Evil Emanations

The Innocents (20th Century-Fox). Henry James once deplored The Turn of the Screw as a "shameless potboiler." There is irony in the confession. For in this little novel the creative flame that boils the pot rushed up from black abysses of religion seldom plumbed in this author's insuperably civil art. Though the book is known to schoolboys merely as a grand ghost story, it is experienced by mature readers as a demonological document of shuddery profundity. Some of that profundity is sacrificed to saleability in this film, which derives partly from the book, partly from William Archibald's stage version of the book (TIME, Feb. 13, 1950). But if the picture is journeyman James, it is also pitapatational entertainment, the most sophisticated scare show since Diabolique.

Superficially, the book and the film tell the same story: a parson's daughter (Deborah Kerr), half in love with a charming bounder (Michael Redgrave), hires on as governess to his niece (Pamela Franklin) and nephew (Martin Stephens)--in the picture the girl seems about eight years old, the boy about ten. The children are charming and she loves them dearly, but after a few days at Ely, the vast old country house the children live in, she begins to notice prowlers about the place --first a man, then a woman, both of them surrounded by an uncanny emanation of evil. She describes these prowlers to the housekeeper, who in horror informs her that she has precisely described a previous governess and a recent manager of the estate--both now dead.

Courageously, the governess begins to investigate the sinister revenants. She discovers that, in life, they were monsters of depravity who not only had licentious relations with each other and with other servants in the household, but even in some mysterious and horrible way perverted the children. She discovers, or thinks she discovers, that they have come back to possess the children. Why? Hell only knows. Worse yet, she discovers, or thinks she discovers, that the children know they have come back, that in fact the dear little boy and girl who kiss her 30 times a day and never say a naughty word are lewdly, furtively delighted to have them there. Is it too late to save them from their supernatural seducers? Too late to save them from themselves? The governess resolves to move heaven and earth.

In the book all this horror, like a walking death, is veiled in a ghostly winding sheet of luminous Jamesian language. Nothing is clear; anything is possible; evil like a serpent glides unseen beneath each gliding sentence. In the film, necessarily, the spectral prose is replaced by spooky images and scary noises. Some of them are eerily effective: Sheffield Park, the gorgeously rotting old Georgian mansion in which the film was mostly made, is a demon's dream house, and Director Jack (Room at the Top} Clayton, sensitively seconded by Cameraman Freddie Frances, has filled every coign and corridor with a dangerous, intelligent darkness. Moreover, the main performances are most capably carried off. Actress Kerr, with steely control, tunes herself like a violin string till she quivers exquisitely at the snapping point; and the dear children are just what Author James imagined--faces that shine like bright new pennies till the watcher begins to wonder uneasily about the other side of the coin.

On the other hand, the film is seriously flawed by a fundamental misconception that arises from a fundamental disagreement among students of the novel. Some say the ghosts are irreally real; others say they are hysterical fantasies developed by the governess, who has repressed a passion for her employer. Both explanations are probably true, and so are several others. James was almost certainly writing on many levels of meaning at once; moreover, he was shrewd enough to see that the tale gained fresh horror from every possible explanation. But the men who wrote this picture, Truman Capote and Playwright Archibald, unhappily press hard, much harder than James did, for the psychiatric interpretation. They have obviously failed to perceive that in suggesting a normal, everyday basis for the ghastly phenomena, they must inevitably relieve the spectator of his nameless horror of what happens. But isn't horror, when all's said and done, the one important experience this tale is intended to communicate?

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