The Innocents (1961)
The film starts with Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), a nineteenth century British governess, is appointed to take care of two children, Flora and Miles. Upon arriving at the bleak mansion she meets the housekeeper and also Flora. Miles arrives a few days later from school. The children seem like little angels but, following a series of bizarre events and examples of the children's wicked impulses, Miss Giddens begins to suspect that all is not what it seems. An unresolved mystery that charges the events of this Gothic story with a dreadful sense of uncertainty far more thrilling than the simple supernatural chills of a typical haunted house movie.
The film made masterly in every way with a great performance from beautiful Deborah Kerr as the troubled Victorian governess, superb black-and-white wide screen photography by Freddie Francis and Georges Auric's truly distinguished soundtrack of laughs and whispers. Not forget to add the remarkable performances by the two children, and we're given a ghost story that stays with us not because of spring-loaded frights, but because of how it tingles our nervous system throughout the eerie, unsettling finale. Truman Capote's screenplay centered on the question: are the two children really possessed by the ghosts of the dead, or is their governess merely imagining everything? Producer-director Jack Clayton keeps the film firmly grounded in reality, so that the essence of this psychological study strikes far more strongly.
The Innocents is one of the most intelligent and evocative ghost story filmed in those golden years of cinema when the audience around the globe witnessed some brilliant celluloid works on English Gothic and Psychological horror ever made. This film adaptation of Henry James'
The Turn of the Screw is like a lost Titanic that sunk into the middle of the phenomenal success of
Psycho (1960), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and The Haunting (1963).
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