I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  People love to be scared by ghost stories; James intensifies this pleasure by allowing us to scare ourselves — we perceive the ghosts in terms of what most frightens us. What is really beautiful about The Innocents is that almost everything is at the right distance. The children are so impersonal that we are not anxious about them: their fates are never quite real. It is all a game of a ghost story: we know that in this cultivated domain the ghosts wouldn’t dream of doing anything so vulgar as themselves impinging on the action. James was a man of taste, and the film makers, even when they fail as artists, remain gentlemen: the movie may not be up to James, but it doesn’t violate his code. Whatever happens in The Innocents happens because of fear. And the fascination in this kind of ghost story is that the horrors cannot be resolved.

  It is the unreality of The Innocents — the distance — which makes the whole concept work. The further away the ghosts are, the more truly ghostly. Close scenes, like the dialogues between the governess and the housekeeper (which have the all-too-carefully-placed middle-class sounds of radio — they go at each other with all the conspiratorial finesse of veterans of John’s Other Wife), even the close scenes between the governess and the children — are too familiar. We listen attentively to the arch patterns in the speech, the loaded remarks, and we assent: yes, they’re really getting it — the overtones, the suggestions are good, they’re excitingly well done. But the mystery — that comes when the camera pulls away and we half-see something in the distance, or it comes when Miles recites a poem that seems so remote and strange for a child to recite that our perspectives on age and understanding become blurred and confused. The landscape with the ghost of Miss Jessel — was it perhaps after all not a photograph we remember, but the work of some painter whose name we can’t recall, though we seem to remember something else by him so much like this landscape, or is it all just a mirage from the summer heat? This Miss Jessel is not merely the best ghost I’ve ever seen, she is the only one who has the qualities I associate with ghostliness — that is to say, not only the governess but we, the audience, think we have seen her before. (Quint is less successful: it’s understandable that he should be conceived more physically as a sexual, almost animal force, but he looms up as the familiar bestial menacing type out of horror films. His first appearance on the bell tower is by far the best: there, dim and indistinct, he puzzles us. We’re sure we saw something but we can’t describe what.)

  The dialogue has, at times, the same beauty and ambiguity as the images. I assume that Truman Capote, who is one of the finest prose stylists — as distinguished from writers — this country has ever produced, is responsible for some of these phrases. And the boy who plays Miles, a child named Martin Stephens, is superb, not only visually, but in his poised and delicate enunciation of lines that are so beautiful they communicate a sense of the terror latent in such beauty. He is a true creature of Henry James — the writer with his children who are too beautiful to live. This beauty is what makes The Innocents the best ghost movie I’ve ever seen: the beauty raises our terror to a higher plane than the simple fears of most ghost stories. It is the great virtue of the men who made this movie that they perceive the qualities of the Jamesian method: we are not simply being tricked, we are carried to a level where trickery — that is to say, master craftsmanship — is art.

  I don’t know why so many of the critics have been so remarkably unenthusiastic about The Innocents. Stanley Kauffmann wrote in the New Republic, “In his famous essay The Ambiguity of Henry James, Edmund Wilson advanced the possibility that the story is a sexual allegory, the ghosts being figments imagined by the repressed governess. If this is the case, it is doubly Freudian because James created the allegory unconsciously.” Henry James, the most conscious craftsman in American literature, writing an unconscious allegory! “Now we are engaged in a small civil war, testing whether that notion can long endure. . . . The film will not settle this controversy, but it does settle that there is only one way in which James’ story can be well dramatized: not for stage or television or screen but as a radio play. This is for two reasons. The ghosts are much less effective when seen than when described; and a radio play can confine itself to the highlights, as James does.”

  I don’t think that anybody who tries to put a great work of literature on the screen stands much of a chance of reproducing its greatness in another medium and probably much of its richness will be lost, but there is an irresistible and certainly not-to-be-condemned desire to visualize works we love. It is perhaps testimony to the love of literature that we want to cast a beautiful actress as Eustacia Vye or Dorothea Brooke, that we can’t help conceiving a film version of The Confidence Man. We may squirm when we see the work we love on the screen but surely we must recognize that someone else has been carried away by his love. And in the case of The Innocents, we don’t have to squirm: The Turn of the Screw was not that great, and this is no simplification or vulgarization. It is an interpretation of a literary work that honors its sources, just as Olivier in taking Shakespeare from the stage to the screen shows his love for both Shakespeare and for the new medium.

  One can understand, if not be very sympathetic toward, the purist monotony that Shakespeare is for the stage, Henry James for the printed page. (Suggested parlor game: try to think of five good movies not adapted or derived from any other medium.) But Kauffmann’s suggestion that radio is the only possible medium is positively freakish.

  Brendan Gill dismisses the movie for the New Yorker audience with a paragraph — “the story,” he informs us, “isn’t intrinsically pictorial.” Well, I’m not sure just what story is intrinsically pictorial; nor am I convinced that the motion picture is just a pictorial medium. The story is a suspense story; and there is a fairly solid tradition by now that the movies are pretty good at handling suspense. And if we think of a story that seems to be pictorial, like say, The Return of the Native, does that necessarily mean its pictorial qualities would be easy to transfer to the screen? Possibly a film version, by substituting its own pictorial qualities, would wreck Hardy far more than it can endanger a melodramatist like James, whose dialogue and method are so highly dramatic. Surely it all depends on who does it, and how.

  Time magazine, in a semi-complimentary review of the film, raises what I guess can fairly be called theological objections. If I were religious I think I would cry blasphemy and sacrilege at the way Time rams God and Satan into its movie reviews.

  Henry James once deplored The Turn of the Screw as a shameless potboiler. There is irony in the confession. For in this little novel the creative flame that boils the pot rushed up from black abysses of religion seldom plumbed in this author’s insuperably civil art. Though the book is known to schoolboys [what schoolboys?] merely as a grand ghost story, it is experienced by mature readers as a demonological document of shuddery profundity. [Mature readers are evidently those who can make hell-fire with only Time to burn.] Some of that profundity is sacrificed to saleability in this film . . .

  and so forth. I am afraid these “black abysses of religion” are just a big hole Time is digging, filling it in with every important picture no matter what its culture or tradition — thus the Japanese film Ikiru becomes “the Calvary of a common man” and The Five-Day Lover becomes, of all things, a study of religious “desperation.”

  Time, having discovered these black abysses, next suggests that the film makers don’t understand the nature of evil and horror in Henry James:

  The film is seriously flawed by a fundamental misconception that arises from a fundamental disagreement among students of the novel. Some say the ghosts are irreally real; others say they are hysterical fantasies developed by the governess, who has repressed a passion for her employer. . . . But the men who wrote this picture, Truman Capote and Playwright Archibald, unhappily press hard, much harder than James did, for the psychiatric interpretation. They have obviously failed to perceive that in suggesting a normal, everyday basis for the ghastly phenomena, they must inevitably relieve
the spectator of his nameless horror of what happens.

  The movie (and James) do not suggest a “normal everyday basis” for the ghastly phenomena: they suggest that ghastly phenomena may be hidden in the normal everyday — for there is nothing more frightening than evil and horror there. And it is this level, this possibility in the novel that makes it, like other James works, so fascinating to the modern reader. It is the evil in the governess’s singlemindedness, her insistence, her determination; it is the destructive power of her innocence that makes the story great. I don’t see why Time and so many of the other reviews call this a “psychiatric interpretation” as if it were a new-fangled modern way to read James — invented presumably by Edmund Wilson. Pick up almost any story by James — Portrait of a Lady or Madame de Mauves — and you find yourself caught up in the destructive elements in virtue, and you are frequently told the story by a narrator whose interpretation of the material is, precisely, an exposure of himself. You read James because of the intellectual pleasure of speculating about what is really going on. The Turn of the Screw is not any different in method: what made it a “potboiler” in James’s terms was simply the use of spooks rather than the more conventional “influences” of his other work — the heiresses and villains and social climbers who try to possess your soul, marry you for money, or drain your energy. However you interpret either The Turn of the Screw or The Innocents, the theme is the abiding Jamesian theme: the corruption of innocence. And the trickery is Jamesian — not letting you be sure whether the children are innocents who are corrupted by the servants who once had control over them, or whether they are destroyed by the innocent who now controls them (in her idealism, she may expect children to be so innocent that she regards actual children as corrupt).

  The evidence that the screenwriters haven’t slanted it is that the critics who complain of slanting are all complaining of different slants. Some of the reviewers have made a good deal of fuss about the supposedly “Freudian” perspective or slant imposed on the material by having the child Miles kiss the governess on the mouth — I don’t see how this slants the material in any direction. I once worked as a governess for six weeks and I’ve never been so mauled in my life: the ten-year old would trap me in corners demanding kisses. Does this prove that the child was corrupt or possessed by an adult spirit, or that I, who of almost as nervous about it as the governess in The Innocents, was hysterical? Both interpretations are possible.

  Unless Time is suggesting that every housewife keeps a set of hallucinations next to the mixmaster, I don’t see how the spectator is relieved of his horror by the possibility that the source of evil is in the governess’s tortured Puritan mind. That kind of evil is not what is usually meant by “normal everyday.” For whether the children see the ghosts or not, the governess certainly does see them, and her forcing Miles to confront the ghost kills him. Is there really more horror in this confrontation if Miles actually sees a ghost than if he dies from fear of her? A good strong, determined woman, so tortured by fears and visions that all her passion goes into making others look her fear in the face, is about as complexly dreadful a demon as any horror story can encompass.

  Deborah Kerr’s performance is in the grand manner — as modulated and controlled, and yet as flamboyant, as almost anything you’ll see on the stage. And it’s a tribute to Miss Kerr’s beauty and dramatic powers that, after twenty years in the movies — years of constant overexposure — she is more exciting than ever. Perhaps she is a demon.

  As for the reviewers who have kept people away from the movie — perhaps the title includes them?

  A View from the Bridge, and a Note on The Children’s Hour

  I wouldn’t have thought A View from the Bridge was worth much discussion, but it has gotten such very-important-picture treatment from the press (including Dwight Macdonald!) that I think maybe I should say a few unkind words. A View from the Bridge is an attempt to make a neo-realist Greek tragedy about a longshoreman in Brooklyn. Eddie Carbone (Raf Vallone) neglects his wife (Maureen Stapleton) because he’s in love — although he doesn’t know it — with his wife’s eighteen-year-old niece. He helps two of his wife’s cousins enter the country illegally, but when one of them (Jean Sorel) makes love to the niece, he accuses him of being homosexual, and then betrays both men to the immigration department.

  The audience — what there is of it — often brings a special cachet of good will toward these slum-set or — to judge by appearances — proletarian dramas. It is supposed to be a more important effort than, say, a story of incest in a middle-class family, and the audience — which, for a film like this, tends to be a liberal, educated audience — respects the good will of the author and those involved in the project. The converse is that the critic who says “But it isn’t any good!” is regarded as a snob who doesn’t care about the best interests of the proletarians — and certainly a snob toward the honest, hardworking movie-makers who do care.

  Miller’s intention is to create tragedy: but what we see is a man behaving so insanely and stupidly that we keep wondering why he isn’t put away or treated. We keep wondering why his wife doesn’t have him locked up or why the lawyer — played by Morris Carnovsky in his full rich tones of pear-shaped passion (he seems to be playing Arthur Miller as an old man) — doesn’t send him to a doctor? They all just wait for the disaster; we can only assume they don’t want to disturb the tragic inevitability.

  We get the feeling of inevitability simply because we see the mechanics of what Miller is trying to do, and we get the feeling of tragedy simply because the atmosphere is so obviously ominous we know it’s all going to end badly. We all know what Miller is trying to do: he seems incapable of keeping a secret. It’s not so much a drama unfolding as a sentence that’s been passed on the audience. What looks like and, for some people, passes for tragic inevitability is just poor playwriting.

  We begin to wonder why we’re being put through all this when nothing good can come of it — no poetry, no deepening awareness. The problem is right at the center of Miller’s conception: in some peculiarly muddled democratic way he is trying to make a tragic hero out of a common man. But a hero cannot be a common man: he must have greater aspirations, ambitions, drives, or dreams than other men. What does Eddie Carbone want? He wants his wife’s niece. According to the press sheets on the film, he is “a man blindly obsessed with an unnatural passion for his wife’s niece.” Well, what’s so unnatural about it? You’ll note that even the incest theme is fake — the girl is his wife’s niece. When you think of the number of uncles who make passes at their own nieces, you begin to see how absurd his “unnatural passion” theme is. Presumably the norm for Eddie — what would be “natural” — would be that after twenty years he should still be physically attracted only to his wife. Well, the wife we see is Maureen Stapleton in a wrapper, biting her lips like a rabbit working on a carrot — carrying naturalism to those extremes of Actor’s Studio perfection in which the people on stage and screen seem not only like the people next door but like the people next door when they’re discussing crabgrass or the lack of rainfall. A man would have to be blindly obsessed to want her at all. When, behaving like Arthur Miller’s official view of a good normal wife, she asks her husband why he doesn’t want to go to bed with her, you fairly want to cry out for him — “Because you’re so damned unattractive.” You will notice that dramatists who write about proletarian characters often have this view of a good normal healthy marriage in which a man is supposed to have a good normal healthy desire for even his fat dull wife. There’s something peculiarly condescending and sanctimonious about this view of the common man: he’s supposed to be happy and settled and content with so much less than a more complex or uncommon man asks of life. The play is written in the old sentimental proletarian tradition in which the working man is good and monogamous and the rich are corrupt and lascivious; Miller has much in common with Wilde’s Algernon Moncrieff: “Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is
the use of them?”

  A View from the Bridge has a couple of good performances — Raf Vallone is a powerful, commanding presence, and he’s a marvelous image (a sort of urban man with a hoe) and Raymond Pellegrin is very good. The movie, despite the little preview trailer with Lumet and Miller, which suggested almost a documentary approach to Brooklyn, was made in France in two versions — French and English. As Stanley Kauffmann pointed out, Vallone’s English, enunciated with difficulty, is completely wrong for the role of Eddie: Arthur Miller specializes in a kind of colloquial speech which sounds ridiculous on the tongue of a man who is obviously struggling to pronounce a foreign language. Perhaps the idioms are so familiar, Miller thinks they’re universal.

  There is, in the structure of the work, an even more serious error. Eddie, in order to discredit the niece’s suitor, accuses him of being homosexual, and at one point, in order to degrade the boy in the niece’s eyes, kisses him. The accusation is supposed to be without foundation: the boy is supposed to be completely straight. Why, then, this particular accusation? The charge is specious and irrelevant unless Eddie has some suppressed homosexual drive which makes him accuse others. Where does the charge come from if not from the character of one or the other? (As Eddie keeps saying, “something isn’t right.”) In having both accused and accuser innocent, Miller is left with a loose motive that has no relationship to anybody’s character: it doesn’t belong in the play at all. And the kiss — which would have a kind of dramatic horror if Eddie was attempting to degrade the boy by revealing what he himself experienced as degradation — has no meaning: it’s just embarrassing. It has its irony, however: after all these years of tabus, we finally get two men kissing on the screen and neither of them is even supposed to be enjoying it. You’d think there were no homosexuals in America, only heterosexuals falsely accused. (If I may indulge in a little game of psychologizing, I would say that, given the character of Eddie as a man unconsciously in love with his niece, he would probably be delighted if he thought the boy was homosexual, because he would then have no real competition for the girl.)