DVDs in Review

The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)

Title: The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)

Release date: August 23 2010

Certificate: 12

Format: Blu-ray

RRP: £19.99

Rating: 5/5

Reviewed by Dave Lancaster

When you get scared it’s because the atmosphere doesn’t feel comfortable. It feels unstable. Whereas if something has made you jump out of shock, that atmosphere has been pierced and you’re rushed out of your comfort zone before the rest of you can process the action.

Jack Clayton’s ‘The Innocents’ leaves you distinctly in the first phase of being scared and feeling completely unnerved without trying for jumps, and it succeeds perfectly.

Based loosely on Henry James’ ‘The Turning of the Screw’, it slowly unravels its sinister story of a woman hired to look after two children in a sprawling country home.

The seemingly angelic children’s parents are dead but do their ghosts haunt the house or has the woman got a screw loose before she even got there?  Is she protecting the children or corrupting them?

That’s the ambiguity that pulls the viewer in – the children act strangely and the house has voices booming through its corridors but the woman never seemed completely sane to begin with.

It’s a lot like Kubrick’s take on ‘The Shining’, but instead of Jack Nicholson stomping around with an axe here we have Deborah Kerr losing her grip on reality. She is more subtle, echoing her character’s repression instead of venting outward frustration. Her performance is much more internal, and that in itself is more frightening.

While Kerr is even better than in her Oscar nominated roles in ‘Separate Tables’ and ‘From Here to Eternity’, it’s the simmering direction and breathtaking cinematography that really make ‘The Innocents’ so memorable. Freddie Francis expertly lights his scenes so beautifully and mysteriously that every time you pause the film it looks like an absorbing painting, rich in detail and tone.

The camera movements and use of deep focus are also exemplary, with dozens of complex arrangements cascading together to create either a sense of jarring detachment or a brooding element of suspense that creeps up slowly via graceful tracking shots.

Aside from some evidence of grain, BFI’s Blu-ray is brimming with vibrant detail and a well separated soundtrack. It also includes a commentary by Professor Christopher Frayling, a film introduction, a trailer, a gallery of the costumes and, most interestingly, a 37-minute short film directed by Jack Clayton from 1955 adapted from Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ which tells the tail of a haunted tailor as he comes to terms with his friend’s death.