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She was an excellent governess and a most respectable woman
This afternoon I voted Miss Jessel from Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) one of my favorite ghosts on film, a tall order but a true one. A masterstroke of sound design and suggestion, she's not spectral, she's uncanny: as real as the reflection she casts on the sunlit shiver of the lake, as motionless in the heat as the bulrushes she stands so far out among, she could be walking on water, though we will learn she drowned herself in it instead. Her slight, dark-dressed figure in long shot gives no impression of a threat, nor even any particular emotion such as hunger or melancholy that would make her apparition easier to read. Her incongruity becomes its own eeriness, the noonday drabness of her presence more frightening than its disappearance between one look and the next, which is after all only characteristic of her kind, though part of the film's chill is that really it has no such rules by which a haunting may be mapped and governed, only the inexplicable facts of things that should not be. Once we have heard that she grieved sleeplessly for her rough, flaunting lover until she died of him, the governess played like a doorway of possession by Deborah Kerr can hear her sobbing, a desolate, gulping, wretchedly echoing sound that when finally traced to the schoolroom has nothing to do with the still-faced, dry-eyed imprint of Miss Jessel at her desk and yet when the governess rushes to the empty chair and touches the slate left by her own earlier lesson, it is wet with tears. Without a parapsychological conversation in sight, it gives the effect of a ghost that has stained through time in all its layers, desynched to perpetuity. The parallel sightings of Peter Wyngarde's Peter Quint with his cock-strut and his bestial snarl of a smile, always smeared through sun-mist, night-glass, steam-sweat until he can cast his unfiltered shadow from a crumbling ring of statues at last have their own rude potency, as malignantly charged as one of the more explicitly libidinous legends of Hell House, but it is his ruined lover who looks as though you could never scrape her off the air, so soaked into this patch of reality that trying to part her from the grounds of Bly would be about as efficacious as trying to exorcise an ice age. Their voices whisper like tape loops on the candlelit stairs. The children are watching. The children are watching. The children are watching. Like the uncredited radiophonics of Daphne Oram that accompany her first, summer-humming manifestation, Miss Jessel or whatever has been left of her belongs to the weirdness of time just really starting to flower in British film and TV, more Nigel Kneale than Henry James or even Truman Capote and yet she fits as exactly into the sensibilities of the Victorian Gothic as she would into the bright horror of that lakeside to this day. She was one of three images left on film by the artist and director Clytie Jessop and I doubt you could get her off the print, either. This excellence brought to you by my watching backers at Patreon.
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Have you seen the TotS "prequel" The Nightcomers? I haven't, and it sounds fairly dire, but I might be tempted.
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Thank you so much! Absolutely. I hope it's been done. I can even think of Deborah Kerr and Julie Harris' faces in the same dark.
Have you seen the TotS "prequel" The Nightcomers? I haven't, and it sounds fairly dire, but I might be tempted.
I have also only ever heard about it! And also never heard it was that good, but if you throw yourself on it, please report back!
(I love the Britten opera. I was lucky enough to see a local production in 2010 whose slight over-reliance on multimedia did not impair the eerie, earthy performances and the twelve-tone sense of trapped and repeating time. I heard first the original cast recording with Peter Pears, Jennifer Vyvyan, and David Hemmings.)
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You heard right. With the help of a "free" streaming service, the only price I had to pay to watch The Nightcomers was five minutes of ads for every 10 or so minutes of movie. Well, that plus the fact that the time I spent actually watching the movie itself was also pretty much wasted. Brando brandoes all over the place -- does he do the hand to the front and top of his head in all his movies? -- the children are more annoying than creepy, and worst of all, nothing is remotely scary or even very disturbing. Eventually liberties are taken with the story, such as we know it from Mr. James, that drive the movie into absurdity. And absurdity is anathema to the whole enterprise of believably conveying supernatural horror and/or psychological disintegration. At least there are ample displays of Stephanie Beacham's ample assets, but when her character said "I'm so embarrassed" I wanted to reply "And so you should be!"
(I love the Britten opera.
Of course this is the first I've heard of it, opera never having been much of a thing in my rustic and provincial life. I do know who Britten was. But on the other side of my cultural desert, at least I was lucky enough to have a progressive eleventh grade English teacher who showed The Innocents to our class, although oddly enough we didn't have to read the story, an oversight that I took care of finally in 2019.
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That is an unimpeachably sick burn and I'm so sorry the film supplied such occasion for it.
Of course this is the first I've heard of it, opera never having been much of a thing in my rustic and provincial life. I do know who Britten was.
I trained and until recently still performed as a classical singer. The relevance was that it's my other point of comparison for an adaptation of the novella—it's unambiguous about its interpretation of the ghosts, but to much of the same hauntological effect as the scenes I find eeriest in the film.
But on the other side of my cultural desert, at least I was lucky enough to have a progressive eleventh grade English teacher who showed The Innocents to our class, although oddly enough we didn't have to read the story, an oversight that I took care of finally in 2019.
I too would have expected the film to be an adjunct to the James as class reading, but what a neat way to be introduced to it!