry James was likely – at last – to reach a popular American readership. Many made a point of differentiating the novella from ‘the ordinary ghost story’. Virginia Woolf, writing in December 1921, agreed: ‘Henry James’s ghosts have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts … They have their origin within us.’ She, of course, would not be seen dead reading the more vulgar, brash type of story: Perhaps it is the silence that first impresses us. Everything at Bly is so profoundly quiet. The twitter of birds at dawn, the far-away cries of children, faint footsteps in the distance stir it but leave it unbroken … it makes us strangely apprehensive of noise … That courtly, worldly, sentimental old gentleman can still make us afraid of the dark.

Oddly, M. R. James – writer of classic Edwardian ghost stories in scholarly settings, the template for the popular modern genre – was not a fan of The Turn of the Screw. He, like Henry James, preferred ‘reticence’ to ‘blatancy’, and distanced himself from the reports published by earnest psychical researchers, preferring ‘the literary ghost’; and although he usually described the physical manifestations of haunting in his stories (fabric, hair, teeth, arms), spiced with many Gothic adjectives, he, too, preferred to leave ‘a loophole for natural explanations’. And he saw ghost stories as tales about the past in the present. But he had no time at all for sex in ghost stories (‘a fatal mistake … sex is tiresome enough in the novels, in a ghost story … I have no patience with it’). This might explain why, in M. R. James’s best-known Some Remarks on Ghost Stories (The Bookman, December 1929), although he praised all the authors he admired

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(Scott, Dickens, Le Fanu, E. F. Benson), he failed to include Henry James on the list, or even to mention his name. Instead, he concluded his Remarks by writing, tersely: ‘I will only ask the reader to believe that, though I have not hitherto mentioned it, I have read The Turn of the Screw.’ And that was that. Henry James himself, in response to letters about his novella, on three occasions referred to it rather defensively as a ‘pot-boiler’ and a ‘jeu d’esprit’. But then again, in an aside made some eight years later, he wrote that the pot-boiler could represent ‘in the lives of all artists, some of the most beautiful things ever done by them’. In reply to a Dr Waldstein, author of The Subconscious Self (1897), who had interpreted The Turn as ‘suggestive and significant’ in its presentation of ‘things … fantastic’, he wrote: I can only rather blush to see real substance read into them … But, of course, where there is life, there’s truth, and the truth was at the back of my head … my bogey-tale dealt with things so hideous that I felt that to save it at all it needed some infusion of beauty or prettiness.

F. W. H. Myers, a founder member of the Society for Psychical Research, evidently sought some clarification from the author about the contact between the children and the apparitions – as if The Turn was ‘a psychical case’, maybe. James elegantly evaded the question, while flattering Myers: I scarce know what to say to you on the subject on which you wrote, especially as I’m afraid I don’t quite understand the principal question you put to me … However, that scantily matters … The Turn of the Screw is a very mechanical matter, I honestly think – an inferior, a merely pictorial, subject and a rather shameless pot-boiler. The thing that, as I recall it, I most wanted not to fail of doing, under penalty of extreme platitude, was to give the impression of the communication to the children of the most infernal imaginable evil and danger … This was my artistic knot to untie, to put any sense of logic into the thing, and if I had known any way of pushing more the

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image of their contact and condition I should assuredly have been proportionately eager to resort to it …

But if the main purpose of the story was to scare its more sophisticated readers, to entrap them, he had to admit on other occasions that it definitely worked. It worked so well that he even scared himself. Edmund Gosse recalled, in Aspects and Impressions (1922), that Henry James had once told him ‘when I had finished [correcting the proof of the story] I was so frightened that I was afraid to go upstairs to bed’.9 Siegfried Sassoon remembered that when Henry James was asked what he thought people would make of the implications of the story, he replied ‘the worst possible construction’. In the Preface to volume XII of the ‘New York Edition’ (as he called it) of his collected works (1908) – an edition for which he lightly revisited The Turn again – Henry James responded directly to his early critics.10 He had been accused of giving a ‘monstrous emphasis’, of ‘indecently expatiating’ – with the theme of the corruption of small children – when in fact he had deliberately left such specifications vague, so they could be interpreted ‘in the light of the spectator’s, the critic’s, the reader’s experience’. One of the disappointments of rival, more literal, tales of terror, he felt, was that they promised a spectacular form of wrongdoing, only to fall sadly short when actually describing ‘some particular immorality’. He may well have had Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in mind when writing this – with its cosmic build-up, followed by Hyde knocking over an eight-year-old girl, and clubbing an elderly MP to death. The point of The Turn was rather to create ‘an air of Evil’. Others had complained that he had not sufficiently ‘characterised’ the young woman engaged in her labyrinth, so that she never confronts her own mystery, but only mysteries outside herself. This, again, was part of his project: ‘the general proposition of our young woman’s keeping crystalline her record of so many intense anomalies and obscurities – by which I don’t of course mean her explanation of them, a different matter’.

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So, the novella was at one level ‘a fairytale pure and simple’, at another ‘a full-blown flower of high fancy’, and at yet another ‘an anecdote amplified and highly emphasised and returning upon itself’. Henry James had been very surprised by ‘the intellectual echoes’ the story had caused since publication ten years before, seeming ‘to draw behind it a train of association’. His ‘pot-boiler’ had become – and was continuing to become – one of the most discussed and analysed of all his works. But he took comfort in the fact that ‘beyond any rival on a like ground, [it had] a conscious provision of prompt retort to the sharpest question that may be addressed to it’. The screw was constantly turning. In trying hard to avoid vulgar clichés, and anticlimax, he had made sure of that. His tale was a moving target. Hence the strange atmosphere of clarity and brightness – contrasted with the rich evasion of the prose and the refusal to define the evil. Some have argued since that James’s nimbly evasive answers to questions about the sexual implications of his novella were partly to avoid accusations of bad taste, and partly to mask his own homosexual tendencies. They may also reflect his views on the ‘vulgarity’ of the sexual act, which he displaced into desire. From the story, it is quite clear that he (or is it the Governess?) was much more interested in Quint/Miles than Miss Jessel/Flora. By the mid-1920s, a few critics were beginning to interpret the novella not as a straightforward ghost story – the ‘superficial’ reading – but as a tale about an inexperienced and nervous young woman, out of her depth, who finds herself at the head of a large establishment, is instantly infatuated with the bachelor uncle who employed her, is carried away by the beauty of the children in her care, and suffers from insomnia. The ghosts (they are never called that in the story) are her hallucinations, dramatisations of her personal problems, and the reader is lured into sharing her obsessive point of view – even though he/she knows little about her. This was not to say that Peter Quint and Miss Jessel existed only in the mind of the Governess. The question was left open.11

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It inspired the most influential essay on The Turn of the Screw ever published – ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’ written by the American literary critic Edmund Wilson in 1934 and updated in 1948.12 This was a Freudian reading – even though the novella was published a few years before Freud’s mature publications – which concluded, boldly, that ‘the Governess who is made to tell the story is a neurotic case of sex repression and that the ghosts are not real ghosts but hallucinations … ’ The Turn was, in short, ‘a study in morbid psychology’. Henry James never gave a single reason for supposing that anybody but the Governess sees the apparitions: she believes that the children and Mrs Grose see them, but there is no proof that they do. Wilson makes much of the Governess’s interest in little Flora sticking a round piece of wood into a little hole and making a boat; and of the Governess gradually falling for Miles as if he was an adult: she is in effect making love to him in his bedroom, when he senses it and blows out the candle to get rid of her. He also notes that ‘the male apparition first takes shape on a tower and the female apparition on a lake’. Wilson interprets the story’s dreadful ending as entirely the Governess’s fault: if we study the dialogue from the other point of view, we see that [Miles] must have taken her ‘There, there’, as an answer to his own ‘where?’. Instead of persuading him that there is nothing to be frightened of, she has, on the contrary, finally convinced him either that he has actually seen or that he is just about to see some horror … she has literally frightened him to death.

For him, The Turn is quite simply: a characterization of the [self-deluded] Governess … [a] poor country parson’s daughter, with her English middle-class class consciousness, her inability to admit to herself her natural sexual impulses and the relentless English ‘authority’ which enables her to put over on inferiors [such as Mrs Grose] even purposes which are totally deluded and not at all in the other peoples’ best interests.

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As was characteristic of the time he was writing, ‘Freud’ was still seen as rather crudely synonymous with sexual symbolism. One gets the impression that in Wilson’s view the social services would have much to say about what was going on at Bly. There were, however, two moments in the story which – he admitted – seemed to contradict his interpretation. First, the Governess’s description of Peter Quint before he has been identified by Mrs Grose; and second, when the Governess feels a gust of frozen air, which blows out the candle even though the bedroom window is closed. Where the former is concerned, the idea of a male who ‘liked everyone young and pretty’ has already been planted in her mind – and besides she may really be describing the Uncle, the master, not the valet. As to the latter, perhaps the Governess ‘merely fancied that she felt it’. When one has once got hold of the clue of this meaning of The Turn of the Screw, one wonders how one could ever have missed it. There is very good reason, however, in the fact that nowhere does James unequivocally give the thing away: almost everything from beginning to end can be read equally in either of two senses.

Although Edmund Wilson does not cite it, Freud’s essay on The Uncanny (1919, first translated 1925) had included explicit reference to ‘the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts’ among the age-old beliefs which still existed in people’s feelings of the uncanny in their everyday lives. Freud attributes this survival to ‘the strength of our original emotional reaction to death and the insufficiency of our scientific knowledge about it’. He also attributed it to repression in the modern age: ‘All supposedly educated people have ceased to believe officially that the dead can become visible as spirits, and have made any such appearances dependent on improbable and remote conditions.’13 Sometimes, this could be a ‘thin disguise’ for the survival of old beliefs which were about fear of death, a form of self-disgust. And although, again, Wilson does not refer to them, the neurological

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researches of John Hughlings Jackson,14 dating from the 1860s and still very much in the public domain, had provided hard data on the kinds of turn experienced by the Governess when she ‘sees’ the apparitions – treating them as medical or behavioural disorders: small fits accompanied by visual hallucinations, dreamy states, memories of something that happened before, a ‘frightful clarity’ and resulting pallor. Jackson’s list of symptoms corresponds closely to Henry James’s description of the Governess’s sightings. Fourteen years after publishing ‘The Ambiguity’, by which time Henry James’s private notebooks had just been issued for the first time, Edmund Wilson conceded in an addendum that James may have set out at a conscious level to write a bona fide ghost story – but that the double reading still held up: ‘The original anecdote [as told by the Archbishop of Canterbury] is used, but it gets another dimension from the attitude of the woman who is supposed to be telling it.’ Wilson also noticed that James seemed morbidly fascinated in his fiction by the beauty and violation of innocence, in the form of underage children. Why this should have been the case, he left an open question. By then, with the unearthing of new material, some scholars were beginning to find autobiographical elements in The Turn of the Screw. While writing the novella, James had signed a long lease on Lamb House, Rye, in Sussex – his first house – and was living in London until the renovations were completed: he was apprehensive about the responsibility and commitment of the move to a substantial house which had a history. As a child, he had been tutored in five different countries, with few friends outside the wealthy family circle, and was looked after by his Aunt Kate rather than his globe-trotting father. His younger sister, Alice James – whose hysterical breakdown in 1868 had left her prey to delusions and fantasies and who, he noted, was unusually curious about sexual anecdotes – had died in 1892. She could well have been, it was argued, a source for the character of the Governess, and for the central ambiguity of the novella. The prologue makes clear, as we have seen, that after she had

THE INNOCENTS

recovered from the experiences at Bly, the Governess became ‘a most charming person’ – just like Alice when she recovered from her breakdown. Edmund Wilson’s essay stimulated much controversy at the 15 time. Was it too reductive? Did it neglect ‘the reality of evil’ in the story, and try to turn a masterpiece into ‘a commonplace clinical record’? Did it do violence to the novella, and to Henry James’s very subtle reflections on the point of view of the narrator? Did it wilfully ignore the author’s own comments about ‘a fairytale pure and simple’, and about something being let loose on the world beyond the person telling the story? Was it insensitive to James’s complex use of language and deliberate lack of precision? Maybe The Turn of the Screw should be read as a combination of ‘light-hearted gruesome and dark-hearted moral apologia’. Wilson had entitled his article ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’ – but there seemed precious little ambiguity about his analysis. Whether or not anyone else does, the reader certainly does see the apparitions – which is why the story is so very frightening. But it was Edmund Wilson’s central thesis in ‘The Ambiguity’ which had the most influence on the film The Innocents, even though by the late 1950s a number of critics had reacted against it. A typescript copy of the essay was prominent among Jack Clayton’s production notes, and was included with the First Draft Script.16

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3 In the Drawing Room The Innocents, the first play written by William Archibald – Trinidadborn, of European descent – opened in New York at The Playhouse, directed by Peter Glenville with costumes by Motley, on 1 February 1950.17 It ran for 141 performances with the twenty-four-year-old Beatrice Straight as the Governess – now known as ‘Miss Giddens’ – and Isobel Elsom as Mrs Grose. On tour, the part of the Governess was taken by Sylvia Sidney. Archibald was better known at the time as a dancer, choreographer and librettist – he had written the book and lyrics for Carib Song (1945). A couple of years after The Innocents, he co-adapted with George Tabori the stage play which became Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953). The London version of The Innocents opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre, in the Haymarket, on 3 July 1952, directed as a different production by Peter Glenville, with the fiftyyear-old Flora Robson as Miss Giddens, veteran film actress Barbara Everest as Mrs Grose and a blonde-haired Jeremy Spenser as Miles. Everest had played the Irish housekeeper in The Uninvited. The play takes place over four consecutive days on a single set – the large drawing room at Bly, with a French window centre stage which seems to be the only entrance and exit, and stairs leading to a landing. In the ‘story of the play’ which introduces the published version, Archibald wrote: Though both of [the seamy servants] have died, their evil example survives. They reappear as ghosts, but when you have left the theatre there is still the question of whether they are literal ghosts or figments of the mind. That you will have to determine for yourself.

Actually, it is clear from the play that they are ‘literal ghosts’. When Miss Jessel appears, just after the interval, in a scene equivalent

THE INNOCENTS

to the apparition at the lake in the novella, Flora ‘faces the figure on the landing – stretching out her hand toward it. MUSIC. As though in answer, a deep moan comes from the FIGURE on the landing – a wretched sound without pity for any.’ In the climactic final scene, the FIGURE OF QUINT appears at the French window, outlined against the darkness of the garden, his eyes on MILES’S back: ‘a high VIBRATION is heard, rising as Miles stiffens in his chair, fully aware of Quint’. Later, just before the tragic end, when Miss Giddens asks Miles to ‘give me his name’, he replies, ‘He’ll hurt me … You don’t understand he’ll hurt me.’ So the ambiguity of Archibald’s ‘story of the play’ is not matched by the play itself. In making the ghosts so palpable on stage, he had turned The Innocents into more like a dramatisation of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ghost story than The Turn of the Screw. William Archibald compresses the action, so there is no sense of time passing, of the long summer and autumn months at Bly. The action, when it happens, is melodramatic and laid on with a Programme for the 1952 London theatre production of ‘The Innocents’, with Flora Robson as Miss Giddens, Barbara Everest as Mrs Grose and Jeremy Spenser as Miles

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trowel. Henry James’s story is reshaped into a well-made play, without any equivalent of his graceful and deliberately diffuse prose style – distilling the atmosphere into a succession of horrific incidents/coups de théâtre which take place in a single setting. And the apparitions are, inevitably in a play, objectified on stage. The Governess speaks openly about her self-doubt, both in monologue and with Mrs Grose, Flora is like a chatterbox version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and Miles is more of a Byronic bully than in the original. The Governess’s background is secularised, and so the symbolism of her missing the Sunday church services, because of her doubts, is lost. Archibald is also casual about details. The play is set ‘in 1880’, then ‘about 1860’; the piano played by Flora becomes a spinet and then a piano again. There are several modern Americanisms: ‘Let them muss the furniture up a bit’, says Mrs Grose, and later, ‘I’m that happy’; Flora says, ‘I’m hid, Miles’, while Miles declares, ‘You can’t get away with this’; at the climax, ‘the high sound of insects toward night can be heard’. And the Gothic atmosphere is occasionally signalled by some over-literal dialogue from the children: Miles discussing whether Miss Giddens is afraid of the dark (‘it’s all in what you think might happen’); Flora on the joys of hide and seek (‘you hear them breathing right behind you – but you don’t dare turn around to look!’). But there are some important innovations: the nameless Governess given the name Miss Giddens; Flora singing a song at the beginning of each act, ‘O, bring me a bonnet/O, bring me a bonnet of bright rose red/With white roses on it’ (though it is not – not yet – directly associated with the previous governess Miss Jessel); Flora precociously reciting the morbid Tennyson poem Mariana (1830): ‘She said “I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead’’’; Miss Giddens walking from the gate at Bly, to enjoy the gardens, rather than arriving by coach; Miles coming home early from school, rather than arriving for the holidays – apparently predicted by Flora; Miss Giddens’s relationship with Mrs Grose starting off informally (an invitation to join her for tea and supper), then steadily becoming more hierarchical as the tension between them increases; Flora’s

THE INNOCENTS

interest in nature – a bird with an enormous worm, a beetle crawling on her neck, a dead beetle on the floor (‘beetles don’t decay’, she sings), another on her bed. Above all, there is a game of hide and seek, a scene of school work in the rain (with the children scratching their slate pencils on little blackboards) and a ‘dressing-up’ game – all of which were to find their way into the film The Innocents, in the case of the dressing-up sequence almost verbatim: Enter Flora down the stairs – dressed in a heavily brocaded curtain with a pincushion on her head, with Miles – in a turban made of a recycled sheet – holding her train. This is ‘an outlandishly costumed masque’. THUNDER. Flora sings a nonsense song ‘Once there was a merry king/Who had a face of blue’, while Miles plays the piano. Then, as Flora plays the piano, Miles sings a demonic hymn, candelabra in his hand: What shall I sing To my Lord from my window? What shall I sing? For my Lord will not stay – What shall I sing? For my Lord will not listen – Where shall I go? For my Lord is away. (A strange, low sound of

VIBRATION

begins.)

What shall I sing When my Lord comes a-calling? What shall I sing When he knocks on my door? What shall I say When his feet enter softly, Leaving the marks of his grave on my floor? (He reaches the window)

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Enter! My Lord! Come from your prison! Come from your grave! For the moon is arisen! THUNDER.

Miles throws the window open. The

MISS GIDDENS:

The

VIBRATION

rises with the wind.

Mrs Grose! He knows! He knows!

VIBRATION

stops abruptly.

Flora (turning from spinet. A puzzled frown mixed with a strange half-smile on her face. Softly): Knows what, Miss Giddens? THUNDER. SLOW CURTAIN. END OF ACT 1.

The demonic hymn seems to have been written by William Archibald – musical lyrics being his speciality. On other occasions, some of Henry James’s most suggestive lines of dialogue (for example, ‘he doesn’t mind them young and pretty’/‘But of whom did you speak first?’) were transposed unaltered into the play. And there was an attempt to dramatise the quickening tempo of the horrific climax: MISS GIDDENS

(Pleading – no longer trying to control her tears – her tenderness): Miles, I’m not a cruel person – However unfair I may seem to you – I am not cruel. Sometimes I am foolish – I make mistakes and at the moment I am very tired. But I am not cruel … Won’t you let me help you, won’t you?

MILES

(A sneering smile on his face. He stares at her for a full moment): Why don’t you stop pretending?

She is stunned, emotionally, by this response. They sit down for supper even though – as Miles points out – it isn’t the dining room. THE FIGURE OF QUINT appears at the window … A high VIBRATION is heard. Miss Giddens does not see the apparition but Miles does, and he throws his plate onto the floor to distract her attention. The VIBRATION stops. Quint disappears. Miles admits that he stole the letter, and read in it the opening words ‘Dear Sir, I think that I am ill’. A low VIBRATION begins, almost inaudibly, as they discuss why Miles was expelled from school.

THE INNOCENTS

The boy becomes more and more agitated, as the Governess presses him about who taught him the nasty things he said to his friends at school. (Stepping backwards to staircase): But I’m not a baby!

MILES

What are you going to do! What will you say to my Uncle! He’ll laugh at you! (The

VIBRATION

stops … A desperation

grows in Miles). I’ll tell him! … He’ll see what you are … I’ll tell him that you’re vile … He won’t believe what you say! Because you’re dirty! Dirty! Dirty! As Miles screams, the figure of THUMPING

QUINT

appears at the window again … a low

is heard, the sound of a heartbeat.

MISS GIDDENS

Who, Miles? His name! Give me his name!

MILES

He’s dead … He’ll hurt me. Stop it, Miss Giddens …

MISS GIDDENS

You will be free. Confess. His name.

MILES

(Breaking away – then – with tremendous directness): Quint! Peter Quint!

Silence, then the loud

THUMPING.

Miles turns to the window and as he screams

‘Leave me –! Leave me –!’, Quint’s arms rise, as though to touch Miles from across the distance … Miles falls, the sound of the heartbeat stops, and Quint slowly disappears. As Miss Giddens triumphantly cradles the boy in her arms, she says ‘He has lost you and you are free’, with gentle lullaby music in the background.

Then she realises with horror that the boy is in fact dead. There is a thin shrieking sound, a gust of wind, the silk curtains billow, dried leaves swirl into the room and Miss Giddens kneels beside the body of Miles sobbing ‘You are free. You are free’. SLOW CURTAIN. And then there was the clever new title, The Innocents, a description which applied to each of the main characters in different ways: the Governess’s sheltered upbringing, Mrs Grose’s want of imagination – and the angelic behaviour/appearance of the

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children. It was precisely this aspect of Henry James’s novella that attracted Myfanwy Piper, whose husband, the painter John Piper, had designed nearly all the first productions of Benjamin Britten’s works for the stage; she suggested to Britten the idea of adapting The Turn of the Screw – first as a possible music film and then as a staged opera. She began to write the libretto in earnest in autumn 1953 – it was her first – although she later recalled that she saw the stage play The Innocents in 1952 shortly after drafting her first ideas. For her, the play showed ‘that it is fatal to go for the bones without the wordy tissue’. With great ingenuity, the story [in the play] was shaped and tidied into a semblance of what the three unities demanded … In spite of extraordinary performances by Flora Robson and the two children, in losing the sense of time passing, the shifting of places, the gaps in the action … it lost the ambience and the drama as well.18

In compressing the action, and making it more literal, the play had lost ‘the web of passing events’: the Governess, for example, became scared too quickly. The key, for Myfanwy Piper, was the theme of innocence under threat – adult desires/childhood innocence – a theme she knew would appeal to the Britten of Billy Budd (1951). In fact, he later admitted that the subject was ‘the nearest to me of any I have yet chosen (although what that indicates of my own character I shouldn’t like to say!)’. The music would provide the colour and the lyrical beauty found in Henry James’s words. As Piper wrote: What is absorbing and fascinating about The Turn of the Screw is not the sin that lies beneath the thin mist of evil, nor yet the Governess’s unfulfilled love, which it was at one time the Freudian fashion to make responsible for the whole affair, but the vulnerability of innocence at all ages. The children’s inquiring innocence is assaulted from outside, the young woman’s is attacked from within by her own fear and imagination and from without by the evidence of her bemused senses, which she constantly mistrusts.

THE INNOCENTS

Sketches by John Piper – of Bly House, the Folly and the Conservatory – specially commissioned as visual concepts for the film version of The Innocents

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During a conversation with me, cinematographer Freddie Francis revealed that Jack Clayton had seen the opera – though whether live or on television he could not remember – and was ‘fascinated by it’. Indeed, some aspects of the opera seem to have found their way into The Innocents. Quint sings to Miles: I am all things strange and bold, The riderless horse Snorting, stamping on the hard sea sand, The hero-highwayman plundering the land.

In the film, the sequence of Miles riding his white pony at dangerous speed – apparently with the poplar trees, or is it the apparitions, applauding him – makes a similar point. Quint also sings of ‘the secret life that stirs/when the candle is out’, the sounds of the grown-up world after children have gone to bed. Myfanwy Piper’s libretto strongly implied that Miss Jessel drowned herself in the lake (her invention): Flora calls it ‘the dead sea’. The most direct influence, though, was through the music: Miles playing the piano like a boy possessed to distract the Governess’s attention, and above all, the rearrangements of existing nursery rhymes – ‘Lavender’s Blue’, ‘Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son’ – together with the ‘Malo’ theme sung by Miles in the schoolroom, as part of the children’s communication with the ghosts, and as musical insights into their characters. This became Flora’s ‘O, Willow Waly’ in the film, where it played a very different and much more subtle role than the song ‘O, bring me a bonnet’ in the play.

THE INNOCENTS

4 Turning the Screw Jack Clayton first read The Turn of the Screw at the age of ten, and thought it ‘one hell of a story’.19 It may well have chimed at some level with his own upbringing, as fellow director Karel Reisz recalled in an obituary notice: Jack himself had never been to school. [He was born in Brighton, Sussex, in 1921.] He grew up not knowing his father, never settled in one place for long, in the company of pets and nannies. In his variation of the Henry James play, the exclusion of the boy [Miles] from the secret world of grown-ups is seen as a condition of life, something to be expected.20

One of the secrets in the Clayton household was that no one would reveal who his father was: the absent guardian who shows no interest in his nephew was a familiar theme to him. After the critical and commercial success of his Room at the Top (1958) – which had been called ‘a breakthrough in British films’ and ‘the start of the kitchen sink trend’ – the industry expected him to follow up with a film ‘which bore a resemblance to The Room at the Top theme’.21 Clayton felt he was in danger of being typecast – or ‘pigeonholed’ – as a pioneer of the British New Wave: In 1961 … the British film industry was suffering from a complaint labelled by many of the film critics as ‘kitchen sink’. I may have been partly responsible for this … I was anxious to get away from this trend by making a film totally against anything that had the smell of realism.

Offered Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Sons and Lovers, Toys in the Attic, To Sir with Love and many other assignments, he turned them all down, preferring to spend time looking for a project he

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could ‘fall in love with’, ‘something worthwhile’. Variety linked his name with the Western A Distant Trumpet (28 September 1960) and The Spinster, with Deborah Kerr (7 July 1960). A year after completing Room at the Top, he suddenly remembered The Turn of the Screw and at first thought of developing the idea as an independent film, only to discover that Twentieth Century-Fox owned the film rights (Henry James died in 1916) and were not prepared to sell them to him. So, if the project was to go ahead, he would have to make it for the studio. Actually, in retrospect, there were more connections between The Turn of the Screw and ‘kitchen sink’ than first met the eye: among them, a dysfunctional family, delinquent children, absent parents, a strong critique of stern Victorian values and sexual repression, a dislike of class distinctions. But Clayton preferred to see the project as a complete departure from the New Wave and a rejection of realism. It certainly departed from the exclusively male point of view of these films. Not a complete departure, though. He had made a short ghost story before – his first as a credited director – with The Bespoke Overcoat (1955), suggested by Nikolai Gogol’s story ‘The Overcoat’ (1842) and based on Wolf Mankowitz’s one-act play. It was made for £5,263, courtesy of Romulus Films, and launched his career as a director rather than a producer for the company. The music was by Georges Auric, directed by Lambert Williamson. The Bespoke Jack Clayton as a boy, in theatrical costume

THE INNOCENTS

Overcoat, set in dark, monochrome, candle-lit interiors, was about the ghost of a clerk called Fender (Alfie Bass) who returns – ‘for haunting, you get a commission’ – to have his revenge on exploitative East End employer Ranting (Alan Tilvern) by stealing a prized sheepskin overcoat. At the end, he returns to the afterlife. Room at the Top had been only his second credited film; again through Romulus Films, of which he had been a production executive. The idea of making The Turn of the Screw into a film had been around for a while. Most recently, John Frankenheimer had directed a one-hour teleplay of the month (October 1959), with Ingrid Bergman in the lead – for which she had won an Emmy. But now there was a big studio behind it. With Twentieth Century-Fox came a $1 million budget, Deborah Kerr, CinemaScope – and playwright William Archibald, who had a contract with the studio specifying that he had to be given first crack at writing the script (in order to secure The Screw as a property, Fox had had to purchase the book and the play). Clayton was, according to Variety, on ‘a substantial percentage’. Deborah Kerr was thirty-eight years old, rather than the twenty specified by the story. A couple of years earlier, she had been voted the top female star at the US box office. Clayton was not a fan of CinemaScope (‘about which I knew nothing’) – least of all for an intimate chamber piece like this – and William Archibald was an unknown quantity as a screenwriter. And this was bound to be a particularly complicated project, not least because the Henry James original was so well known and critically respected. Clayton’s earliest surviving notes on The Turn of the Screw, dictated in autumn 1960, are all about how to adapt the literary text – as if the play did not exist: Mustn’t forget in the original story it is told by a man to a group of people and then in fact it goes into a flashback of the story. Now I hate this technique – it’s bad novel technique – but of course one mustn’t forget it has a true advantage. It does have a sort of way of setting things up … Suppose it was told – a completely mad idea … by the Governess as an old woman.22

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‘… like an enormous old-fashioned rose – but it’s … almost overbloomed …’

THE INNOCENTS

In fact, the question of how best to begin the film, flashback or not, would continue to be debated until the end of the actual shoot. Then Clayton turned, in his notes, to the story proper. The film would depend, he wrote, to an unusual degree on ‘mood, tempo and design from the start’: I think, funnily enough, that this is a film which needs a slow, gentle, quiet opening to slowly take the audience along with it, start by getting them embroiled into this evil, as a contrast … when she arrives at the house it should all look very lush – very beautiful – yet the only possible thing that could be the matter with it is that it’s like an enormous old-fashioned rose – but it’s too big – it’s almost overbloomed – this is what exists in this house and in the atmosphere.

Henry James had called his story ‘a full-blown flower of high fancy’. The symbolism of overblown white roses, as we shall see, came to loom large in the finished film, a visual equivalent of James’s rich prose and a traditional symbol – noted by Freud – of both virginity and sexual desire. Another equivalent was the multiple dissolves, also involving white roses, and the cloying sense of a humid summer heat haze. As to the ending of the story, Clayton asked, ‘do we stop the film at the same place?’: If we use the idea of the boy in one scene quite near the end, kissing her on the lips – literally kissing her as a grown-up man would kiss her, and if we had developed this idea of her literally falling in love with the kid, I think we might very easily have … the boy die in her arms … but then at the very end she carries him back to the house and up the steps of the house and then she repeats the boy’s kiss. She kisses his cold, beautiful dead little face. She kisses it fully, completely on the lips as one would with one’s lover.

He then included a series of notes ‘particularly for the sake of Bill Archibald’, whose job it was to ‘help us out of this’:

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Miles kisses Miss Giddens ‘as a grown-up man’, and she reciprocates

THE INNOCENTS

• ‘We certainly, by virtue of being so short of any characters, and of course cutaways which they would supply, we have got to have animals in it – strange things. I think the girl has a tortoise … ’ • Because there are so few characters, it will be a major challenge, and imperative to ‘vary the tempo, atmosphere and tension’. • the background is limited too, ‘in and out of the house and outside – very few of these … not much variety of where we can go’. • ‘one particularly useful set can be an enormous greenhouse – I mean really a kind of Victorian heated Conservatory, rather similar to those extraordinary constructions in Kew Gardens … like walking into a tropical climate’. • ‘there should [also] most certainly be some kind of small lake and, of course, statues. The lake’s got a tremendous importance in every way.’ • ‘the very end – the dying of the boy. I don’t want to leave it in the room – as in the play – because it will be dead there … part of it is played on the run, in the grounds, possibly even the boy dies by the side of the lake. There should obviously be, in the last scene, created the most tremendous amount of movement – bramble bushes tearing – splashing in the water – all that.’ • ‘we must always keep the audience guessing’ and sustain the tension ‘in a rather unexpected way’. • the hide and seek scene, which should take place elsewhere in the house, could be ‘the first scene where he [Miles] becomes aware that he is suddenly like a man – physically aware of her – wrestling … it’s almost as if he desired her’. • in the dressing-up scene, ‘we could make an enormous amount of just sheer creepiness …’ • where construction was concerned, ‘every time we go from one scene to another, albeit with the same character, we’ve got to have – in the scene we’re going to – it’s got to be different … different atmospherically, emotionally and surprise-wise’. • So, a ‘definite style photographically’ would be needed for this film; they were saddled with CinemaScope, but Clayton would be

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• •

• •

•

• •

setting up ‘photographic tests just to experiment myself with it’, as well as experiments with camera filters and with ‘a very wide angle, the camera on floor level’. sound design could help too, with ‘a brooding feeling of what is going to be unfolded in the scene’. would the children be able to sustain it? ‘I think a lot of it has been written in the play … in long speeches from the children – this is going to be very dangerous in the film because they’re not going to be capable at all of keeping variety in their voice and in keeping up this tension. We’ve got therefore to try and limit all their speeches to a minimum.’ ‘use of musical box or harpsichord can plant some real source for music’. ‘a musical instrument – the first governess should certainly play it and perhaps teach one of the children’. ‘We might from this evolve what we could call an eerie tune. It could be a very simple melody played, say, on the piano, not in itself sinister, but we could make it give us a very strange sort of atmosphere.’ another major challenge for the screenwriter would be the ‘vagueness in the writing as to what were the – let’s call it horrors – perpetrated or seen by the children which in fact, particularly in the case of the boy, apparently torment him in such a way’. ‘I think one has to tackle this whole film rather as though it was a strange detective story … rather like peeling an artichoke.’ Some detailed suggestions: ‘a wonderful mirror … like The Bespoke Overcoat mirror absolutely rotting with age’ [in Overcoat, tailor David Kossoff has a large, stained, vertical mirror, through which he talks to himself]; an attic room ‘full of all that beautiful junk – just the sort of stuff I like – and possibly even with something like statues or figures in it’.

Clayton also noted that he had already sought the advice of other writers on the best way to adapt the Henry James story. Maybe this was a not-so-subtle hint that although William Archibald

THE INNOCENTS

was part of the contract package, he could easily be supplemented with a co-writer if need be. Or maybe it was intended for Clayton’s eyes only. Novelist and screenwriter Peter Viertel (Deborah Kerr’s husband since July 1960) suggested that the most interesting aspect of the story might be ‘what had already happened before it begins’ – namely, the relationship between Quint and Miss Jessel, and their influence on the children – so in one sense all the action had taken place off stage. Viertel thought that the boy Miles must have ‘watched, observed or something, her [Miss Jessel] being seduced by Quint’: ‘It might help the governess at the end – Deborah – in order to try and what she thinks is reclaim the boy, she deliberately makes him, or encourages him, to fall in love with her.’ Perhaps one way of presenting Quint and Miss Jessel would be through flashbacks (‘much as I loathe flashbacks’), as seen through the children’s eyes without dialogue, or the entirety through sound. Viertel also suggested that the vagueness of the writing could prove to be a virtue in the film: I said … this was one of the things I like enormously about The Turn of the Screw … because this is really the most perfect example of real horror, which is, in other words, leave it to the person’s imagination to in fact make for himself his conception of the horror – in other words, it’s the opposite of overstated, over clear horror scenes, where the moment one sees it or defines it they lose automatically all their intrigue or interest. Peter agreed with this.

This was a restatement of Henry James’s own credo. Nigel Kneale (his name was spelled phonetically as Neill) was, according to the notes, the second screenwriter Clayton had consulted. He had written the Quatermass series for television and The Abominable Snowman (1957) for Hammer, as well as adapting Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (1960) for the screen – indeed, he was one of the few film people not to argue with John Osborne. Kneale later reminisced that he was the first to discuss the project with Clayton as ‘an accepted master of terrifying audiences’, and a

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specialist in uncovering hidden horrors.23 Clayton, for his part, referred to Kneale as ‘a possible screenplay writer for this’ – raising the intriguing possibility of a Hammer person working on The Innocents, of all projects. Kneale agreed that ‘one aspect that might make the thing worth doing’ was that it couldn’t possibly be staged in modern dress and played as a contemporary subject (‘which I had at first thought of, incidentally’, Clayton admitted). It had to be presented in period, with an emphasis on aspects which ‘at that time, or at the time of writing it – either could not have been told or would not have been told. Like … looking back through something and seeing it as it really was.’ Digging into the past. The tension between today’s values and those of the past was key to the project: the sexual repression, the constriction of a Victorian upbringing, the explanations which were available then and now. ‘Now one of the things this particularly applies to is the relationship between the Governess and the boy … The boy falls in love with her, and in a way she falls in love with him – the ending is inexplicable unless we try to do that’: Nigel Neill [sic] said he was puzzled to know what in fact the spirits were after from the children. It is a good point. He also said that presumably it was purely from a satisfaction of the senses – in other words a complete sex thing – they wanted in fact, to relive their – what could you call them? – sexual orgies or whatever it is – in fact through the children.

Jack Clayton had also talked with Harold Pinter: not originally as a writer … but out of interest … But he seemed extraordinarily interested in it, and perhaps one never knows just because he is the exact opposite of the kind of writer one would select, he might therefore be of value doing it.

They discussed the idea of presenting flashbacks through the children’s eyes:

THE INNOCENTS

I hadn’t realised that if one shows Quint and the first governess in flashback any suggestion of them as ghosts is enormously watered down … for the very simple reason that once you show something on the screen, even though you are relating it to the past, through the children, it completely destroys the effect of seeing it, even as a ghost, in the present … This must be considered.

Clayton would work with Pinter on The Pumpkin Eater in 1964. Pinter, in turn, was to script The Go-Between (1970), which in some ways resembles The Turn of the Screw, and to direct a revival of William Archibald’s The Innocents on Broadway in 1976, with Claire Bloom (aged forty-five) as Miss Giddens, the eleven-year-old Sarah Jessica Parker as Flora and music by Harrison Birtwistle. It closed after a fortnight. Jack Clayton concluded his notes with some general thoughts on the question of ambiguity: My original interest in the story was the fact that one could tell this story from a completely different point of view – in other words – evil was alive in the mind of the governess and in fact she more or less creates the situation – now this was long before I ever read the notes on Henry James and find that somebody else also imagines that Henry James wrote it in this way – sort of almost Freudian hallucination the governess had. Now it is going to be very difficult to do this because if one gets it on to this level and this level alone, one is going to have a very dangerous subject to ever hold the public. I mean the one great holding strength at the moment in a very flimsy arrangement – in other words, a woman and two children and a very unhappy, depressing end – is the fact that a terrible horror – excitement – can be manufactured all through it which will hold them for it. Now, regardless of whether one wants to have this new angle from the governess’s point of view, one has still got to retain that old horror, otherwise no public’s going to see it.

This also meant that the screenwriter had to be very careful about the ending: ‘it has, after all, to have some kind of achievement to it as well as being a disaster. In other words, the boy is dead but

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‘In the mind of the governess’ or ‘a terrible horror’? Miss Giddens sees the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel

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evil has been divorced from the earth, or something like this’. It was important to remember, too, that ‘by any standards, the total budget is a very liberal one’, especially for an intimate chamber piece; in the event, it amounted to some £432,000. These early notes reveal just how precise and focused Jack Clayton was about his work, once he was immersed in it. A lot of the cleverest ideas originated with him. Having agreed that The Innocents had to be a costume piece, the production staff worked at an early stage on the exact period in which the story was supposed to be set: Book published (therefore assume story told) 1898. Miss Giddens died twenty years earlier 1878. Narrator [sic] met her when he was at university – therefore he could not have been younger than 18. She was ten years older than he, therefore she was 28. She was 20 when she went to Bly. Therefore she met the narrator at least 8 years after the happenings at Bly. Therefore if she died almost immediately after their meeting – i.e. when she was 28 – the date of the events at Bly were: 1898 less 20 years since her death 1878. 1878 less 8 years from Bly to her death 1870. It could be no later than this. There is no indication of the narrator’s age at the time of his telling the story. However, we know James himself was 55 in 1898. Assuming the narrator was the same age … the events at Bly were 45 years before 1898 – therefore the date was 1853. Conclusion: the story takes place no later than 1870 and probably no earlier than 1853.24

A first draft script – informed by the dictated notes from the director – was submitted in December 1960.25 It begins with Miles’s funeral in the rain, as Mrs Grose and ‘a handsome middle-aged man’ turn their backs on Miss Giddens and refuse to talk to her. Back at Bly, with her bags packed, the Governess takes out a sheet of paper from a desk. On top of it is a child’s drawing of a horse. She starts

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writing. Flashback to a ‘younger and happier Miss Giddens’ being interviewed by the Uncle, ‘a man of immense charm and attractiveness’. Then to Bly House by train and coach: ‘we see the house bathed in sunlight, surrounded with rolling lawns, a glimpse of the lake, trees’. There is also a marble folly, or ‘mini-temple’. A flock of white pigeons, calling and flapping, rises from the rooftops of the house. Miss Giddens is greeted on her arrival by Mrs Grose. In the drawing room, she meets little Flora, who chatters away: FLORA

I have a pet too. He’s a tortoise. His name is Julius Caesar.

MISS GIDDENS

(laughing) Why Julius Caesar?

FLORA

Miles calls him that – because he’s bald.

They discuss how tortoises go to sleep in winter ‘and never wake up’/‘Until the spring’/(to tortoise) ‘how will you know? When it’s time to wake up?’ The Governess reads Flora a story about a little boy in the snow, a magic key and a locked box. Then it is Flora’s bath-time; the maid Anna holds the jug of warm water. As the little girl is being dried, and getting into her white nightdress, a line of wet footprints is visible on the floor. FLORA

Somebody’s been here!

MISS GIDDENS

You silly goose – it was you!

FLORA

They’re vanishing.

MISS GIDDENS

They’re getting dry.

When she is put to bed in the Governess’s room, Flora keeps asking her ‘what was in the box?’ It is at this point that we are introduced to the tune we will come to know as ‘O, bring me a bonnet’. The following day, Miss Giddens is in the garden picking flowers in ‘brilliant sunlight’. A stone dryad stands nearby: ‘between the dryad’s upturned arm and her head, a spider has spun its web’. The tortoise is lying among the damp leaves, as well as a mildewed copy of the book about the little boy who finds a magic

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box. A cascade of rose petals falls to the ground, as Miss Giddens cuts off a bloom. Flora’s voice can be heard singing in the background. The atmosphere is ‘heavy with overblown roses’. There is another sculpture in the garden, a stone cupid, head tilted back, with an infantile toothless smile, each of his hands clasping another hand broken at the wrists: ‘stone bodies belonging to them lie in the tall grass’. And a beetle crawls out of his mouth. All of a sudden, the sounds stop – the singing, the cawing of the rooks, the chirping of sparrows – ‘as though the morning had lost its voice’. Miss Giddens feels impelled to look up at the tower, where the figure of a man stands, ‘or so it seems. It is difficult to tell the shadow from the substance – for the morning sun is half eclipsed by the tower.’ The Governess drops her scissors into the bird-bath, and the sounds return. An old gardener chats with her. ‘There’s no one there, Miss.’ Flora plays with the estate pony; she slips and falls and ‘seems to disappear under the pony’. Miss Giddens reads the fateful letter from Miles’s school ‘beside a vase of white roses’. As soon as Miles arrives home, he rushes off to ride the pony and ‘gives an exhibition’: ‘his call has become more strident and more urgent – more than just the showing off of a little boy’. Then comes the game of hide and seek. As Miss Giddens is searching for the children, she ‘catches a glimpse of swift movement at the dark end of the corridor – as of a hand, or the edge of a skirt, turning the corner and gone from sight’. Is this one of the servants? In the attic, along with a rocking horse and a musical box playing ‘O, bring me a bonnet’, she discovers the miniature of a man: ‘A pair of arms are thrown about her and she drops the miniature: He holds her tight. They both whisper.’ Downstairs, Miss Giddens first sees her own reflection in the glass of the French window; then ‘through the window and mingled with the reflected room and the reality of the moonlit garden, a man standing – casually, looking at her with a peculiar insolence … The man seems to take slow, assured steps backwards.’ After the schoolroom scene, the Governess discusses what she has seen with Mrs Grose, and learns about Quint:

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MRS GROSE

We see bad sights in the country. Not like towns – where people die more private. We see bad sights … But that wound … and the pain on his face! His eyes were open. I’ve seen a horse dead like that – with its eyes open! They brought it in, an accident.

Then, the dressing-up scene – in which Miles sings his demonic hymn, with Flora accompanying him on the spinet. After the ‘outlandishly costumed masque’ is over, Mrs Grose strongly encourages Miss Giddens to write to the Uncle, but the Governess explains at some length why she cannot. ‘What if I have been imagining this?’ At the folly by the lake – ‘a little circular building similar to a temple’, a tangle of cobwebs, twigs and leaves – Flora sings ‘Speed, bonny boat’, the ‘Skye Boat Song’. By the side of the lake: a woman in black – young, pale and beautiful – is standing quietly looking at them. The grass, moved by the wind, is blowing in her long skirt – trailing vines and creepers from the trees blow across her, partly obscuring her figure … everything suddenly goes silent.

Back at Bly, Mrs Grose reveals more about the violent relationship between Quint and Miss Jessel: ‘It was more like two animals tearing each other to pieces. Love, I suppose that’s what she called it … Rooms used by daylight as if they were dark woods.’ She is full of country lore: MRS GROSE

I’m a country woman, Miss. I’ve lived in these parts all my life. I’ve known people … it was rumoured they had bad secrets – they were speaking with the devil and all such talk. Perhaps it was true but they were no worse than their neighbours. Anyhow, they came to no harm. When they were left with their secrets … I’ve spoken out of my position.

In Miles’s bedroom, where Miss Giddens has visited him at night, ‘he leans forward and kisses her, suddenly, on the mouth like a

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man. Miss Giddens gets up, her hand on her mouth, and looks at him.’ When the candle is extinguished, he says, ‘Why, I blew it out, dear …’ and smiles. In the churchyard, on the way to Sunday service, we learn from Mrs Grose that Mary Jessel (she now has a first name) died at the inn in the village. The vicar is overheard reciting an Anglican prayer: ‘if we say we have no sin … we have erred and strayed like lost sheep’. When Miss Giddens returns from the church to Bly, she sees – at the desk in the schoolroom, ‘in the sunlight … misty and confused’ – the apparition of Miss Jessel, her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking: ‘thin, haggard and stained with tears – her eyes are tormented’. In the climactic scene, which now takes place in the conservatory, Miles talks to the Governess about his father: MILES

It’s an orange tree. My father told me – he planted a pip out of an orange when he was a little boy at Bly. Now look at it!

MISS GIDDENS

You’ve never talked about your father before.

MILES

Haven’t I? He was a soldier.

MISS GIDDENS

I know.

MILES

You know a lot.

Later, she hears Quint laughing but does not yet see him – until the final moments when he appears again. MISS GIDDENS

Say it! Say his name! … Be brave Miles – say his name – say it!

Quint seems to move towards them. Miles screams, ‘Peter Quint!’ He turns to Miss Giddens and rushes at her, his arms flailing in the air, exclaiming, ‘You devil! Where?’ And as he screams, the figure of Quint has disappeared – as though it never existed. Miss Giddens carries the limp body back to the house, up the steps of the terrace. Slowly, she kisses the white face. She looks up. ‘From the top of the

THE INNOCENTS

house, the pigeons fly in a great white cloud. She moves towards the dark doorway as we – fade out.’ * * * It’s clear from his notes that Jack Clayton was tough on this script and – by implication – on earlier attempts at individual scenes.26 He evidently felt that William Archibald was not heeding his advice. ‘I realized he was not the person for me’, Clayton later recalled. ‘I made suggestions but he always wrote the opposite way.’ There was a whiff of resentment in his reaction to the playwright’s work: it is not a screenplay based on the book The Turn of the Screw, so much as an expanded version of the existing play The Innocents. I am much more impressed with the storyline of the book than with either the play or the script.

He felt that it was ‘very heavily over-dialogued’, the storyline was obscure – with too many digressions – and it did not keep the audience guessing. Flora prattled away ‘aimlessly’ for pages and pages, and both children talked too much, and too pretentiously: ‘I do not propose to shoot this picture in little short sections just to keep the performances for the children.’ There was a need for much greater magic and excitement in every scene – ‘more than one would normally have to worry about’. He reiterated, from his earlier notes: The script falls straight into the trap which, as discussed at the beginning, could be its greatest failing. This is that stuck as we are for the bulk of the film with too few characters … we lack the opportunities normal in a film for constantly varying tempo, atmosphere and tension … therefore the script has got to be written to at least help this difficulty.

So far, it had not been:

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As everybody is aware, there are certain scenes in the play The Innocents of which I am a great admirer. However, I think there are too many scenes in this script with hardly a word changed, which have been lifted from the play and I cannot help feeling that in some of them we could achieve a better result … when the storyline deviates from the book and follows the play we should consider whether this is wise: the purpose of making this film is to make the story of The Turn of the Screw …

In particular, the ‘framework’ needed a lot of attention: Miss Giddens was given too much family background in the Uncle scene and behaved too aggressively – ‘I think it is much more plausible if we are led to believe she is alone in the world (we have to remember the youngest Deborah Kerr can possibly look is, I would say, 28)’; the first impressions of Bly as a ‘wonderful and beautiful house’ should be seen through Miss Giddens’s eyes, rather than described in stage directions; the new scenes with Flora and the Governess showed promise but Archibald should take care ‘not to over-build Flora’s part’; there wasn’t enough dramatic preparation for Miles’s entrance (‘the audience should by now be most anxious to meet him’) and the order of events following his arrival at Bly was confused – dinner, the pony ride, hide and seek; Quint appeared on the tower too early – before his appearance could be linked to Miles; more should be made of Miss Giddens’s uncertainty about whether or not she should resign from her job and whether she can cope with her responsibilities (‘this has unbalanced her’); she should investigate the top of the tower and find nothing there but, say, a gargoyle; for the lakeside scene, Archibald should go back to the original story – where Miss Giddens tries to get Flora to acknowledge Miss Jessel’s presence; Miles should seem ‘educated beyond Miss Giddens’ standard’; and the final scene did not work at all – the latter part of it should take place in the garden rather than the conservatory, and should display much more dynamism and violence: ‘as the last scene is exactly the same as in the play, it is hardly surprising that this does not work’. Above all, the relationship between the Governess, the

THE INNOCENTS

children and the apparitions did not emerge clearly enough from Archibald’s screenplay: Quint and Miss Jessel to a lesser extent are not just ghosts that haunt the premises [as they had been in the play], but they are there for a very definite purpose – to obtain Miles and Flora. We have not yet got anything like the feeling I want of the strange relationship growing up between Miss Giddens and Miles. The strange thing about The Turn of the Screw as a story is that it poses three stories, the first between Quint and Miss Jessel, never seen but fascinating and incidentally a separate film in itself; next our actual story – the effect these two people had on two apparently innocent children and an equally innocent Governess; and lastly what happened to Miss Giddens afterwards, what effect did this ghastly incident have on her life (which is conveniently discussed in the book in two lines).

By the second week of December 1960, Jack Clayton was working on the script with the lawyer-playwright John Mortimer, who had joined the team a little earlier.27 The two men had known each other since just after he made Room at the Top, and Clayton had been impressed by Mortimer’s script for the radio drama turned one-act play The Dock Brief (1958), about a barrister’s relationship with his client, a suspected murderer. When I spoke to John Mortimer in 2006 (he died in 2009), he recalled how he was brought in to ‘help with the dialogue’, to open the story out a little, to improve the Victorian period flavour and to tighten the construction – ‘to make sure each scene should either be a contrast to, or an echo of the last one’. ‘Jack taught me how to start each scene with some ironical comment or with a surprising contrast to the one that went before and I’ve never forgotten it.’ He wrote a new series of scenes involving the Uncle’s visit to Bly with his jaded lady friend Miss Fawcett; this was his second appearance, and had nothing to do with the novella.

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The new material – which Mortimer called ‘the cricket scenes’ – was inserted into the script on 14 December and sent to Jack Clayton. Flora is picking bluebells in the woods, and tracing a heart carved in the bark of a tree; Miles is climbing another tree, while Miss Giddens tries to elicit from him what really happened when he was expelled from school. This is followed by the schoolroom scene with the squeaking pencils on slates. Miss Giddens is writing a letter to the Uncle, and trying hard to ignore the ghastly noise, when there is the sound outside of a ‘smart little carriage’ bringing him and a young woman to Bly. The children rush downstairs to meet him. ‘I’m afraid I was writing to you, sir,’ says Miss Giddens – but the Uncle is already preoccupied with taking Miles and Flora out for the day, and he politely ignores her: out to the seaside, the beach and a village inn. Miles excitedly takes over the driving seat of the carriage at one point. At the inn, the Uncle raises a glass to drink Miles’s health before the start of the village cricket match, which is watched, reluctantly, by Miss Fawcett under her parasol. During the match, Miles fields a ball, and the Uncle smiles approvingly. On their return to Bly, Miss Giddens at last has the briefest chance to explain to her employer what is on her mind, while the impatient Miss Fawcett whinges from the carriage: MISS GIDDENS

It’s Quint!

UNCLE

(pausing and frowning imperceptibly) My poor man! Does Miles talk about him? Well, he had his faults like all of us. But he’s gone, poor fellow. He won’t trouble us now.

And with that he departs. The scene was never filmed, though variations on it survived until late in the day. Opening out the story too much, it damaged the carefully crafted atmosphere of Victorian claustrophobia and overripeness, and added little to our understanding of the characters. But Jack Clayton did acknowledge Mortimer’s input: ‘John was invaluable to The Innocents. He contributed a great deal to [the

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dialogue and the construction] we were eventually to put on screen. Unfortunately, we only had him for three weeks because he had other commitments.’ When I spoke to him, John Mortimer could only recall one specific line for which he was responsible: ‘Rooms … used by daylight as though they were dark woods’ – and maybe the best line in the film, ‘It’s only the wind, my dear’ (instead of ‘Why, I blew it out, dear’), both of which actually improved on Henry James. Since the ‘rooms’ line was already in the first draft December script, this suggests that Mortimer tightened up Archibald’s original version – which Mortimer confirmed to me. The first draft was thus the result of both their inputs.28 As we shall see, the ‘wind’ line was definitely written by Truman Capote. In a covering letter, Mortimer wished Jack Clayton a ‘lovely unhaunted Christmas’ and by early January had left the team. He remembered, as an aside, that The Innocents was responsible for Jack Clayton’s lifelong fascination with pigeons – ‘he somehow kept the white pigeons from the film and took them to Marlowe with him, after the filming, then he bred from them’ – to the point where he had a large aviary constructed in his garden and won major trophies. ‘Those pigeons changed his life.’ Clayton went on to work with Mortimer’s wife, Penelope, on The Pumpkin Eater (published 1964, film 1971). ‘We both used our marriage in our work!’ According to the production schedule, filming was supposed to start at the beginning of February 1961, but by the end of December, Clayton still did not have a workable script. A cable from Joe Moskowitz, Vice-President at Fox, dated 20 January, gave him formal studio approval to bring in Truman Capote to help with the dialogue.29 (Actually, he had already been working with Capote on The Innocents – at least since 14 January, and probably before that): In view of your talks with Truman Capote and your strong desire to have him on script, we agree to his appointment if more reasonable deal than his

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present asking terms can be worked out quickly. However, we feel that in addition to the dialogue changes, possible structural improvements should be strongly considered.

These included the following suggestions: 1. There should be more suspense. 2. There should be more romantic tension between Miss Giddens and the Uncle. 3. The Uncle should be a more sympathetic character – should, perhaps, acknowledge ‘his own responsibility for what happens at the end’. 4. But the Uncle’s brief visit to Bly should be cut, since ‘it now seems to serve no dramatic function’. 5. There should be ‘more positive results offered in this relationship between Miss Giddens and the Uncle than the present bleak ending’. 6. The children seem ‘terribly prissy – we realize that this is set in an earlier period yet we feel that the children’s acts of naughtiness are hardly recognisable to modern audiences. Isn’t it possible to make their acts of naughtiness more understandable by contemporary standards?’ 7. Miles’s appearance on the lawn, for example, is ‘hardly an infraction to which modern parents would give a second thought’. 8. Why couldn’t Miles ‘secretly destroy some personal belongings of Miss Giddens obviously as an act of vandalism and hate … we need one evidence of actual corruption’. 9. Couldn’t Miss Giddens suddenly find Quint in a pew in church, behind the children, ‘only to have him disappear a moment later’? These suggestions, concluded Moskowitz, were ‘for your consideration and with the intention of being constructive’. So, with the studio leaning on him to turn the children into juvenile

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delinquents, to add to the suspense and to include a happy ending – and with about ten days to go before shooting was supposed to begin – Jack Clayton was given permission to contract Truman Capote. The two men had worked together in Italy on John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1953) – Clayton as associate producer, Capote as screenwriter, providing witty and cultish dialogue on set as they went along – and they had remained in touch. Capote recalled the Beat the Devil experience as ‘tremendous fun’. At the time he was working on The Innocents, he was also deeply involved in writing his ‘non-fiction novel’ In Cold Blood – another story of an innocent family (the Clutters of Holcomb, West Kansas) torn apart by evil – and had left for Switzerland to complete the book in peace, away from the hectic literary life of New York. The script pages were sent to Clayton from Verbier, the ski resort in the canton of Valais. A little later, when Capote came to London to be on set and polish the dialogue during filming, he wrote on Connaught Hotel notepaper.30 Capote recalled that he was commissioned by Clayton to ‘rewrite the script’, which he duly did in eight weeks flat – with only ‘touching up’ needed afterwards. He apparently started in January, worked through February and into March, putting aside In Cold Blood to concentrate on the project. Jim Clark, film editor on The Innocents, recalls that Capote was sometimes on the set and that he said to him one day – over lunch at Shepperton – of the two murderers of the Clutter family, ‘I gotta wait till they swing – they gotta swing before I can publish, God dammit!’ In Capote’s retrospective view, Henry James’s prose ‘has a certain cream but it coagulates’ (his equivalent of Clayton’s observation that the prose resembled an overripe rose). Acknowledging James as ‘a maestro of the semi-colon’, Capote revealed that he used at one time to enjoy reading his work more than he did now. Where The Turn of the Screw was concerned, Henry James ‘fudged it a lot’, which created particular problems for the screenwriter.31

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The film Capote (2005) suggested that he was obsessed with In Cold Blood at this time, to the exclusion of everything else in his life; this was clearly not the case. He was expected to bring a Southern Gothic sensibility to the project, along with a gallows sense of humour, a sharp line in dialogue and an understanding of unconventional relationships – all of them essential, in Jack Clayton’s view, to tie the script together, give it some style and bring much needed variety of pace to the project. Above all, The Innocents needed ambiguity – to differentiate it from traditional spook stories and from the recently successful blood-and-thunder Gothics of Hammer Films, and to keep the audience guessing. Not too much of a smart sense of humour, though: ‘haunted house’ stories in Hollywood had traditionally been associated with comedy or lightweight thrills; The Innocents had to belong to a completely different world. Capote’s earliest rough draft notebooks of dialogue have survived – one hardback, six soft, all containing ‘holzfrei’ uncoated paper, all written in pencil. Capote left the opening ‘funeral’ sequence intact, and began his notes with the interview in Harley Street. The Uncle has become a more insensitive figure, with a slightly camp, urbane charm, and overall there is the sense that Miss Giddens is falling head over heels in love, or at least becoming infatuated in a very Victorian way: MISS GIDDENS

More than anything, I love children.

UNCLE

(looking at her, coolly flirtatious) More than anything?

MISS GIDDENS

(embarrassed) Yes.

UNCLE

How remarkable. I find the company of children much too sophisticated for me, they make me feel – er – dreadfully coarse and ignorant.

MISS GIDDENS UNCLE

Are you speaking of your wards? (with surprise, realising it) I suppose I must be … Poor brats – they need more than a distant Uncle. And they need more than a Governess (rising from his desk; moving towards Miss Giddens – as though he were going to touch her).

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When the Uncle finally holds her hand, ‘Miss Giddens is highly conscious of his physical contact’. Then to Bly, in a carriage rather than by train, and the ‘impressionistic blur of the journey’. Instead of appearing at the front door, Miss Giddens is shown walking through the gardens and kicking the leaves, pausing by the lake. ‘We hear, off-screen, and far away, so that it seems a sound made by the wind, a voice calling’: WOMAN’S VOICE

Flo-ra. Flo-ra.

And we see Miss Giddens reflected in a pond of still water, ringed by willows. The voice is never explained, neither in Capote’s script nor in the film itself. There is a ‘marble folly’ in the garden. The sound of The urbane and manipulative Uncle (Michael Redgrave) is impressed by Miss Giddens, who in turn is ‘highly conscious of his physical contact’

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the song ‘O, bring me a bonnet’ rises delicately – ‘a wisp of melody, as though emanating from a music box’. Flora meets Miss Giddens by one of the lakes, and among her first words are: FLORA

Are you afraid of reptiles? Because I’ve got one in my pocket and he’s very eager to meet you … His name is Timothy.

MISS GIDDENS

Oh, a tortoise.

The ‘reptiles’ reference explicitly links the gardens at Bly with the Garden of Eden. Flora is the picture of innocence. As in the Archibald/Mortimer script, when Miss Giddens and the little girl near the house, ‘a crowd of white pigeons, calling and flapping, issues from the rooftops of the house and fills the sky, which is darkening. We see Mrs Grose.’ In the drawing room, the French windows open onto the terrace, a portrait of the Uncle hangs over the fireplace, and a cheerful fire is burning in the grate. ‘She puts out a hand to touch [the beautiful flowers in a vase] as she passes – and at her slight touch the petals seem to shiver off every bloom.’ MISS GIDDENS

Yes I heard you. Just now. When I was coming through the garden. I heard you calling her name.

MRS GROSE

Not me, Miss. Perhaps Anna or the cook.

MISS GIDDENS

(slightly puzzled, as she puts her bonnet on top of the spinet) Well – someone.

The exchange between Mrs Grose and the Governess about the Master’s taste for young and pretty women is then sharpened: MRS GROSE

(vehemently) Oh, he did. He had the devil’s own eye [instead of ‘it was the way he liked everyone’].

Miss Giddens turns to look at her in surprise. Mrs Grose catches breath, then: I mean – that’s his way – the master’s. MISS GIDDENS

But of whom did you speak first?

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MRS GROSE

Why the master of course.

At this moment, Anna, in the process of placing a lamp on a table next to Mrs Grose, looks sideways to Mrs Grose: they exchange an uneasy glance. MRS GROSE

There’s nobody else Miss. Nobody at all.

A clock on the mantel starts to chime.

‘He had the devil’s own eye’ is one of the cleverest lines in the film. Flora’s bath sequence remains intact, complete with the line of small footprints leading from the tub. In Miss Giddens’s large bedroom, Flora approaches her own little bed with white curtains: A small breeze suddenly billows the thin white curtains around the bed as Flora jumps into it. Giggling, she becomes entangled with the curtains. FLORA

Look, I’m a cobweb.

MISS GIDDENS

No you’re not. Into bed with you.

After the prayer ‘Now I lay me down to sleep/I pray thee Lord my soul to keep’, Flora asks her Governess where the Lord will take her soul to.

FLORA

And if I weren’t [a good girl] then wouldn’t the Lord just leave me here? To walk around? Isn’t that what happens to some people?

Outside the window, there is a small animal cry. Later that night at the window, Flora begins to hum ‘O, bring me a bonnet’: After moment [sic] she stops humming, and it is clear from her expression, a slight narrowing of the eyes and a small half-smile, that she has seen something in the garden. Something had [sic] expected to see. Then, even more softly, and staring with rapt attention, she starts to hum again.

When the adorable Miles arrives at Bly (‘charm seems to be the chief family trait’), he rushes off with Flora to see the pony in the paddock – but his ‘exhibition’ of riding does not happen

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until later. That night, Miss Giddens visits Miles in his small, neat bedroom: MISS GIDDENS

How did you know I was there? This is a very old house. Things creak. And anyway, I saw the

MILES

light from your candle under the door [if ever you want to play ghost again remember to blow out your candle]. MISS GIDDENS

You ought to be asleep …

‘Can’t you see that I want to help you?’ asks Miss Giddens, and she gasps as the candle flickers and goes out. MILES

Don’t be frightened. It was only the wind, my dear. The wind blew it out.

Note to Jack. I’ve changed this because 1) it would be physically impossible for Miles to blow out the candle and 2) why would he have done so (despite James). It would seem a merely spiteful gesture. Also, Miss Giddens would have to ask him why he had done it. And thirdly, I like the idea of Miles wanting, in a way, to protect her.

So the ‘wind’ line was Capote’s. It was followed by a ‘cascade of rose petals’, as Miss Giddens, armed with scissors, clips at flowers in the garden and listens to Flora singing ‘O, bring me a bonnet’ in the distance. The sequence of the man on the tower – including the broken stone cupid sculpture, the beetle and the ‘flight of birds … across her line of vision’ – was retained by Capote, so that it was now linked to Miles’s arrival. But he added a new sequence to follow it, with Miss Giddens opening the aged tower door, ascending the stone circular staircase and entering the platform on the roof. There is the sound of ‘rustling wings and squaking [sic] pigeons’. Miles is there, feeding the white birds ‘hovering like humming-birds at his bread-filled fingers’. Miss Giddens asks if he has seen a man on the tower:

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I’ve been quite alone – except for my greedy friends.

MILES MISS GIDDENS

That can’t be true. Not ten minutes ago I saw a man – standing exactly there. Perhaps it was me.

MILES

Immediately after this sequence, Capote retained the idea of Miss Giddens trying to write home to her father: We see: the hand of Miss Giddens writing. And the words as they appear on the paper. ‘Dearest Father Forgive my not writing sooner’ (the hand hesitates then adds). ‘But (now a longer pause, as though she can’t think how to continue. Suddenly she scrawls a hopeless line down the rest of the page – as we hear Mrs Grose).

This is followed by Miles’s ‘exhibition’ of pony-riding in the paddock (more than just a little boy showing off) and ‘a sound like clapping – hands clapping … But the sound merges with the cawing of rooks which suddenly fly up from the trees.’ Capote was not sure exactly where this sequence should go – except that it was a mistake to place it just after Miles’s arrival. Such an action sequence would be useful for pacing. We move to the drawing room, and a child’s drawing of a pony, ‘the same drawing we saw in the opening sequence on Miss Giddens’ desk’. The children are playing with paper and crayons. This is a light scene after the high drama of the horse-riding: FLORA MISS GIDDENS

Miles isn’t the only one who can draw. (looks at Flora’s drawing, is puzzled by it, turns it this way and that; then, with a radiant smile) Ah, now I see. Lovely. Lovely. It’s a vase full of flowers.

FLORA

Goodness, no (leaning close to Miss Giddens, and pointing at the picture). It’s a thunderstorm. See the clouds – and the lightning.

MISS GIDDENS

Well, dear – it’s certainly very original. Perhaps you’ll grow up to be a famous artist.

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Miles suggests a game of hide and seek. There follows – as in the Archibald/Mortimer script – the walk along the upstairs corridor; the glimpse of a ‘swift movement … as of the edge of a skirt’; the attic scene with the rocking horse, the musical box playing ‘O, bring me a bonnet’ and the miniature of Quint’s face; and Miles pouncing out of the darkness onto Miss Giddens. ‘Did I frighten you?’/‘A bit … You’re hurting me.’ As the Governess returns to the drawing room, to take her turn at the game, ‘a draught shakes down the petals of a rose in the vase by the door’. We see her reflection in the glass of the French window, then Quint staring past her into the room ‘with peculiar insolence’, then her reflection again. ‘Heavens, child! Why, you’re white as a sheet,’ says Mrs Grose. Miss Giddens is now able to give a full description: MISS GIDDENS

He has bright red hair. And a red mustache. And blue, ice-blue eyes.

MRS GROSE

And is he – would you say he was handsome?

Miss Giddens replies, ‘handsome, yes – and obscene’, quickly correcting herself. This is followed by the Uncle’s visit, in the company of his ‘old friend’ Mlle de Valais, ‘very beautiful but rather hard and glittery’. When she hears the coach arrive, Miss Giddens pats her hair in place, her expression one of relief and pleasure: UNCLE

Ah, Miss Giddens – the perfect, the impeccable Governess – how goes it my dear. Those rascals running you ragged? (Not waiting for a reply, he takes her hand) May I present Mademoiselle de Valais … Ma chère, voiçi l’institutrice des enfants. C’est une être assez joli, n’est-ce pas?

Mlle de Valais [has] a bored expression and dropping eyelids …

The Governess hopes they will stay at Bly, but is told ‘this is the merest pop-in, pop-out’. She is so disappointed ‘that she can scarcely raise her voice above a whisper’:

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MISS GIDDENS

(forced by her sense of frustration, into a tone mildly sarcastic) Would that be such a disaster?

UNCLE

(grinning, as he throws an arm around Miles’s shoulder) Overwhelming. I have a party of twelve coming to (for) dinner …

Mlle de Valais becomes impatient. UNCLE

Ayez un peu de la patience, ma chère. Ou je te quitte ou j’ai te trouvé – faisant le trottoir.

Miss Giddens tries to engage the Uncle in conversation about Miles’s expulsion from school, but cannot do so with the children present (‘they know why she does not speak’): MISS GIDDENS UNCLE

It was – it was nothing. Ha! (now again in roaring good spirits) Women! You women are the confoundest crowd. All this bother, and then she tells me nothing …

Flora begs him to stay longer, but Miles interjects, ‘Don’t Flora – never beg. It’s not polite’/‘I’m not begging. Uncle Charles I’m not begging, am I?’ Nevertheless, after breezily promising ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’, he leaves Miss Giddens and the children standing – with their backs to the camera – ‘a small, sad tableau’. The tone of the episode is lightweight, and the ‘Valais’ reference presumably an in-joke about Capote’s temporary residence in Switzerland. Then, the schoolroom on a rainy day, the ‘unbearable squeaking on a slate’ and the suggestion of a costume party from Miles and Flora. While the children are preparing, Miss Giddens and Mrs Grose discuss how Quint died, and the wound on his head: MRS GROSE

I can’t forget his eyes. They were open, filled with surprise, with pain. Like the eyes of a fox I saw once. A fox the dogs had hunted down.

MISS GIDDENS

But – it was an accident?

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The costume party is exactly the same as in the Archibald/ Mortimer script, except that Flora now enters with the musical box ‘playing its little tune’. Miles still sings his hymn, and at the end of it slowly pushes the window open. The Governess discusses with Mrs Grose, in her bedroom, the hold she thinks that Quint has over Miles, which the costume party seems to have confirmed. That night, Miss Giddens looks out of her bedroom window and sees the marble figures of the man and woman, their arms entwined within the little square of hedges beneath the window. Their wet, chiselled nakedness shines against the dark carpet of grass, caught for a moment in the oblong of lamplight from the window as: EXT: THE LAKE DAY

The lake scene, and the appearance of Miss Jessel through ‘trailing vines and creepers’ remains unaltered from the first draft script. Afterwards, however, Mrs Grose reveals much more about the previous governess’s relationship with Quint: MRS GROSE

In the beginning, when she first came here, she was always happy and smiling. Very fond of music she was – and dancing. She and Miss Flora, they used to dance together – dance by the hour … But she changed. Yes, she changed (then). It was hard to believe – her being an educated young lady and Quint being – well, what he was …

MRS GROSE

There was no cruelty she wouldn’t suffer. If he struck her – yes, and I’ve seen him knock her to the floor – she’d look at him as though she wanted the weight of his hand. No pride, no shame … rooms – used by daylight – as though they were dark woods.

By now, Miss Giddens has convinced herself that the children are possessed, and that it is high time to pay a visit to the local vicar, Mr Meedy. She shares this idea with Mrs Grose:

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MISS GIDDENS

(with great intensity) By exorcising Bly! By bringing the strength of God to bear against their evil! There is no other way to banish this darkness. Drive it out of the house. Out of the gardens. Out of the minds of those children.

MRS GROSE

(feebly) But, Miss. We mustn’t have a scandal.

Truman Capote made several attempts to write the dialogue for this ‘vicar’ scene. In one of them – attached to a covering letter from the Connaught Hotel, late in the day – the vicar says, ‘you mustn’t think me unsympathetic … but may I say – I think you might well consult a medical man. Ask his advice.’ In an earlier version – played more for comic relief – the rotund vicar in his oak-panelled room, with a ‘rather arrogant kind of jollity’ and an equally rotund white cat, munches chocolates as he listens to this ‘rather cloudy story’: MISS GIDDENS

Don’t you see? The children are being used as mediums. And the horror of it is that – that they must live every moment of it! Witness everything that occurs. Every vile, degrading thing. (then beseechingly) Please sir, we cannot stand by and watch them destroyed. You must—

VICAR

Must what, Miss Giddens?

MISS GIDDENS

… perform the rites.

VICAR

(perplexed) Rites? Rites! What rites!

MISS GIDDENS

Of exorcism. (Pause)

VICAR

(looks at her with an expression at first fish-like, then hard, drops the cat to the floor) Truly, Miss Giddens, you astound me … That you, yourself, the daughter of a vicar, should put forth such an unholy suggestion!

He explains that the Anglican Church, as she should well know, no longer performs the rite of exorcism – and that she would do much better to consult the local physician. The hallucinations she is describing are most probably the result of ‘an ailing constitution’.

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Capote does not seem to have been happy with either of his attempts, but references to the meeting with the vicar survived until shooting began. On the way to church, Mrs Grose wonders why Miss Giddens cannot bring herself to write to the Uncle, telling him the truth. ‘The truth?’ she replies. ‘No, he’d think me certifiable.’ Just as the congregation starts singing a hymn in the church, Mrs Grose reveals that Miss Jessel was ‘found hanging’. Miss Giddens returns to Bly, and the schoolroom, where she sees Miss Jessel, her head in her hands: on the desk lies an open exercise book, showing Flora’s round, childish writing. The ink is blurred in places as though by tears. Miss Giddens touches one of the stains with her finger. ‘It is still wet.’ Mrs Grose enters the schoolroom: ‘the figure of a woman in black is seated at the desk, her head in her hands. She looks up and we see it is Miss Giddens.’ MRS GROSE MISS GIDDENS

She spoke? It came to that (a pause – then). I could feel pity for her – if she herself were not so pitiless. And hungry. Hungry for him. His arms. His lips. But she can only reach him – they can only reach each other – by entering the souls of the children, possessing them.

Miss Giddens finally starts writing her letter to the Uncle. Miles plays ‘O, bring me a bonnet’ on the piano, while Flora disappears into the garden (‘shall I play you something else?’). After the second scene at the lake, Mrs Grose is deeply shocked by Flora’s tantrum – when she is accused by Miss Giddens of seeing the ghost of Miss Jessel – and use of expletives, as she explains to Miss Giddens in her bedroom: MRS GROSE

I don’t know how – where she could have learned such language.

MISS GIDDENS

I know.

MRS GROSE

I shouldn’t be surprised if you do.

MISS GIDDENS

What precisely are you suggesting, Mrs Grose?

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MRS GROSE

Just this. I never heard her speak like it before – never till

MISS GIDDENS

(advancing on her, pleading) How can you be so unfair? You saw

MRS GROSE

I know what I saw.

you came! who taught her. You saw that woman – standing in the rain.

‘I know what I saw’ is another key line in the film. They continue talking about Miss Jessel: MRS GROSE

… that bad memory (she turns away). It had gone to sleep inside her. She’d forgotten how it was her that woke one morning, and walked out in the garden, and found Miss Jessel hanging from a tree.

Miss Giddens shields her face, as though to ward off a blow …: I didn’t know – I didn’t know. And yet – in a way – it may have been the saving of her. Now Flora can really go to sleep: and when she dreams, dreams not of the dead, but me. I’ll be the ogre, the wicked but at least alive woman in her life. Much as it hurts, it’s better that she hates me. [MRS

GROSE

I don’t know that I’ve ever understood you, Miss. And after today – you had no right to do it! That was a cruel thing – and if you’re planning another cruelty … ]

The ‘Conservatory’ sequence has a steamy atmosphere and pace that improves considerably on the Archibald/Mortimer script: There is, throughout the scene, the sensation of heat. The windows are misted over, and, as the scene progresses, beads of perspiration bathe the faces of Miles and Miss Giddens. At times their voices echo against the glass, rise and fall, became blurred, like fishing [sic] swimming in an acquarium [sic].

The tortoise is still called ‘Timothy’, though at one point this is erased and the word ‘Rupert’ substituted. The sequence comes to a climax when Miles finally admits to what he did at school:

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I— well. I said things. And I— drew pictures [And sometimes,

MILES

at night when the lights were out] MISS GIDDENS

Yes, Miles? Sometimes – I hurt things (pause, then) And sometimes, at

MILES

night, when the lights were out MISS GIDDENS

You what?

Miles places a fingernail against the window: during the next several speeches he draws a circle on the glass that makes an ever-widening clear space. The masters heard about it (his voice falling to a whisper).

MILES

They said I frightened the boys. MISS GIDDENS

Where did you first see – hear of such things … shall I tell you who taught you? …

Miles spins round and faces her. The cleared space he has made on the window covers a large, moon-like area. As Miles looks at her, his whole expression changes and hardens: his eyes narrow. And, as he begins to speak, we see the face of Quint take form inside the window’s cleared circle – Quint’s face looming above Miles’s face: MILES

You don’t fool me. I know why you keep on and on and on.

Miss Giddens’s voice (as though she was trying to draw his attention to the face looming behind him): Miles! MILES

It’s because you’re afraid – you’re afraid you might be crazy. So you keep on and on – trying to make me admit something that isn’t true. Trying to frighten me … The way you frightened Flora … (screaming at her, his face pouring sweat). But I’m not Flora. I’m no baby. You think you can run to my uncle (and fill him) with a lot of lies. But he won’t believe you – not when I tell him what you are – a damned hussy. A damned dirty-minded bitch. You never fooled us – we always knew.

Capote later rewrote the ‘I’m not Flora’ exchange, at Jack Clayton’s request, to make it even more dramatic: Miles advances on Miss Giddens brandishing a pair of garden shears as he calls her ‘a damned dirty-minded bitch’. As the sound of laughter

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diminishes, Miles throws down the shears and runs out of the conservatory. However, Clayton later wisely changed his mind, and the idea was dropped. The script finishes exactly as the first draft did, except that the action has moved to the garden, with Quint standing among the statues. Miss Giddens carries the lifeless body of Miles to the house, and ‘kisses his white face’. ‘From the roof of the house, the pigeons fly in a great white cloud … ’ After filming had begun, Capote supplied Jack Clayton with some important additions to his script, written on yellow notepaper, always by hand. They included the scene in Miles’s bedroom that takes place just after the discussion about Quint’s sadism, where Miss Giddens discovers a pigeon with a broken neck under the little boy’s quilt (later pillow) – a scene which ends when he ‘puts his arms around her neck and kisses her like a man’; and suggestions for a ‘whispering montage’ involving the children (‘She’s always watching’/‘Wait till we’re alone’/‘Remember it’s a secret’). The first large batch of these notebook drafts came from Verbier, complete with a covering letter on yellow notepaper: 14 January 1961 Do hope you will like these changes. I do. I think the Tower scene between Miles and Miss Giddens [with the pigeons] really works, could be quite beautiful visually and is, in all events, infinitely more dramatic than the previous exchange between Miss Giddens and Mrs Grose. Am working hard, and think I have solved quite a number of our problems. Will send more in a few days. Please cable me on receipt of this. Love Truman.

Then later, with another batch: Dear Jack – or should I say Quint … Hope you will like this – and if not, don’t worry, we will make everything right. Anyway, have been busy with it.

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Onward. Your loving slave Mary Jessel

Capote’s improvements to the Archibald/Mortimer script – from his first notes to his last – were considerable. The Uncle scene is given more edge; there is the addition of the walk in the gardens and mystery woman’s voice; the integration of Flora’s haunting melody into the story; the highly charged conversations in Miles’s bedroom; the scene on the roof of the tower with Miles and the pigeons; the reordering of events after Miles’s arrival at Bly; the use of light-hearted scenes and lines to contrast with the darkness (‘you mean you like a boy with spirit,’ says Miss Giddens to Mrs Grose at one point); the sordid details of the earthly relationship between Quint and Miss Jessel, and hints of what Quint wanted from Miles; the children callously playing with animals – Flora now enjoys watching a spider trap a butterfly – as in a mid-Victorian painting, perhaps by Landseer, which combines sentimentality with cruelty. Then there was the accelerating pace of the Conservatory scene, leading to the tragedy among the sculptures in the garden; the many references to reflection – in water, windows and mirrors – and to overripe foliage in this wilting Garden of Eden. There are also some terrific lines, including: ‘He had the devil’s own eye’, ‘It was only the wind, my dear’, ‘I know what I saw’. And Capote delivered a more pointed critique of Victorian repression, with a stronger emphasis on the Governess’s fear of sexual desire. Above all, there was the tightening of the script – with much less dialogue for the children, especially Flora; the transformation of Quint and Miss Jessel from things that went bump in the night into sinister sexual beings; the varied pacing; and the ambiguity which we see through Miss Giddens’s eyes until the very last scene in the garden. Some of Capote’s contributions did not make it into the final script – notably the Uncle’s visit and the meeting with the vicar. But his pencil drafts, more often than not, are identical when pruned with the script as filmed. Jack Clayton later claimed that

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Miles and the pigeons on top of the Tower, a scene added by Truman Capote

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Reflections and mirror images – one of Capote’s many refinements of the script

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A corrupted Eden – the reptile, the spider and the beetle in the garden at Bly

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Truman virtually wrote the entire script. At the time we were lucky enough to get him. Truman was very much caught up with writing In Cold Blood. He had to leave for Switzerland to finish the book and would send us pages of The Innocents from there. We had to start filming without a full, completed script.

In interviews, he always maintained that the script was 90 per cent Capote, and appealed at the time to the Arbitration Committee of the Writers Guild of America, to secure sole screenwriting credit for Capote.32 ‘It seems to me surprising,’ he wrote, ‘to say the least, that anyone acquainted with the work of the two writers, viewing the scripts as a whole, should not come to the conclusion that it is primarily the work of Truman Capote.’ The Committee upheld their decision to award joint credit with William Archibald on the grounds that he was the creator of the original stage play – and that many elements from the play remained in the film. ‘Primarily’ seems just: from the evidence of the first draft screenplay and Capote’s notebook rewrites, the proportions would seem to be nearer 60:40 in Capote’s favour, rather than 90:10. In any case, as Freddie Francis recalled, ‘Jack beavered away at the script until it became Jack Clayton’s The Innocents’. After receiving Capote’s handwritten dialogue, Clayton suggested some revisions to him. This must have been just before shooting began: • • • •

review whole of prologue cut-down Uncle scene in study Tortoise is called ‘Rupert’ If Anna is not to be used again – i.e. as a source of information on Quint – perhaps lose the exchange of glances at the end of the tortoise-tea-party scene • … Miss Giddens writing [to] her father. Do we need this? And aren’t we perhaps opening a can of beans [sic], remembering her father is a minister, so why doesn’t she turn to him later? • it’s a bit dangerous to list so many staff members we’ve never seen, nor will see.

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• … at the end of hide-and-seek game – description of Quint to be revised [presumably because of the casting of Peter Wyngarde: it became ‘dark curling hair’ and no moustache]. • reconsider possibility of dropping Uncle scene entirely • … scene between Mrs Grose and Miss Giddens immediately after dressing up (cut by Truman and combined with later scene about Quint and Miss Jessel after the Folly) has been reinserted because it is important Miss Giddens is reminded about Miss Jessel before seeing her at the lake, otherwise how does she recognise her immediately? • TOO MANY WORDS – particularly the children • possible use of dead nightingale in bedroom scene with Miles … so that we build up for the ending, some sort of feeling or fear about death [this became the ‘dead pigeon’ scene]. • we must have a sense of danger. Must frighten the audience. Starting from bedroom scene (as above) we must build up actual danger. • Could not Miss Jessel, instead of hanging herself have drowned herself in the lake? [an idea probably inspired by the Benjamin Britten opera]. • whole vicar scene needs re-working – he is too much of a ‘character’ – comedy angle hurts purpose of scene.33 As late as 20 February, a fortnight after principal photography began, Jack Clayton was still fine-tuning the shooting script, which was dated ‘February 1961’: delete the Uncle’s portrait in the drawing room; some of the children’s dialogue was ‘prissy and even twee’ – so cut the footprints in the bathroom; transpose ‘Don’t Flora – never beg’ from the Uncle’s visit to the schoolroom; prune some of the many explanatory scenes between Mrs Grose and Miss Giddens; and be very careful about repeating things we already know in these scenes – and also about making Mrs Grose too aggressive with the Governess (‘I shouldn’t be surprised if you do’). And on 26 February, he added that a new prologue was definitely needed – ‘this one is just

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not good enough’; the Uncle’s crack about children being ‘too sophisticated’ should go – as should Flora saying of her bedroom drapes ‘look, I’m a cobweb’; there should be more shots of Miss Giddens tossing and turning in bed, thinking about what is happening to her – to help with the montages in post-production; an extra ‘Rupert’ scene was needed, to remind the audience about the existence of the tortoise halfway through the story [this became the lakeside picnic scene in which Flora washes the creature and asks innocently if tortoises can swim … ‘I thought not’]; the Uncle’s second visit and the vicar scene should definitely go – the vicar had come over as ‘a character conjured up for the film’; and there should be more pointed references to Miss Giddens’s desperate wish to ‘save the children’ – ‘this is a film about … a woman’s passion, a narrowminded passion’, as well as about repressed desires. Some of the ‘cute dialogue, smart dialogue’ should make way for more warmth – especially in the relationship between Miles and Miss Giddens, Miss Giddens and Mrs Grose, and in the understanding of the Governess’s sexuality. And some moment of ‘dreadful violence’ was required at the end. Not the shears idea (which, as we have seen, Clayton had thought better of) but: The worst thing that can happen is … that at an exact moment to be calculated, Miles picks up his beloved Flora’s tortoise and flings it either through the glass window or into the statute or grotto thing, so that it sinks with bubbles in the water.

The final act had to be slow and static (the drawing room), with tension mounting (the conservatory), and tender and loving (the garden). Looking back on his contribution, Truman Capote reckoned it was his best movie script, and that it only contained one mistake. This concerned the decision to emphasise the blurred ink on Flora’s exercise book in the final schoolroom scene, so that it became Miss Jessel’s teardrop, still wet, fallen on a little blackboard with sums on it. Although the teardrop was transient – it faded away leaving no

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trace – there was a physical reality to it, and the idea was repeated with the raindrops that fall on the Governess’s face at the folly. It had been there since the Archibald/Mortimer script, though not expressed so explicitly. Pauline Kael reckoned that this was a high point of ambiguity – intriguing for the audience – and she loved it. Capote thought, on the contrary, that it was the one time the ambiguity was lost. The tear was too real. Capote never referred, in interviews, to his version of the sexual relationship between Quint and Miles, but he had made it a little more explicit than either the novella or play and added more sado-masochism to the mix. Also Miles’s arrival at the railway station is presented as the beginning of a courtship. This was not noticed by the American censor, though. Among the MPAA’s ‘censor notes’ on the script in Clayton’s papers, special attention was drawn to just four details: • Flora running naked from the bath – ‘to be handled with proper discretion’. • The words ‘obscenities’ and ‘filth’ as coming from a child’s mouth – which ‘may give offence’. ‘Urge and recommend’ their omission. • Might approve Miles’s line ‘… damned hussy …’. The next line ‘… damned dirty-minded bitch …’ unacceptable and cannot be approved. Miss Jessel’s teardrop on the blackboard – according to Truman Capote, his one mistake

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• Urge word ‘damned’ from Miles be deleted, as in ‘damned devil’ …34 And that was that. The hints – no more than that – of paedophilia and homosexuality were, apparently, not even noticed when the final cut was delivered to Fox – even though it now included, in one of the montages, a shot of Quint putting his arm around little Miles. But the studio head, Spyros Skouras, was worried about the ending, where Miss Giddens kisses the dead Miles on the lips in a very grown-up way. According to Jack Clayton: [He] called me from Hollywood … He said ‘You can’t finish a film like that!’ I asked him why and he spluttered ‘Because … because … it’s not done!’ Every two days for two solid weeks, he called begging me to change the ending, which I would not and did not do.35

This happened in mid-October 1961, after Skouras had heard comments about the early studio screenings. Just before shooting, it was decided to drop ‘O, bring me a bonnet’ as the song that links Flora, Miss Jessel, the musical box, the dancing and the lake; this would require a series of small dialogue changes throughout. A new song, specially written for The Innocents, was needed – whether for commercial reasons, because of copyright issues, or simply as a last-minute creative decision. Truman Capote supplied some new lyrics, still with a reference to roses: A lady came dancing, She danced at the fair A lady came dancing She danced with an air. A rare, rare lady with roses and rubies And red, red hair … She danced till the dawn And then she was gone.

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A lady so lovely, so lovely and rare. She danced through the night And was gone come the day … Gone come the light.36

In the end, though, the chosen lyrics would be written by librettist and screenwriter Paul Dehn, to a traditional melody rearranged by composer George Auric. They were closer in spirit to Tennyson’s Mariana (from the play), with its lovesick heroine, than to the folksy ‘O, bring me a bonnet’ or the even more folksy ‘A lady came dancing’. Dehn and Auric had worked together on Moulin Rouge (1952); Dehn had also written the lyrics for a song in I Am a Camera (1955), on which Jack Clayton had again been associate producer. His song was called ‘O Willow Waly’ – ‘Waly’ being a traditional English exclamation of sorrow or woe.37 It is a thirteen-line lament, sung by a heartbroken lady who remembers lying with her lover beneath a weeping willow tree, but who has since been abandoned – left alone to sing ‘O Willow Waly’ until her lover returns. The lament finishes on thoughts of death, shared with the willow tree that weeps in sympathy with the lady. It clearly relates to the scenes by the lakeside, and also indicates Flora’s precociousness in knowing such a morbid, adult song. It was sung in the film by the Scots folk singer Isla Cameron, imitating a child’s voice. Is it meant to be Flora singing, or Miss Jessel? Cameron had appeared, uncredited, in Room at the Top and played Anna in The Innocents. ‘O Willow Waly’ was issued as a record in March 1962. On 20 March 1961, six weeks into shooting, Jack Clayton wrote of the all-important slow dissolves and montages between scenes, about which he had been concerned since his very first notes to William Archibald: 1. Dissolves: Could we not have a third shot in each dissolve – as a background? … Also, has anyone ever done a dissolve like this, using a third shot as a meaning for the last scene, or as a suggestion for what is to come in the next one?

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2. Montages: [these] are of inestimable value. Either for a sort of montage where they are or to go here and there throughout the script as little silent significant pauses or as backgrounds to the dissolves or as dissolves over Miss Giddens in bed.38 An example was the insertion of ‘one beautiful big rose – as the third element in the dissolve’ between Miles’s ‘It was only the wind, my dear’ and Miss Giddens cutting flowers in the garden. These dissolves would be like mini-montages. One quadruple montage consisted, in superimposition, of Miss Jessel dancing with Flora, Quint putting his arm around Miles, a close-up of Miss Jessel’s mourning dress and, across the foreground, Miss Giddens asleep. Every single sequence in the film – with one exception: the shock-cut to the bathroom – was to finish on a dissolve; and the montages, especially those ‘over Miss Giddens in bed’, were to play an important role in varying ‘the tempo, atmosphere and tension’, as Jack Clayton had always hoped they would. Their function was, in part, as a visual equivalent of Henry James’s prose style – like ‘literary similes’ or symbolic links (roses, statues, curtains, smoke, whispering children, poplars in the wind, the miniature of Quint, memories). One dissolve moved from a semi-nude statue in a loincloth (‘are you afraid he’ll corrupt you?’) to Miles’s arrival at the railway station. They also contributed to the languid pace of the piece, even though it was delivered at 99 minutes.

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5 The Innocents Deborah Kerr had been cast as Miss Giddens since the project was green-lit. She owed Twentieth Century-Fox one more picture, on a contract. Although she was nearly forty, she could – as Clayton wrote – just about pass for twenty-eight. In a way, her casting made the ‘frustration’ theme – and the sense of moral rectitude – even stronger. Kerr had known Jack Clayton since she played Jenny Hill in Major Barbara (1940), her first film, on which he was one of three assistant directors – uncredited: his job was ‘to call me when I was needed on the set’. When I interviewed Deborah Kerr for a BBC television profile in 1986, she recalled that she had already played a governess in The King and I (1956) and a repressed spinster dominated by her mother in Separate Tables (1959), so she was well prepared for the role. Oh, and in Colonel Blimp (1943) she had been Edith, a young governess in Berlin. She had even played Martin Stephens’s mother, Grace, in Count Your Blessings (1959). In her view, her performance as Miss Giddens was ‘the best of my career’, and The Innocents never received at the time the recognition it deserved: I don’t speak just for myself, I speak for Jack Clayton’s brilliant direction, and Freddie Francis’s extraordinary lighting in black and white, and the atmosphere they created … I do remember saying to Jack ‘Do you think she really sees these spooks or is it all in her mind and is she actually just going round the bend a little bit, out of frustration?’ And he said ‘You make up your mind’ and I said ‘well that’s a big help!’ So I tried to play it that it could be taken either way, because it was written very cleverly in either way.39

It was up to the audience to judge, which would be part of the film’s ‘disturbing quality’. She remembered the film clearly as one of the most demanding in which she had ever appeared. As she was in

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One of the most demanding roles of her career: Deborah Kerr prepares, and is directed by Jack Clayton

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‘nearly every shot’, and almost the whole story was seen from her point of view, she worked every single day of the twelve-week shooting schedule, between February and the beginning of May 1961, always wearing heavy Victorian dresses and under unusually heavy Brute lights on the interiors at Shepperton. The heat was ferocious, she recalled with a shudder, and for the close-ups the camera had to be almost on top of her. And Henry James had not left many clues for her to work with: he deliberately did not provide the sorts of detail an actress needs. The Governess could be interpreted as ‘a completely normal human being who found herself beset by evil powers’. She agreed that the ‘frustration’ theme worked well for her. As we have seen, Flora Robson had played Miss Giddens on stage at the age of fifty, but in Kerr’s case, ‘the woman was younger and more physically attractive’, so her deep frustration was credible as well – leaving the question open as to whether ‘the whole thing was nurtured in her own imagination’ and the entire film was actually about the Governess’s sexuality. Kerr was particularly effective when catching sight of the ghosts just before the audience did: in Penelope Gilliat’s memorable phrase, ‘her lips drew back like a horse that smells fire’.40 Over the course of the film, Deborah Kerr presented inexperience, then excitement, then anxiety, then doubt, then fascination, then fear, and finally terror. She particularly enjoyed the scenes where her neurosis was contrasted with the feet-on-the ground common sense of Mrs Grose, played by Megs Jenkins, who by then had come to specialise in plumpish, down-to-earth character parts of this kind – usually Welsh (such as in Tiger Bay [1959]), although she was in fact born in Birkenhead. In the novella, Henry James had referred to ‘the blessings of a want of imagination’ – her surname was not idly chosen – but in The Innocents her character was more nuanced: she starts off by believing in Miss Giddens – in a cautious and deferential way – but slowly begins to have her doubts, at which point the Governess feels she has to exercise her authority over her. From being strict with the children (‘Stuff and nonsense’), Mrs Grose

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comes to be their protector. After all, she has much more life experience than Miss Giddens. Jack Clayton had been concerned all along about giving the children too many lines. ‘If the children did not work in the film, the film was gone.’41 He was auditioning until two weeks before filming began. As it turned out, he need not have worried. Where the character of Miles was concerned, he only tested four hopefuls, before deciding on Martin Stephens (b.1949), who had already appeared in The Hellfire Club (1961), Count Your Blessings and Village of the Damned (1960) as the creepy, blonde-haired leader of a group of children touched by an alien force. Stephens, back to his original hair colour, seemed just right for the combination of angelic looks, gentlemanly demeanour and – as Clayton put it – ‘behaving with dignity without being priggish’; an absurdly grown-up child with a very sinister sidelong look. At the end of the dressing-up scene, instead of throwing open the French windows, he turns to look at Miss Giddens – and seems genuinely frightening. Stephens’s mother was on the set with him a lot of the time. After auditioning ‘hundreds’ of little girls, Clayton selected Pamela Franklin (also b.1949) for Flora. ‘Pamela stood right out. I never even actually tested her for the part.’42 She had never appeared in a film before and was training to be a dancer. Again, she seemed to combine the angelic with the precocious, the self-possessed and the spooky. When asked at the time how he achieved two such remarkable and contrasting performances from the children – Miles the soldier, Flora the flower – Clayton said that all he told them in advance was that they were to appear in a ghost story ‘and they adored that’. He did not want them to come to any psychological harm through reading the whole script, so he would only show them a page or two at a time, the day before filming. Pamela Franklin has more recently confirmed this: He would give me the next day’s pages. That’s all I ever saw. I never saw the picture as a whole until I was sixteen. So I hadn’t a clue. He just wanted her to be a little girl. That was it. No undertones.

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Creepily precocious angels: Jack Clayton directs the remarkable children Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin

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She also recalled that Clayton never talked down, but got involved in what we had to say – always seemed to be interested, though I’m sure it was very uninteresting for him … If he didn’t like what you were doing, he wouldn’t let the whole set know … he’d take you by the shoulders and lead you off and say ‘I think maybe you’d like to try this …’43

Editor Jim Clark later recalled that Clayton seemed fascinated by the world of children: ‘he had no father, never had children of his own – anything to do with children interested him’.44 For the part of the Uncle, it was key that the actor was charismatic enough to cast a shadow over the entire story. But it was decided late in the day that the Harley Street scenes at the beginning would be his sole appearance. At one point, Jack Clayton asked Cary Grant, whom he met at the studio when Grant was over in England to film The Grass Is Greener in 1960. Grant was apparently intrigued by the idea, but would only consider the proposition if the Uncle returned at the end, bookending the film. This was impossible. As Clayton was to remember, he was ‘probably the only director [in 1960–1] who ever said “no” to Cary Grant!’45 Instead, he cast Michael Redgrave, who had recently played ‘H. J.’ on the stage in his own adaptation of The Aspern Papers, and the cameo part of ‘The General’ – a ruthless Michael Collins figure – in Shake Hands with the Devil (1959), which comprised one big scene and two short ones and still managed to permeate the entire film. As Stanislavski famously wrote, ‘there are no small parts – only small actors’. Variety (6 December 1961) wondered why such a well-known stage and film performer had been wasted on a ‘guest spot’. ‘Since he disappears after the first few minutes, it might have been wiser to use a lesser figure. As it is, audiences may be expecting Redgrave to play an important role in the plot, which doesn’t happen.’ But that was, of course, the point. He does play an important role in the plot. Henry James described the Governess’s impressions of the Uncle as

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‘handsome and bold and pleasant, offhand and gay and kind’. In the film, he is not quite so kind, but charmingly callous and smooth when talking about the children and the death of the previous governess. In a last-minute production touch, he wears a white rose in his buttonhole, a symbol which will often be reprised visually both inside and outside Bly. Michael Redgrave was cast ‘at the last possible moment’.46 For the ghosts, Clayton cast the Australian-born stage actress Clytie Jessop, in her first film role, as Miss Jessel – she would later work with Freddie Francis again on Nightmare (1964) and Torture Garden (1967) – and the dark, saturnine Peter Wyngarde as Quint. Variety (20 March 1961) reported that the young Peter O’Toole had agreed to appear in The Innocents – presumably as Quint – but he was released, to become Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Wyngarde had recently starred in an adaptation of South (1959), the first television drama to deal with an explicitly homosexual theme. Despite his public image as a Don Juan figure, it was widely known in the business that he was gay. Clayton’s scouts tried hard to find a suitable house and gardens as a location for Bly; he eventually came across photos of the National Trust gardens of Sheffield Park House near Haywards Heath, Sussex – with its four lakes, on separate levels – in the pages of a magazine. The house had been remodelled by architect James Wyatt in the 1770s, in the then-fashionable Gothick style, complete with turrets, pointed cathedral-like windows and a pavilion – like a better-built version of Strawberry Hill. The gardens – vistas, lakes, waterfalls, avenues of trees, bridges, rich foliage – had originally been designed with advice from ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphrey Repton. There was a small railway station nearby, built in Victorian times to take wood from the estate to the coast, a suitably imposing castellated main gate and a local church. ‘The house was just what I had been looking for,’ Clayton was to recall, ‘particularly because of the landscaping.’47 The rhododendrons, introduced in 1910, were a bit anachronistic but looked impressive. The stepping stones where

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the Governess meets Flora, the bridge she crosses and the folly exteriors (specially built) were filmed at the western end of Middle Lake; Miss Jessel’s appearance in the reeds was shot on Lower Woman’s Way Pond and matted into the view from the folly. The railway station and entrance gate of Sheffield Park House, and the nearby church, were also used. The interior of the house is more classical, much less flamboyant. In any case, it was occupied, and was not used. Instead, production designer Wilfred Shingleton (or ‘Shingy’) constructed interior sets – as well as the front terrace, folly, ivycovered doorway, topless tower, turret top, frontage of Bly and the conservatory – in Pugin neo-Gothic churchy style on sound stages at Shepperton: dark panelling; a round skylight; arched and mullioned windows; a medieval revival chair; a deer-hunting tapestry in the stairwell; a gloomy portrait of a mother and child; a large eighteenth-century Reynolds-style portrait (instead of the Uncle); Creating heavy rainfall at the Folly set on location near one of the lakes in the gardens of Sheffield House

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an abundance of woodcarving; cobwebby drapes over the beds; a cluttered attic complete with nodding clown, rocking horse and harp; Staffordshire ceramics for Mrs Grose; stuffed birds and a globe in the schoolroom; sepulchral corridors; and for the Uncle’s Harley Street residence ‘a moneyed masculinity’. All of this evoked the taste of the decade following the Great Exhibition, much mocked in the early 1950s by Modernists for being too ornate, but coming back into fashion by the time The Innocents was made – thanks to the likes of John Betjeman and the more traditionalist wing of the design establishment. Shingleton also designed the bushes – and sculptures – where the Governess picks roses, the ring of statues in the garden, and even the willow tree overlooking the folly – 3,000 paper leaves stuck on handmade branches. One challenge was to present the changing seasons at Bly – from ‘high summer’ to autumn – even though filming took place in mid-February. Another was to show as much visual variety in the house as possible – a long way from the single-set drawing room of the play. Jack Clayton kept a large white plaster model of Bly House in his office for several months. Shingleton had designed Beat the Devil and most recently Tunes of Glory (1960), which was mainly set in a regimental barracks within a Scottish castle. He had won an Academy Award in 1947 for his art direction of the expressionist/Victorian sets for David Lean’s Great Expectations. Jack Clayton had also commissioned artist John Piper to make a series of watercolour sketches as visual concepts. As we have seen, Piper had designed Benjamin Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw for the stage, in which the front door of the house, the terraces, tower and gardens were combined in a single set with different facets, and revealed at various stages of the play. In 1960, he had also provided drawings and watercolours to illustrate Britten’s many orchestral interludes when Screw was broadcast over two nights by AssociatedRediffusion – the first full-length screening of an opera on British commercial television. These images included foliage, flowers, birds, butterflies and water – some figurative, some more abstract.

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For Clayton, Piper painted two watercolours of a neo-Gothic Bly House from different angles, and others of the conservatory and temple-like Gothic folly (a characteristic image), both surrounded by a profusion of foliage. The folly is very similar to Wilfred Shingleton’s design which was to be placed next to the lake in Sheffield Park. John Piper was at the centre of British neo-romanticism in the postwar period, with his threatened antiquarian exteriors and sense of an Eden or Arcadia about to be lost, of a British landscape that has shed its innocence – just the right atmosphere for Henry James’s novella. It had been decided that the story should be set between 1853 and 1870. The costumes, dating from the earlier part of this period, were designed by Motley, the theatre and film design group consisting of Margaret Harris and her sister Sophia/Sophie Devine (based in London), and Elizabeth Montgomery (based in New York).48 They specialised in detailed historical costumes ‘in original settings’, and Sophia Harris was responsible for most of the group’s film work. She had recently designed for the stage Michael Redgrave’s The Aspern Papers, The Magistrate and A Man for All Seasons, and had created the costumes – inspired by Cruickshank’s illustrations – for David Lean’s Great Expectations as well as for Captain Boycott a year later. Sophia had also designed the costumes for the London production of William Archibald’s play The Innocents, while Elizabeth Montgomery had worked on the New York production, both under the collective name ‘Motley’. Sophia Harris saw her brief for the film as ‘giving an elegant face to the atmosphere of Gothic terror’: so, Miss Giddens’s ‘interview dress’ (grey suiting with black velvet trim), her elaborate ‘arrival’ dress’ (an ample bustle skirt with crinoline and corseted top) and her ‘picnic dress’ (spotted muslin with ribbons) were all contrasted with the plain woollen black dress – just like Miss Jessel’s, with whom she is beginning to identify – which she wears towards the end of the film; and all were in keeping with the overblown natural surroundings. Maybe Miss Giddens is somewhat overdressed – in fashion-plate garments – for a vicar’s daughter from a small

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Sophia Harris’s costume designs: Miss Giddens’s grey interview and muslin picnic dresses; her black woollen dress – deliberately resembling Miss Jessel’s mourning outfit

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Hampshire vicarage, and maybe her hair is over-coiffed with scarcely a strand out of place except at bedtime. But the dress is for the star as well as the character; it makes a series of strong silhouettes and gives Miss Giddens extra charisma, bringing with it memories of The King and I: you almost expect Deborah Kerr to sing the opening bars of ‘Getting to Know You’ when first she meets Flora. She walks through the gardens of Bly – thanks to the crinoline – as if she is floating on air. Stills were issued of Deborah Kerr being dressed for the first folly scene. Jack Clayton insisted on period shoes being worn – even when the characters walked on wooden floors – while the sound-man kept on requesting ‘more felt!’ Clayton often liked to say, in interviews, that about a week before shooting started on 6 February, he suddenly noticed that his contract with Fox stipulated ‘CinemaScope’: he tried to change the terms of the contract, without success. It makes a good story. In fact, his notes confirm that he was thinking hard about how to ‘experiment’ with the letterbox image – and how to use it most effectively for an intimate chamber piece about ghosts – for at least a couple of months before shooting began. Fox had patented CinemaScope, and Freddie Francis had used the process for Sons and Lovers the previous year – winning an Academy Award for his monochrome cinematography. He had been friends with Jack Clayton since working as camera operator on Beat the Devil, and recalled to me that early in The Innocents pre-production Fox said, ‘this is the film – we’ll be doing it in CinemaScope’.49 But there is no doubt that the process presented big challenges, as Clayton predicted from the outset. As the format allowed for very little depth of field when shooting interiors, Francis had to beam an unusual amount of highwattage Brute lights into the middle of the image, so that he could take the camera down a stop or two and create depth of focus. There was so much light on the set that Deborah Kerr took to turning up in sunglasses, and Francis was worried that they might be responsible for burning down Shepperton! ‘All the available lights

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from the whole of Shepperton were pointing at that set.’ But the effect – especially in the scenes involving Miss Giddens and Mrs Grose – was almost reminiscent of Citizen Kane (1941). ‘We put a lot of light on the faces’, Freddie Francis recalled, ‘they were illuminated, strongly lit and “innocent” – it was particularly impressive on Deborah’s face’. Then there was the narrow width of the image. Francis wanted to create the impression that things half-seen may or may not be present on the perimeter of the frame – at the corner of the retina. So he created shadows with camera filters covering each side of the frame ‘to close the picture in’. The filters were variations on the single colour filters used by black-and-white photographers: The focus was right in the middle, and the edges were brought in. The photographic filters were made by two old ladies who ran a company Almost Kane-like: depth of focus achieved with ‘a lot of light on the faces’ of Megs Jenkins and Deborah Kerr at Shepperton

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making filters. And we even hand-painted one or two filters on set, painted on glass and put in front of the lens.50

The filters on the edges of the frames were coloured in a range from yellow to dark red, resulting in a clear area in the centre and areas of increasing darkness out towards the edges. Ghosts as peripheral vision. Francis’s favourite sequence in the film – and editor Jim Clark’s as well – was when Deborah Kerr goes upstairs and wanders around the corridors at night, flickering candle in hand, lured by the ghostly whispering voices of Quint and Miss Jessel. Or so she thinks: maybe it is just the children giggling. ‘Love me’/‘You’re hurting me’ – a reference to what she said to Miles in the attic – ‘Knock before you enter’ as a door slams shut. The sequence begins with the petal of a rose falling onto her Bible, followed by the sound of the piano, then whispering and laughter heard in the flames of the fire. ‘The candles had to light the character and be the light source’, as well as keeping continuity while Miss Giddens anxiously walks about. The solution was to use special candles with four or five wicks, and dimmer switches as she wanders down the corridors, creating a circular ‘tunnel of light’ framed by underexposed shadows. It took a great deal of care to match the shots, and the candlewicks burned quickly, but the technique saved time and looked very effective. If he had used studio lighting for each set-up, explained Francis, it would have taken far too long. Besides, this way the camera could move with the Governess, ‘it could flow’. There is even a moment in the corridor where the viewer thinks he/she has seen something out of the corner of the eye; in fact, it is a few frames of film with the clapperboard in shot. Clayton decided to keep it in. As Jim Clark put it, ‘little bits of film never intended for use can be very helpful indeed’.51 At other times, the image is framed by pillars, details of beds, sculptures, candles – verticles on either side of the frame. In these various ways, the letterbox – against all the odds – becomes intimate and even spooky.

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The visuals of the interiors evoke filmic references too: La Belle et la bête (1946), with its billowing curtains and symbolic rose; The Fallen Idol (1948) for the child’s-eye view of a game of hide and seek; Dead of Night for the haunted antique mirror which reflects desire, passion and jealousy when uptight individuals look into it; Vertigo for the steps in the tower; The Queen of Spades (1949, which Clayton associate-produced), with its haunting by the old countess; Citizen Kane for the shadowy Great Hall of Xanadu and the stone fireplace as proscenium arch – plus, of course, the deep focus; and A Place in the Sun (1951) for the dissolves. For the exteriors shot in Sheffield Park, Francis aimed for an unusual brightness and clarity – for ‘high summer’ – to highlight the overripe atmosphere, and to contrast the gilded surface with the decay and corruption that lay behind it. Behind every beautiful thing Ghosts as peripheral vision: Deborah Kerr with multi-wick candles and, down the dark corridor, a few frames with the clapperboard in shot (centre)

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is a sense of decay. When Miss Giddens first arrives, she is evidently relieved and excited to discover how glittering and fairytale-like Bly is – unlike her gloomy imaginings. Francis even painted some of the trees, so they looked brighter than they really were in February. The camera tracks behind the trees, as if someone is watching Miss Giddens. Later, the weather will change to wind, heavy rain and thunder. Jim Clark, whose third film as a fully-fledged editor this was (he’d edited two for Stanley Donen in 1960), remembers that part of his job was to make sure – by choosing the right take – that the children did not seem to be overplaying their roles.52 Another was to work with sound editor Peter Musgrave on the hypersensitive soundtrack, where the sound design is used almost expressionistically: the fluttering and cooing of pigeons, the buzzing of flies and bees, the silences followed by the cawing of crows, the shriek of a peacock, the creak of a clown’s nodding head, the musical box, running water in the conservatory. A particular challenge, and an important aspect of the visual language of the film, was to create the montages of long dissolves and superimpositions – up to four images at a time, as we have seen – working on a British Acmade Acmiola machine with a bullseye magnifying glass, viewing a tiny squeezed anamorphic image. The aim was to link the scene ending, via a ‘floating’ image or two, with the subsequent scene – and to create a rich, languid rhythm, as if life at Bly is moving at a different pace to life everywhere else. The filmic equivalent of overripe prose. Critic Penelope Houston visited the set at Shepperton and was told about ‘the use of dissolves burning out into white instead of fading into the usual black’.53 Although the ‘prowling’ scene was Clark’s favourite, he was not entirely happy with the sound editing: too much electronic reverb, echo, slamming doors, creaking floorboards and distorted orgasmic laughter – state of the art at the time, and Clayton was ‘seduced by the thought of it’, but ‘it has a feeling of Hammer Horror which I think we were trying to avoid’.54 Jack Clayton never visited the cutting rooms. He preferred to see the reels in the studio viewing theatre each evening and give notes

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to his editor. He was, apparently, ‘a consummate film-maker – light touch on set, quite ferocious off set’:55 tense, chain-smoking, insecure and short-fused when not in public. Clark remembers him being particularly exercised about how the ghosts would appear to the audience. They were to be presented as palpable creatures, sometimes appearing in broad sunlight. How to make them seem sinister and half-seen, without resorting to cinematic clichés? The subtle contrast between Quint’s first appearance on the tower and subsequent, more detailed appearance in Miss Giddens’s nightmare was achieved by ‘filming Quint the actor, with and without flare’. Miss Jessel in blackest mourning staring in the reeds involved the actress standing in a boat – as if she was resting on the water – and in the first folly scene optically projecting the results as if she was in a different dimension. This was the effect that so impressed Pauline Kael – like watching a memory. But Quint’s face at the French window continued to worry Clayton. Various options were considered: a zoom, a shock-cut, a camera movement. The scene was reshot several times. In the end, the problem was solved by placing Peter Wyngarde on a trolley on wheels – so he glides into the frame, towards the window, by a statue and fades away. Clayton was concerned that Quint’s appearances might still be too obvious, too Hammer Films, whereas the appearances of Miss Jessel were much more effective because they just seemed to happen. This was his idea of what a ghost should look like. Not quite complete. Quint was more predatory, animal-like, and had to impinge more aggressively. Jim Clark recalls that the cut in the finished film – Quint at the window – was partly based on the moment in Lean’s Great Expectations when Pip first catches sight of the convict Magwitch. The little boy looks up … and sees the face. Clayton, though, was still not entirely convinced. He wanted a sense of incompleteness about his ghosts. Until the final sequence – and in a reversal of the usual cinematic grammar – every time we see the ghosts, we see Miss Giddens’s reaction first. It is as if she is in some way creating the ghosts for us. She is not seen with a ghost in the

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same shot, until the schoolroom with Miss Jessel and the second lakeside sequence – by which time she is becoming Miss Jessel, just as Miles is becoming Quint. In the final sequence, though, there is a shot over Quint’s left shoulder as he raises his left hand. He is standing on a plinth, as if one of the garden sculptures has come to life. And we, rather than Miss Giddens, are looking at him from above. This shot seems to break the subjective convention, one of Pauline Kael’s ‘deliberate mystifications’. And yet, when Miles says ‘You devil!’ he is looking not at Quint but at the Governess. Clayton later said: ‘I hated the way I had to do Quint. My idea of a ghost is much more like Miss Jessel. But Quint couldn’t be done that way. He had to be very dramatic and powerful – madly overacted …’ He must have been particularly stung by the reviews which accused The Innocents of not being frightening enough. Little musical ‘clues’ – electronic whirrs and muffled cymbals – were laid in to herald the arrival of sinister happenings on screen, in a quiet, understated way: viewers expecting James Bernard’s crashing chords, Hammer-style, would have been disappointed by this ‘strange music’. Georges Auric wrote the score. He had worked with Clayton on Moulin Rouge and The Bespoke Overcoat, had scored La Belle et la bête as well as being Jean Cocteau’s house-composer, and in a long career had moved from the Parisian avant-garde to Ealing comedies. To judge by Jack Clayton’s notes, however, the director/composer relationship on The Innocents was strained.56 At successive meetings held between the middle of June and the end of July 1961, they discussed how to create an atmosphere that was ‘not disquieting or menacing but weird and erotic’, how to avoid being too ‘sinister and menacing – the whole point here should be to mislead the audience’; and how to save up to the end ‘music [that] really pulls your nerves out on what is going to happen’. Clayton did not seem satisfied with any of the results: This is the most important thing in the film – she has been imagining all these horrors – and here is the boy who explains them logically. The music

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‘He had to be very dramatic and powerful – madly overacted …’: Quint (Peter Wyngarde) in the climactic scenes, ending on the controversial shot from over his left shoulder

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should represent the Quint/Jessel horror translated, though, into what is, in fact, the living image of what she has to contend with.

Even the finished score was not quite what Clayton had hoped for. Auric was no longer available – the process had dragged on so long that the director commissioned Lambert Williamson (as ‘musical director’) to re-orchestrate what Auric had written.57 The rearrangement of the ‘O Willow Waly’ song was the composer’s most successful contribution. In 1962, Georges Auric gave up writing music for films, to become Director of the National Opera in Paris. The marketing campaign for The Innocents was to stress the importance of seeing the film ‘from the very beginning’. But the very beginning was, until late in the schedule, a bone of contention. Jack Clayton later said: ‘That credit sequence caused me more headache and heartache than the rest of the film put together. We did it after the rest of the shooting was completed.’58 The second part of the ‘funeral’ sequence – in which Deborah Kerr walks back from the church in the rain, with an umbrella, past the folly, across the bridge, along the terrace and into Bly House – had been filmed, and stills of it were to be issued. She goes into her bedroom, her bags packed, finds the child’s drawing of a pony, then writes to the Uncle: ‘When I first came to see you in answer to your advertisement, you said to me …’ Flashback. The first part of the sequence – people in the churchyard shunning Miss Giddens as they let her through the lychgate – does not appear to have been filmed. Instead, the shooting script was rewritten (dated ‘February 1961’), presumably by Truman Capote: Over the blank screen the sound of a nightingale. Titles The sound of sobbing, faint at first but gradually increasing, mingles with the nightingale’s song. Then, very slowly the hands of Miss Giddens enter frame from below, pressed together as though in prayer. Still very slowly, they begin to open, until they are fully extended in an agony of supplication, as the

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sobbing continues … Hands slowly clasp together – and the tear-stained, ravaged face of Miss Giddens enters the screen in profile. Camera pans slowly until, as the titles end, Miss Giddens is seen, facing camera, in close-up. Over this we hear – as though echoing in memory – the voice of Miss Giddens: ‘They need affection … love … someone who will belong to them, and to whom they will belong … More than anything I love children … more than anything. All I want to do is to save the children – not destroy them—’ Uncle’s voice: ‘Miss Giddens, may I ask you a somewhat personal question?’59

This was, Clayton noted, ‘almost an exact duplicate of a shot I have at the very end of the film, so you’re not certain if she is lost in her own thoughts or is in reality’. In post-production, it was decided to open the film with a child’s voice singing ‘O Willow Waly’ against an inky black, featureless background instead of the usual blaring Fox fanfare, which would have killed the atmosphere stone dead. Then the logo. Then hands in prayer. The new opening sequence, with its reprised fragments of dialogue from subsequent scenes with the Uncle, and with Mrs Grose, reveals that the whole film will be seen from the Governess’s point of view. It is happening after the story is over. Is she in church? Is she praying or begging or raving? Is this about guilt or justification? Tenderness or torment? Is it really happening, or is it in her head? Is she reaching out, or does she want affection? When she says ‘belong’, does she mean ‘possess’? This is

The original opening sequence: Miss Giddens arrives back at Bly after Miles’s funeral …

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the equivalent of Henry James’s prologue, in which he introduces a narrator whose interpretation of the written material will be an expression of himself. An untrustworthy narrator. The whole film will be a question mark, and it is already clear from the credits that this will be no ordinary ghost story, to be taken at face value. Other changes happened during the filming, some in consultation with Capote:60 the white rose in the Uncle’s buttonhole was added; the reflection of Flora in the water superseded that of Miss Giddens; Flora saying to Miss Giddens, ‘I’d love to do housework – Mrs Grose won’t let me. I’m a lady’, was removed; half the bathroom sequence was cut; Miles would now give Miss Giddens a posy of flowers at the station, which Flora would then chuck out of the carriage window; Miles’s lines about the Governess wanting to ‘play ghost’ were cut, as were Flora’s remarks about ‘the pretty lady … And the rewritten one: in the finished film, with her hands ‘as though in prayer’

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getting wet’ when it rains – both were thought to be too ‘cute … smart’; there would be even more emphasis on the white roses, in dissolves; Miles’s exhibition of pony-riding would become more ‘violent action’, to contrast with previous scenes; there would be extra shots of Miss Giddens in bed, restless; Miles’s hymn-intoning during the dressing-up game would be pruned; roses placed next to Miss Giddens’s Bible; Miss Giddens throwing down the posy of flowers by Mary Jessel’s grave – mirroring Flora’s earlier gesture; Miles would no longer draw ‘a circle on the glass’ of the conservatory. For censor cover, ‘you damned dirty-minded bitch’ would become ‘hag’, and ‘you damned devil. Where?’ would become ‘you devil’. Miss Jessel’s appearance in the reeds would change. Instead of trailing vines and creepers blowing across her body, there would be ‘the tall reeds moved by the wind … moist from the waterfall behind her and the reflection of the sunlight from the lake’, responding to the location. The final schoolroom scene, though, would become rather less ambiguous, more complete: Camera pans with [Miss Giddens] as she moves, as though hypnotised, to the desk. There is no longer anyone there but we still hear the sound of the sobbing. It stops as Miss Giddens looks down at the desk. On it lies a slate [an open exercise book] showing Flora’s round childish writing. The chalk [ink] is still blurred in places as though by tears. Miss Giddens touches one of the stains with her finger. It is still wet.

This was the scene which Capote thought was a mistake. The handwriting on the slate, in the finished film, did not look very childish. Miles would now flip at some ‘rabbit-shaped jelly’ in a provocative manner, and laugh, as he says to the Governess, ‘I’ll protect you’. He would throw Rupert the tortoise through the conservatory window ‘with a loud crash of glass’. Quint’s final appearance would now involve a ‘whip pan across the statues – to reveal the figure of Quint – looming menacingly’. And at the very

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end, instead of the walk back to the house and the pigeons, an inky black screen, Deborah Kerr leaning backwards, the sound of a nightingale: and ‘very slowly, the hands of Miss Giddens enter the frame from below, pressed together as though in prayer’. The end of The Innocents would be its beginning. It would be about ‘a woman’s passion’.

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6 Release The Innocents opened at the Carlton Haymarket, London, on 24 November 1961, transferring to the Rialto, Leicester Square, on 4 January 1962. It opened in Los Angeles at the 861-seat El Rey Cinema – which felt arthouse – on 15 December, and in New York City on 24 December 1961 at the 1,500-seat Criterion and the 370-seat 72nd Street Playhouse – one mainstream, one arthouse. There had been no previews for a paying audience in America, but according to Fox executives speaking to Jack Clayton on 12 October 1961, early reactions in private screenings had been mixed – with negative comments about the ‘ambiguous ending’. Which was why Spyros Skouras wanted Clayton to change it.61 Skouras (in LA) and Joe Moskowitz (in New York) had suggested that a sneak preview be arranged in London, to test the water there. Clayton had reacted angrily to this suggestion, saying that this was likely to prove precisely nothing: ‘if you are worried about it Spyros – shelve it and don’t show it’. He was convinced, he added on 20 October, that ‘public excitement’ would more effectively be generated by positive press reactions, and that for this reason bookings in London, then New York, should precede Los Angeles: ‘am convinced isolated L.A. press without prior support of London and New York reviews will be a wasted effort’. Everyone agreed that it would be preferable if the film was booked into a Los Angeles theatre in December, to qualify for the Academy Awards, and also to schedule it in New York that same month to qualify for the New York Critics Award. Public relations man Arthur P. Jacobs suggested inviting celebrities to certain screenings and then giving the impression that all seats had been allocated, thus creating ‘word of mouth excitement’. In the event, it opened in LA a week before New York.

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The studio was unsure about how to market the film. Should it be presented as ‘a story of evil, evil that spreads its foul stain across the soul’, asking the question, ‘what is fear? Fear is a footstep following in the night … the sound of breathing in an empty room … a rustling in the shadows …’ Or as a study in psychology rather than a ghost story: ‘What is loneliness? Loneliness is an echo in the hopeful heart … a door where no one enters … a silence at noontime … a song unheard … a smile unreturned.’ From the week before opening onwards, the American advertising campaign combined ‘A strange new experience in shock’ with a tagline written in spooky lettering – or spoken by a Vincent Price sound-alike in the trailer and on short TV ads (‘Do they ever return to possess the living?’); and on some press ads, the words ‘Depravity’, ‘Aberrations’, ‘Evils’, ‘Whisper’ and ‘Witchcraft’ were written around Deborah Kerr’s face. Some upright press ads also asked, ‘Did she really see these evil spirits … or was she really the love-starved spinster “the innocents” said she was?’62 The American trailer added, ‘there has never been a ghost story created especially for the adult movie-goer until The Innocents … perhaps the most controversial concept in human relationships ever presented on screen’. All advertisements ‘forewarned’ audiences to ‘see this picture from the very beginning to the mind-stunning end’. Most featured a monochrome photograph of Deborah Kerr, giving a sidelong glance – like the equivalent image of Janet Leigh on the Psycho poster of the year before (the forewarning, too, resembled Psycho’s). Fox did not have the money to spend on an extensive marketing campaign, and did not have the commitment either. The studio would announce a $22.5 million loss for 1961–2, the largest ever recorded in Hollywood, mainly because it was carrying the spiralling costs of Cleopatra (1963). Initial American reviews were on the whole respectful, New York taking the film more seriously than LA, as Jack Clayton had predicted. British broadsheet critics welcomed the atmosphere of uncertainty and imprecision, while showbiz correspondents treated the film, in the words of Hollywood Reporter, as ‘a ghost story for

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grownups, a spook show for sophisticates’. According to Jim Clark, Jack Clayton was so wound up at the time of a press show for magazine critics in Soho Square that he furiously smashed to smithereens the model of Bly House in his office. Business was so-so for the first week, then tailed off in most cinemas. On 9 January 1962, S. Charles Einfeld of Fox advertising and publicity wrote to Clayton: I would be less than honest with you if I didn’t register my slight disappointment in the business being done … compared to the excellence of the picture and the reviews. I’m not at all sure that The Innocents gets the same high praise in word of mouth comment from the public it has received from the professional reviewer. This may be because of the picture’s ending which does not ‘spell out’ the story but leaves considerable [sic] to the imagination and the viewer can draw his own conclusion.63

That ‘mind-stunning end’ again. In Philadelphia, Einfeld added, the film had not done well, and had fared only slightly better in Los Angeles. ‘These contradictions are what make motion pictures such a scientific business!!’ On release to key American cities in late January, it gave a lacklustre performance. By the beginning of March, The Innocents was appearing in LA neighbourhood cinemas on the lower half of a double bill. Fox only released eleven films in the whole of this period. Of the eleven, The Innocents fared the worst. In the USA, the overall distributors’ rentals on first release came to some $1.4 million – a long way from break-even. Total earnings were around $2.5 million. Interviewed in 1983, Jack Clayton claimed that his film eventually ‘made over $25 million’ – which was more than a tad optimistic … It did not achieve any Oscar nominations in 1962, although it was entered for Cannes, where it competed with A Taste of Honey (1961) and A Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962). Perhaps this is where Truffaut first saw the film. The Innocents was nominated for two BAFTAS – it won neither – but Archibald and Capote won an ‘Edgar’ from the

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Mystery Writers of America for Best Screenplay. This was not enough to boost business. At the time, Jack Clayton had said that his aim was ‘to keep the audience off balance’, and that he was determined to distance himself from the clichés of cheap horror. He had certainly succeeded in both. Clytie Jessop sent him a congratulatory telegram signed ‘Jessel – in Hades’. Deborah Kerr’s retrospective verdict was that the biggest shock of all was how seriously overlooked and underrated the film had been.64

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Notes 1 Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), pp. 163–72. All subsequent quotes by Kael in this introduction are from her review. 2 David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (London: Little, Brown, 2002), p. 162. 3 Quoted in Neil Sinyard, Jack Clayton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 81. 4 Notebook entry for 12 January 1895, in Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (eds), The Complete Notebooks of Henry James (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 109. For useful background to the writing of The Turn of the Screw, see Henry James [1898], The Turn of the Screw, ed. Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren. Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1999), pp. 111–23 (hereafter Norton Critical Edition); and Colm Tóibín, All a Novelist Needs – Colm Tóibín on Henry James (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 38–44. 5 Roger Clarke, A Natural History of Ghosts (London: Particular Books, 2012), pp. 35–66. 6 From the Preface to the 1908 New York edition of Henry James’s collected works, reprinted in Esch and Warren (eds), Norton Critical Edition, pp. 123–4. 7 A well-presented text of The Turn of the Screw is in Esch and Warren (eds), Norton Critical Edition, pp. 1–93. 8 For early reviews of the novella, see Esch and Warren (eds), Norton Critical Edition, pp. 149–60, and for Henry James’s letters on the subject, pp. 113–18. All subsequent critics’

quotes in this chapter are from these sources. 9 Cited in Tóibín, All a Novelist Needs, p. 38. 10 Reprinted in Esch and Warren (eds), Norton Critical Edition, pp. 123–9. 11 Ibid., pp. 161–8. 12 Edmund Wilson, ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’, in Edmund Wilson – Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Library of America, 2007), pp. 90–132. All subsequent quotes are from this article and its revised version. 13 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, in The Standard Complete Psychological Works, vol. XVII (1917–19), trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage/The Hogarth Press, 2001), pp. 241–3. 14 On the researches of Hughlings Jackson, see J. Purdon Martin, ‘Neurology in Fiction – The Turn of the Screw’, British Medical Journal, vol. 4, 22 December 1973. 15 For the critical reactions to Edmund Wilson’s article, see Esch and Warren (eds), Norton Critical Edition, pp. 173–86, 191–2. 16 The typescript is in the Jack Clayton Archive, in the BFI National Archive’s Special Collections, at JCL 8–8–1. 17 William Archibald, The Innocents (New York: Samuel French, 1950 and 1951). All my quotations from the play are from this edition. 18 Myfanwy Piper, ‘Writing for Britten’, in David Herbert (ed.), The Operas of Benjamin Britten (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979); and Francis Spalding, John Piper/Myfanwy Piper – Lives in Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 324–43 and

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430–1. Subsequent Myfanwy Piper quotes come from these sources. 19 Cited in Stephen Rebello, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, Cinefantastique, vol. 13 no. 5, June/July 1983, p. 52. 20 Cited in Sinyard, Jack Clayton, p. 83. 21 Useful background on Jack Clayton’s career in relation to The Innocents is in Sinyard, Jack Clayton, pp. 81–108; Rebello, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, pp. 51–5); Penelope Houston’s studio visit, in Sight and Sound, vol. 30 no. 3, summer 1961, pp. 114–15; Gordon Gow, ‘The Way Things Are – An Interview with Jack Clayton’, Films and Filming, vol. 20 no. 7, April 1974, p. 12, and Gow, Suspense in the Cinema (London: Zwemmer, 1968), pp. 30–1; files in the Jack Clayton Archive at JCL 8; Jack Clayton letter to the programmer of the Cherbourg Film Festival in JCL 8–7–2. The articles and chapters I have found most stimulating, in thinking about The Innocents, include: Donald Chase, ‘Romancing the Stones’, Film Comment, vol. 34 no. 1, January/ February 1998, pp. 63–73; James W. Palmer, ‘Cinematic Ambiguity’, Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 5 no. 3, summer 1977, pp. 198–215; Edward Recchia, ‘An Eye for an I’, Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 15 no. 1, January 1987, pp. 28–35; Alain Silver and James Ursini, More Things Than Are Dreamt Of (New York: Limelight, 1994), pp. 116–33; and Andrew Higson, ‘Gothic Fantasy as Art Cinema’, in Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage (eds), Gothic Origins and Innovations (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1994), pp. 204–17. 22 Jack Clayton’s early notes are in JCL 8–1–2.

23 Andy Murray, Into the Unknown – The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale (London: Headpress, 2006), p. 75. 24 JCL 8–2–4. 25 ‘First Draft Script’ in JCL 8–1–3 and 8–1–4. 26 Jack Clayton’s notes in JCL 8–1–5 and 8–1–14 (on The Turn of the Screw); see also 8–1–11. 27 Part of John Mortimer’s contribution is in JCL 8–1–25, including a letter dated 14 December 1960. Also JCL 8–5–5 (programme for a retrospective screening at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, 9–23 September 1995). 28 Rhys Adrian – then a writer for radio – also contributed versions of the Harley Street scene and Miss Giddens’s arrival at Bly, but they were not used. See JCL 8–1–13. 29 Copy of Moskowitz cable JCL 8–1–24. 30 Truman Capote’s letters and handwritten notebooks are in JCL 8–1–15 (one notebook), JCL 8–1–16 (six notebooks), JCL 8–1–17 (the ‘vicar’ scene), JCL 8–1–18 (the ‘goodnight kiss’), JCL 8–1–19 (‘whispering’), JCL 8–1–20 (letters from Miss Giddens’s father and from school) and 8–1–21 (Miles in the garden, looking up). There are other short scenes and redrafts in the archive. 31 See, among many biographical sources, Thomas M. Inge (ed.), Truman Capote Conversations (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987); George Plimpton, Truman Capote (New York: Anchor Books, 1998); and Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005).

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Credits The Innocents United States/United Kingdom 1961 Directed by Jack Clayton Produced by Jack Clayton Screenplay by William Archibald and Truman Capote Based on the story ‘The Turn of the Screw’ by Henry James Additional Scenes & Dialogue by John Mortimer Director of Photography Freddie Francis Editor James Clark Art Director Wilfred Shingleton Music Composed by Georges Auric ©Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation Production Company Twentieth Century-Fox presents … Jack Clayton’s production of … released by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Executive Producer Albert Fennell Production Manager James Ware Unit Manager Claude Watson Assistant Director Michael Birkett Continuity Pamela Mann Script Editor Jeanie Sims Camera Operator Ronald Taylor Supervising Floor Electrician Maurice Gillett Camera Grip Ray Jones Assistant Editor Mary Kessel Set Dresser Peter James Costumes Designed by Motley [Sophie Devine] Make-up Harold Fletcher Hairdresser Gordon Bond [Music] Conducted by W. Lambert Williamson Soundtrack ‘O Willow Waly’: music by Georges Auric, lyrics by Paul Dehn Sound Recordists A. G. [Buster] Ambler John Cox

Boom Operator Ken Ritchie Dubbing Editor Peter Musgrave Lenses Bausch & Lomb uncredited Production Company Achilles Film Productions Ltd. (London) Twentieth Century-Fox Head of Production Robert Goldstein Production Accountant Charles Wilder Assistant Accountant/Cashier Bob Blues Secretary to Mr Clayton Ann Travis Production Secretary Joan Williams 2nd Assistant Director Claude Watson 3rd Assistant Director Ken Softley Focus Pullers Ronnie Maasz Bernard Ford Clapper Loader Simon Ransley Stills Photography Ted Reed 2nd Assistant Editor Pamela Gardner Assistant Art Director Martin Atkinson

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Draughtsmen Tony Woollard James Sawyer Anthony Pratt Scenic Artist Alan Evans Production Buyer Marjory Whittington Construction Manager Gus Walker Wardrobe Mistress Brenda Gardner Wardrobe Assistant Lily Lynch Electronic Sounds Daphne Oram Publicity Paul Grocott Publicity Secretary Jean Barnett

CAST Deborah Kerr Miss Giddens Peter Wyngarde Peter Quint Megs Jenkins Mrs Grose Michael Redgrave the uncle Martin Stephens Miles Pamela Franklin Flora Clytie Jessop Miss Jessel Isla Cameron Anna uncredited Eric Woodburn coachman Production Details Filmed from 6 February 1961 on location in Sheffield Park Gardens, Sussex, at the estate’s railway station and nearby church, and at Shepperton Studios (Shepperton, Surrey, England) 35mm, black and white, 2.35:1 (CinemaScope), mono (Westrex Recording System), MPAA: 20046

Release Details UK theatrical release in November 1961, certificate X (no cuts). Running time: 99 minutes 9 seconds/ 8,923 feet (re-submitted in December 2005 and passed 12A [uncut], running time: 99 minutes 57 seconds/ 8,995 feet + nine frames) US theatrical release by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation in LA on 15 December 1961 and in New York City (New York) on 24 December 1961. Running time: 100 minutes Credits compiled by Julian Grainger

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