Silver Screen Shivers
Aug. 24th, 2007 12:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesI know that this community is largely devoted to horror literature, and that's great, but how about discussing some films based on that literature for a change? I recently watched two wonderful adaptations of ghostly tales - The Innocents, based on Henry James' The Turn Of The Screw, and Night Of The Eagle, inspired by Fritz Leiber's novel Conjure Wife. I wrote about them on my lj a while back, but hopefully none of my lj friends on this forum will mind if I re-post my thoughts here!
Jack Clayton's The Innocents just blew me away. The plot concerns a highly-strung woman, Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), who is employed as governess to two children, Flora and Miles. Their uncle is a guardian in name only, who has left the orphaned children to roam about his huge country house in almost total solitude while he lives it up in London. He demands of Miss Giddens that she not trouble him with the children under any circumstances. Miss Giddens soon settles into her new life, but trouble slowly steals into her heart after a series of unnerving discoveries about the childrens' former governess, Miss Jessel, and His Lordship's former valet, Quint, both of whom used to have the run of the place in their master's constant absence, and continue to exercise a dubious influence on the two little angels...
The Innocents offers everything you could want in a film. It boasts some of the most gorgeous, silvery location camerawork I've ever seen. Clayton distills every last drop of an English summer into a visual ambrosia of lush gardens, swathes of roses, willow trees whispering over rippling water, hazy sunlight and sheets of summer rain on the lake, while mystery and corruption lurk beneath the surface, expressed by shower upon shower of dying rose petals or an eerie black insect suddenly crawling out of the mouth of a broken stone cherub. The scene is set for a good haunting, and when Miss Jessel and Quint begin appearing to the poor governess it comes as no surprise.
The two apparitions are staged magnificently. Quint (played by Peter Wyngarde) is bad enough, a heavy-breathing rake with coal-black eyes and a pall of sweat across his forehead, but it's the love-crazed, hungry ghost of Miss Jessell who truly terrifies. Her appearance to Miss Giddens across the lake one bright Summer's day, stock still and ever so slightly shimmering, with sunken eyes and drooping hair, is the best on-screen ghost I've ever seen - the temptation to hide my eyes from her unblinking, starved stare was almost overpowering. There is something very modern about the way the hauntings are shot - it's partly due to the evil, dissonant hum that soundtracks Jessel and Quint's manifestations - and in fact these scenes presage any number of Japanese horror films.
Henry James' original story famously raised the question of whether or not the hauntings were real, or a product of Miss Gidden's repressed imagination and fearful fascination with sex. This ambiguity comes across very well in the film, though I do think Miss Giddens peaks too soon where the craziness is concerned - at her initial interview with the childrens' uncle, she already looks highly unbalanced, and it's hard to imagine even the most selfish of old bachelors hiring her to look after kids, although she professes to love children in an intense tone of voice. I would've liked her to start out more stable to make her descent into fear more upsetting.
Still, the bond she forms with the children, and young Miles in particular, is as upsetting as you like! Miles, who has just been expelled from his boarding school for a mysterious crime (it is implied he has tried to corrupt the other children) starts out as the titular 'innocent', but turns out to possess a suave charm that sits very oddly with his age (about 8 or 9.) Some of the scenes where he sets about seducing Miss Giddens (having taken tips from Quint) are perhaps especially disturbing to a modern audience, partly because she seems to enjoy these attempts. Flora's character is less developed but both the child actors are great.
Anyway, I could go on all night about how fab this film is - and I'm not even a fan of the original story, though I like it better than much of James' work. I really can't stand his 'hippopotamus pushing a pea', dry-as-dust, labyrinthine writing style, and I don't think he's as subtle as he's cracked up to be either, at least where his supernatural tales are concerned. The most annoying thing about James is that people who +do+ like him often try to make out that his detractors are just too thick or too green to understand the great man. But enough carping! If James had never existed The Innocents would never have been made, after all ;)
Night Of The Eagle is Sidney Heyer's 1961 adaptation of Fritz Leiber's satirical occult horror novel Conjure Wife. I had expected this black-and-white film to be in the vein of Tourneur and Lewton classics such as Cat People or Night Of The Demon, and although Heyer's film fails to live up to those stratospheric standards there were certainly similarities. Peter Wyngarde is as dazzling and suave as ever as Norman Taylor, an up-and-coming, modern-minded academic who chances upon some strange objects in his wife Tansy's drawer and discovers she is a witch. The camerawork is classy, the horrors are mainly psychological, the string section eloquent (sadly to the point of overkill sometimes) and a brooding atmosphere of doom reigns supreme as we find that no-one, witch or layman, can escape their fate. The misogyny which apparently dents many peoples' enjoyment of the novel seemed absent to me, though maybe I'm just too thick to discern the subtext - indeed the film seems distinctly woman-friendly thanks to Wyngarde's unusual amount of topless scenes ;) The special effects at the end are pretty good for the time, too.
I enjoyed the film, though I felt that the character of Tansy and her rival witch Flora were drawn with too heavy and melodramatic a hand from the outset, forever glancing daggers and chucking thinly veiled threats at each other in a way that even a donnish 50s husband could spot (despite just being made in the 60s, this is very much a 50s film where values and mood are concerned.) Much of the acting is over-the-top at the outset and none of the supporting actors are of Wyngarde's calibre, though Margaret Johnson really comes into her own as Tansy's evil, sarcastic and gloating occult rival Flora during the last third of the film. For me, the film would've been much more frightening if the menace had been allowed to creep in more slowly and subtly. Instead, it is tense rather than outright scary. That said, I did have the film spoiled by reading many of the so-called 'minor' plot twists online or hearing about them from others so it might've been better if that hadn't happened...
The film is also said to differ from the novel in many important ways - in the novel, all the campus wives are witches, whereas here there are only two, and much of Leiber's thematic richness has apparently been disposed of to concentrate on the main thrust of the book. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though - I'll have to read it to find out! Meanwhile, I can certainly believe the oft-repeated claim that Night Of The Eagle was Heyer's finest hour,though considering that his later work consisted largely of Magnum P.I and Baywatch episodes, that may not sound like much of an accolade...That said there is a haunting and lyrical sea-rescue scene which may have paved the way for the 'Hoff's livesaving exploits ;)
I've also just found out that another excellent modern-day vampire story of Leiber's, The Girl With The Hungry Eyes, has been adapted! If any of you have seen the film I'd love to hear your views on the subject. Is it worth renting?
What about you? What are your favourite and/or least favourite film versions of dark fiction? Do you feel that works of fiction can be improved upon by translation to the screen, or that a certain something will always be lost in doing so? Do you find that the medium of film has particular strengths or weaknesses, where this sort of thing is concerned?
I guess it's fairly obvious from my thoughts on The Innocents that I think successful adaptations can be made, in the right hands! However, such beasts do seem rather thin on the ground - though not quite as rare as successful cinematizations of comics, funnily enough. It is often alleged that fiction inspires fear more powerfully than film because it leaves more room for the reader's imagination, but I believe that a good director and script can work wonders when it comes to hinting at horrors and dealing with ambiguity.
I've often heard people also say that the distancing mechanism so vital to Jamesian horror (M.R. this time!) is damaged by transition to film, since it's too immediate and in-yer-face (by distancing mechanism, I mean the action of putting the reader in a sort of paralyzed nightmare state where they can see the danger coming from afar but can't do anything about it. The term also implies an element of confusion and corner-of-the-eye threats.)In answer to that, I would simply point any critic to the screening of the deadly video in the film Ringu, which incidentally is absent from the original novel. If that isn't first class 'hinted horror', I don't know what is!
Jack Clayton's The Innocents just blew me away. The plot concerns a highly-strung woman, Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), who is employed as governess to two children, Flora and Miles. Their uncle is a guardian in name only, who has left the orphaned children to roam about his huge country house in almost total solitude while he lives it up in London. He demands of Miss Giddens that she not trouble him with the children under any circumstances. Miss Giddens soon settles into her new life, but trouble slowly steals into her heart after a series of unnerving discoveries about the childrens' former governess, Miss Jessel, and His Lordship's former valet, Quint, both of whom used to have the run of the place in their master's constant absence, and continue to exercise a dubious influence on the two little angels...
The Innocents offers everything you could want in a film. It boasts some of the most gorgeous, silvery location camerawork I've ever seen. Clayton distills every last drop of an English summer into a visual ambrosia of lush gardens, swathes of roses, willow trees whispering over rippling water, hazy sunlight and sheets of summer rain on the lake, while mystery and corruption lurk beneath the surface, expressed by shower upon shower of dying rose petals or an eerie black insect suddenly crawling out of the mouth of a broken stone cherub. The scene is set for a good haunting, and when Miss Jessel and Quint begin appearing to the poor governess it comes as no surprise.
The two apparitions are staged magnificently. Quint (played by Peter Wyngarde) is bad enough, a heavy-breathing rake with coal-black eyes and a pall of sweat across his forehead, but it's the love-crazed, hungry ghost of Miss Jessell who truly terrifies. Her appearance to Miss Giddens across the lake one bright Summer's day, stock still and ever so slightly shimmering, with sunken eyes and drooping hair, is the best on-screen ghost I've ever seen - the temptation to hide my eyes from her unblinking, starved stare was almost overpowering. There is something very modern about the way the hauntings are shot - it's partly due to the evil, dissonant hum that soundtracks Jessel and Quint's manifestations - and in fact these scenes presage any number of Japanese horror films.
Henry James' original story famously raised the question of whether or not the hauntings were real, or a product of Miss Gidden's repressed imagination and fearful fascination with sex. This ambiguity comes across very well in the film, though I do think Miss Giddens peaks too soon where the craziness is concerned - at her initial interview with the childrens' uncle, she already looks highly unbalanced, and it's hard to imagine even the most selfish of old bachelors hiring her to look after kids, although she professes to love children in an intense tone of voice. I would've liked her to start out more stable to make her descent into fear more upsetting.
Still, the bond she forms with the children, and young Miles in particular, is as upsetting as you like! Miles, who has just been expelled from his boarding school for a mysterious crime (it is implied he has tried to corrupt the other children) starts out as the titular 'innocent', but turns out to possess a suave charm that sits very oddly with his age (about 8 or 9.) Some of the scenes where he sets about seducing Miss Giddens (having taken tips from Quint) are perhaps especially disturbing to a modern audience, partly because she seems to enjoy these attempts. Flora's character is less developed but both the child actors are great.
Anyway, I could go on all night about how fab this film is - and I'm not even a fan of the original story, though I like it better than much of James' work. I really can't stand his 'hippopotamus pushing a pea', dry-as-dust, labyrinthine writing style, and I don't think he's as subtle as he's cracked up to be either, at least where his supernatural tales are concerned. The most annoying thing about James is that people who +do+ like him often try to make out that his detractors are just too thick or too green to understand the great man. But enough carping! If James had never existed The Innocents would never have been made, after all ;)
Night Of The Eagle is Sidney Heyer's 1961 adaptation of Fritz Leiber's satirical occult horror novel Conjure Wife. I had expected this black-and-white film to be in the vein of Tourneur and Lewton classics such as Cat People or Night Of The Demon, and although Heyer's film fails to live up to those stratospheric standards there were certainly similarities. Peter Wyngarde is as dazzling and suave as ever as Norman Taylor, an up-and-coming, modern-minded academic who chances upon some strange objects in his wife Tansy's drawer and discovers she is a witch. The camerawork is classy, the horrors are mainly psychological, the string section eloquent (sadly to the point of overkill sometimes) and a brooding atmosphere of doom reigns supreme as we find that no-one, witch or layman, can escape their fate. The misogyny which apparently dents many peoples' enjoyment of the novel seemed absent to me, though maybe I'm just too thick to discern the subtext - indeed the film seems distinctly woman-friendly thanks to Wyngarde's unusual amount of topless scenes ;) The special effects at the end are pretty good for the time, too.
I enjoyed the film, though I felt that the character of Tansy and her rival witch Flora were drawn with too heavy and melodramatic a hand from the outset, forever glancing daggers and chucking thinly veiled threats at each other in a way that even a donnish 50s husband could spot (despite just being made in the 60s, this is very much a 50s film where values and mood are concerned.) Much of the acting is over-the-top at the outset and none of the supporting actors are of Wyngarde's calibre, though Margaret Johnson really comes into her own as Tansy's evil, sarcastic and gloating occult rival Flora during the last third of the film. For me, the film would've been much more frightening if the menace had been allowed to creep in more slowly and subtly. Instead, it is tense rather than outright scary. That said, I did have the film spoiled by reading many of the so-called 'minor' plot twists online or hearing about them from others so it might've been better if that hadn't happened...
The film is also said to differ from the novel in many important ways - in the novel, all the campus wives are witches, whereas here there are only two, and much of Leiber's thematic richness has apparently been disposed of to concentrate on the main thrust of the book. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though - I'll have to read it to find out! Meanwhile, I can certainly believe the oft-repeated claim that Night Of The Eagle was Heyer's finest hour,though considering that his later work consisted largely of Magnum P.I and Baywatch episodes, that may not sound like much of an accolade...That said there is a haunting and lyrical sea-rescue scene which may have paved the way for the 'Hoff's livesaving exploits ;)
I've also just found out that another excellent modern-day vampire story of Leiber's, The Girl With The Hungry Eyes, has been adapted! If any of you have seen the film I'd love to hear your views on the subject. Is it worth renting?
What about you? What are your favourite and/or least favourite film versions of dark fiction? Do you feel that works of fiction can be improved upon by translation to the screen, or that a certain something will always be lost in doing so? Do you find that the medium of film has particular strengths or weaknesses, where this sort of thing is concerned?
I guess it's fairly obvious from my thoughts on The Innocents that I think successful adaptations can be made, in the right hands! However, such beasts do seem rather thin on the ground - though not quite as rare as successful cinematizations of comics, funnily enough. It is often alleged that fiction inspires fear more powerfully than film because it leaves more room for the reader's imagination, but I believe that a good director and script can work wonders when it comes to hinting at horrors and dealing with ambiguity.
I've often heard people also say that the distancing mechanism so vital to Jamesian horror (M.R. this time!) is damaged by transition to film, since it's too immediate and in-yer-face (by distancing mechanism, I mean the action of putting the reader in a sort of paralyzed nightmare state where they can see the danger coming from afar but can't do anything about it. The term also implies an element of confusion and corner-of-the-eye threats.)In answer to that, I would simply point any critic to the screening of the deadly video in the film Ringu, which incidentally is absent from the original novel. If that isn't first class 'hinted horror', I don't know what is!
