The Innocents
I'm currently reading Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, a psychological ghost story. I love me some Victorian novels. This whole modern thing...I don't think it'll last. And post-modernism? Puh-lease. I guess I'm just an old poop.
But reading the story is making me remember the movie it was based on, which leads in turn to other movies, and other ideas, and I want to talk about those.
Cast me back down the years and the days of my youth. I'm eleven years old, and I want to ride my bike to the movies with my friend Billy Jewell. My mom says yes and draws me a map. To this day I remember the route we took through lovely El Cajon, California. I have that kind of mind. I can't remember the name of someone I met yesterday (or even their face), but I remember something random from 40 years ago, because it has to to with a map.
It must have been a Sunday. We ride and ride and ride and we finally get there and buy our tickets and go in. The movie comes on, it's called The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. This is not a movie for kids. I don't know what me or my friend or my mom or the theater was thinking to let kids into this movie, but whatever. The movie is way over my head (as I know from having seen it a couple times as an adult). But there's one scene that is burned into my memory: the schoolgirl protagonist Sandy has gone to the house of her lover, a married painter, to sit for a portrait. Suddenly we the audience see that Sandy is modelling nude! She has lost her clothes and is lying on her side, her head resting on one hand. Naked. A beautiful naked teenage girl right there for all the world to see, including my eleven year old heterosexual self. The shot only lasted for one second or so, but needless to say it made a huge impression on me, and I've never forgotten it. Oh, and I got a traffic ticket on the way home, for riding my bike on the wrong side of the road. Who knew that was a thing? All in all, quite a day.
As is my wont, I became a little obsessed by the actress who played Sandy, and sort of followed her career, trying to catch every movie she was in that I could find. This was pre-internet, remember, so such opportunities were few and far between.
One such opportunity came a few years later, when my mom convinced my brother and sister and me to watch The Innocents, a black-and-white movie from 1961. We were scared shitless. It's a great movie, all old-fashioned suggestion, nothing overt or violent. It was also my first exposure to the idea of psychological horror. The protagonist, a young governess, starts seeing the ghosts of the previous governess and her lover, the valet of the absent master. Or does she? Maybe she's crazy. You get the idea. Deborah Kerr is just wonderful, as usual.
So, the governess has two young charges, a boy and a girl. The girl is played by...Pamela Franklin! It's her first movie role.
There's another movie I remember when I think of The Innocents. It's called The Haunting, and it's another one my mother persuaded us kids to watch. Another brilliant psychological thriller, shot in black and white (although it was made well after the start of the color era). Like The Innocents, The Haunting features a female protagonist who may or may not be mad. (I think of these movies in terms of "madness" rather than "insanity" or "mental illness." "Insanity" is a legal term and "mental illness" sounds so clinical. In these movies, the state of mind of the woman at the center of the story is above a social phenomenon. It's either a result or a cause of the sickness in her relationships with other people.)
Where were we? Oh yeah, so The Innocents is based on the book I'm reading now, The Turn of the Screw.
A few years after seeing The Innocents, I happened to stumble upon an odd little movie called The Night Comers. It stars Marlon Brando, and is a prequel to the events of The Innocents. It features lots of kinky sex. The two young children witnessed this, and that's what made them so twisted in the later, more famous story. It is not a great movie.
A few years after that, I watched another deservedly obscure little movie called The Night of the Following Day. Another non-very-good-movie, I only mention it because it starts Marlon Brando and Pamela Franklin. So there are three otherwise unrelated movies, each pair of which shares an actor or a story.
Odd, huh? These are the kind of things I think of, when it's late at night and I'm reading a ghost story.
