Adaptation of Henry James' gothic novella The Turn Of The Screw by screenwriter Truman Capote and director Jack Clayton. Deborah Kerr plays an inexperienced governess hired to tend to an orphaned brother and sister, all alone in a sprawling and creepy English estate. The little tots are not as angelic as they first seem, and the governess starts to lose her marbles when she becomes convinced they are possessed by ghosts. I don't get why so many film people (most notably Martin Scorsese) hold this film in such high regard. It isn't scary or creepy in the slightest. It's beautifully photographed by a distinguished cameraman (Freddie Francis), but aside from a famous moment where the seven-year-old boy plants a very long and adult kiss on Deborah Kerr, this ain't much. And I don't think the age of the film has anything to do with it. There are films made twenty and thirty years earlier that can still scare the pants off of you (the Val Lewton films at RKO, for example). I think the problem here is the "stiff upper lip" attitude (it's a British film). Director Jack Clayton smothers all of the Freudian subtext in Capote's script and generally flinches from the sinister aspects of the story. And nobody embodies British gentility more than the terminally prim and proper Deborah Kerr, someone I find very "one-note". The more I watched this, the more I wanted her to be done in by falling statuary or a tumble down the stairs. Dull stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment