One of the benefits of living in Seattle is the blessing of Scarecrow Video, the largest video store I've ever seen and widely considered one of the best in the world. If you can think of a movie, they've got it as well as a dozen others like it you didn't know existed, or were even possible under the current understanding of quantum mechanics. They've even published a mammoth review book, and many big film names have visited the place and signed their own work's boxes. Having recently revamped the portion of the store previously reserved for selling used videos, Scarecrow has started hosting events (including the upcoming VHS Swapmeet, where I'll have a table (!)), and this month is VHS month in honor of their large collection of such and the current retro-craze for the obsolete and less-than-snuff format. Though later in the month we'll get to see such treats as the ultra-obscure kung-fu-and-magic headscratcher Furious (1984) and the legendary shot-on-video anthology baffler Tales from the Quadead Zone (1987), Monday night's screening was much different - John Frankenheimer's The Turn of the Screw.
The concept of "made-for-TV movie" wasn't always a simile for "forgotten stool sample on the bus"; in the 50's and 60's there were programs dedicated to high-quality 75 minute adaptations and originals, with big names in front of the camera and talented workhorses behind. Robert Altman started out in these productions, as did John Frankenheimer, director of The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds. His name wasn't the least bit recognizable when he helmed Turn, but his work is exemplary, and it's a shame this version of Henry James's novella is so hard to find because it's a surprisingly scary, visually engrossing piece of film-making brevity.
I've never had the pleasure of reading the story, and haven't seen any other adaptations (with The Innocents being a shameful hole in my horror-viewing repertoire). No matter - Startime makes it easy for us. A young governess (Ingrid Bergman) has been hired by a London-based man who has been charged with taking care of his nephew and niece whose parents have just died. He has no interest in looking after for them himself, so the governess makes for their country mansion, Bly (which has its own carriage bearing its seal). The niece, Flora (Alexandra Wager) is chipper enough, with far too many teeth visible at a time, but the nephew Miles (Hayward Morse) has been expelled from his private school, and will be home any day now. The governess and their maid surmise that the only cause (because none is stated) would be causing harm to others, though what harm that is we may never know. Plenty of creepy harms are implied, though, as well as many other phantomic creeps (faces in the window, songs from distant rooms). When he does return he meets his sister's cute precociousness with an unsettling precociousness, and the governess's grip on the children and reality start to spiral out of control.
Horror fare from this time period can usually be shelved under quaint anti-fright, but Turn has far too much going on to be punted to that oubliette. B&W fullscreen has never looked better, as Frankenheimer takes a fluid, askew method to filming a deeply shadowed house. There are many small uniquities, my favorite being a panning shot across a staircase that ends looking down a hallway, the camera tilting slightly at the entrance to uproot the Earth in wait of Bergman's discoveries. Anybody who has seen the Shining-centric documentary Room 237 will remember the observation that during the first half of The Shining Kubrick transitioned between scenes with very slow dissolves, so slow they forced you to study the superimposition. While Kubrick may not have meant anything like that, Frankenheimer certainly does, pulling out double- and triple-exposures to great effect (my favorite being the Bly house seal over a doll in a pond).
Production designer Warren Clymer utilizes the handful of sets offered to him to great effect, allowing period design to fold into darkness and creating some of the most unsettlingly fake exteriors I've ever seen. Flying in the face of 50's TV, the soon-to-be-accomplished classical composer David Amram supplies a hair-raising Avant-Garde soundtrack, terse and shrieking with a healthy supply of alien clangs and burbles. It's always nice to see that quirk of Victorian wear in film whereby too-tight dresses make the wearer look like a gliding bobblehead. As for the actors, Bergman is excellent, steadily mounting upon a professional manner with nervous terror. The two child actors are unbelievable, displaying a creativity and control beyond their years; Hayward Morse is so precocious in his performance it makes his later scenes downright chilling.
I've never been much of a fan of ghost movies, mostly because ghosts, by design, shouldn't be scary. When you get down to their motivations and what they were like alive the darn things just don't make any sense, and all the frights come from what might be there rather than what's actually there. If there's a lesson we learned from The Blair Witch Project it's that suggestion is far more fear-inducing than explanation. The Turn of the Screw renews my faith that a traditional ghost story can induce frights if done properly, and much like the classic Witchboard the usual logistical issues are sidestepped via careful details. At the end of the 75 minutes I was invigorated and a little spooked, and if you can track it down you won't be disappointed. I have to emphasize the "if" here, because this movie is so rare that Scarecrow's copy was hand-donated by Frankenheimer himself (!) and comes with a hefty rental deposit. That screencap standing in for a poster was on YouTube, so there must be a torrent floating around there somewhere. Hopefully it looks better than Scarecrow's copy, which had a slow warble and seemed to have grown a coat of cheesecloth. For my money, a smudgy presentation may have helped the experience, as the shadows are that much more concealing. Get it ASAP. Don't wait.
~PNK
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