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From one mausoleum to another, "story of my dull life." A "house of Hades" in New England, it reaps a pair of wives and a caretaker and a mummified daughter in the prelude. "The dead are not quiet" there, the perfect research site for a gaggle of Nervous Nellies and Doubting Thomases: Supernatural anthropologist (Richard Johnson), poltergeist-struck wallflower (Julie Harris), chic psychic (Claire Bloom), smartass heir (Russ Tamblyn). Clayton's The Innocents is a model of composition for Robert Wise's camera, with mirrors, pillars and curtains to point up a kinship with Losey's The Servant. (Bloom's cosmopolitan crypto-Sappho approves: "There's nothing more cozy than an old gargoyle, except maybe a whipping post or two.") The baleful manor boasts a frigid center and a corkscrew spine, the heaving door and the visage on the wallpaper are some of frissons in an expert assembly that doesn't neglect the otherworldly rattle that turns out to be the clinking of ice cubes in the wiseguy's drink. "Not a square corner in the place," the doctor marvels, Wise's throwback to Lewton suggestiveness scrambles to do the same with the widescreen—bulging lenses, zooms up and down towers, spirals on stairwells to visualize invisible forces at play, a meticulous soundscape of creaks and moans contemporaneous with Bergman (The Silence) and greatly appreciated by Polanski (Repulsion). "Miss ESP and Bridey Murphy... some combination." Flashy as they are, the fright pyrotechnics remain admirably anchored by a premature spinster's sense of solitude. As Harris agonizes through shame and abandonment and desire, the walls around her alternately suggest a behemoth slowly digesting a snared critter and a welcoming mother pressing a lost child to her bosom. "Next vacation I really go somewhere else." Cinematography by Davis Boulton. With Fay Compton, Lois Maxwell, Rosalie Crutchley, and Valentine Dyall. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |