The Innocents

Jack Clayton only made a few films, all adapted from novels. He's most famous for filming Room at the Top, or perhaps for his version of The Great Gatsby, but The Innocents is probably his best. Based on Henry James' Turn of the Screw, the film stars Deborah Kerr, who becomes the new governess to two young children around 1900. But strange occurrences in the large, gloomy old house she shares with them start to trouble her -is she seeing ghosts or going mad? This uncertainty is hard to depict, but Clayton assembled a fantastic cast, with Kerr and the child actors extremely convincing in difficult roles. His script had contributions from Truman Capote and John Mortimer and is finely balanced, but the best work of all is Freddie Francis' beautifully composed photography. He somehow achieves a visual quality that, while stately, allows shock moments to occur at virtually any time. The only flaw the film has is that, much like a Henry James novel, it's so well constructed it's hard to really enjoy at first consumption. [Keir Hind]