from book to film: the innocents.

This is a new feature at TT&CF I call "From Book to Film." Like most creatures who walk upright and have opposable thumbs, I like to read and I like to watch movies. And I'm often fascinated by the relationship between the two, which I think is much more complex than "the book is always better." My general rule of thumb is that if the book is a great work of literature, there's no way a movie can measure up, but if the book is trash, a film can transform it into something amazing. I think the most obvious case of this is The Godfather. I had seen the film many times as a kid before I read the book, and when I finally did, I was appalled at how sleazy it was. Similarly, when I finally broke down and read The Firm, I almost threw it across the room when I finished. But I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the film and really enjoyed The Gingerbread Man, too (The Pelican Brief still sucked, though).

So anyway, I recently read The Turn of the Screw by Henry James because 1. I never read it and I felt like I should have by now, 2. I read Portrait of a Lady last year and loved it, 3. it is short. I love ghost stories, and I think the great ones are really about how "ghosts" lurk in the shadows of life and of the individual, dredging up the darkness inside of us and bringing it to consciousness. Which is often horrifying. That's exactly what Turn of the Screw does--are the ghosts really ghosts or are they the figments of the main character's paranoia, her sexual repression, her delirium? There are all kinds of scholarly essays on this, so I'm not going to go into it here. You get the idea. Of course, it's a great story, and you get a real sense off claustrophobia and madness just reading it. And, as I've noticed with Henry James, this is one American guy who really should have been born in Europe.

It's funny, because at the same time I read The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde, and tivo'd the film (which was so goofy and played for broad comedy I couldn't watch it, and hence it will not be a "From Book to Film" feature), which was kind of delightful because it was the Yanks, and their implied American-ness, that were completely free of any fear of ghosts, unlike their stuffy Brit hosts.

Anyway. So I got The Innocents off Netflix, and I have to admit, I wasn't expecting much--just a limp, dreary, unnecessary adaption of a classic novel. Then the opening credits rolled. And they had me at "Screenplay by Truman Capote." I got a little excited. This had to be good.

And it was! What a great film! It was eerie and chilling like any spooky horror movie should be and Deborah Kerr rocked it! The special effects were, of course, unsophisticated, and yet incredibly effective. It managed to capture the cloistered nature of the novel, the feeling that the governess could implode and expolde at the same time. And when she lays a kiss square on a litttle boy's mouth--I can imagine this was quite shocking back in the day. Kind of like Birth, except that wasn't so much shocking, as desperately trying to be shocking.

Anyway. The Turn of the Screw: great book. The Innocents: great film.