Deborah Kerr
October 18, 2007You’ve probably seen at least some of the obituaries today for actress Deborah Kerr, who died Tuesday at age 86, and if like me you never paid much attention to her work, it must come as a slight shock to realize how many great or at least memorable films she was in. Anybody whose career encompassed The King and I, Black Narcissus and From Here to Eternity has made a pretty deep mark in film history.
What’s puzzling is that the obits I’ve seen to date completely ignore The Innocents, the 1961 adaptation of The Turn of the Screw that is one of the best horror movies ever made. As the governess terrified by visions of ghostly figures menacing the children in her car, Kerr makes the idea that the wraiths are all figments of her imagination even scarier than the possibility that they could be real ghosts. Her performance is the powerful centerpiece of an exceptionally subtle and intense spook story, one that should be much better known.
October 19, 2007 at 4:52 pm
The Innocents is excellent–with a Truman Capote screenplay, if I remember correctly?
The manifestation of Quint at the window is exceptionally well-done. And the first hallucination, at the lake? Brrrr.
I have a laserdisc-to-VHS copy boxed away somewhere.