The Innocents (1961) on Netflix
On her first post as governess, Miss Giddens takes charge of orphaned Flora and Miles at Bly, a country estate. She glimpses apparitions and comes to believe the children are possessed.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb7.7/1036,602 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes95%
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Plot summary
Miss Giddens, seeking her first position, is hired by a wealthy bachelor to take charge of his orphaned niece and nephew, Flora and Miles, at Bly, his country estate. He wants no trouble from the arrangement and leaves her full authority over the children. The previous governess, Miss Jessel, died less than a year before. Miles returns home early, expelled from boarding school for his influence on the other boys, though he seems charming and composed. Miss Giddens then glimpses a man on the tower and a woman in the house, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, says the figures match Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, the uncle's valet, both of them dead. Miss Giddens becomes convinced that the children are in the grip of the ghosts, and sets out to free them.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Innocents (1961)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- As actor Peter Wyngarde recalled, Alec Guinness and Cary Grant both expressed a strong interest in playing the ghost Peter Quint in The Innocents, but director Jack Clayton turned them down.
- Editor Jim Clark recalled that Jack Clayton flew into a rage when his personal assistant was late phoning him the critics' reactions before release, and the next day Clark found Clayton had smashed a large plaster scale model of Bly House and was refusing to speak to either of them.
- Director Jack Clayton had Truman Capote rework William Archibald's script; Capote, then in the middle of writing In Cold Blood, took a three-week hiatus from the book to rewrite the screenplay because he was a fan of Henry James's novella.
- To keep the performances of his child actors uninhibited, director Jack Clayton withheld the full story from Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin, giving them only the parts of the script without the film's surprising and mysterious adult elements.
- The Innocents pioneered synthesised electronic sound in film: Daphne Oram created "spectral massed sine tones" for its soundtrack, but she was not credited for them.
- Cinematographer Freddie Francis painted the sides of the lenses with black paint for many interior night scenes to get a more intense, "elegiac" focus, and used candles custom-made with four to five wicks twined together to cast more light.
- Deborah Kerr was cast as the governess Miss Giddens at the urging of the studio 20th Century Fox, even though the character is twenty years old in Henry James's original work and Kerr was forty at the time.
- Kate Bush's 1980 song "The Infant Kiss", from her album Never for Ever, was inspired by the film, and Mexican director Guillermo del Toro cites it as an influence on his 2015 gothic horror film Crimson Peak.
