PERIOD PIECES : A BIT OF A CHILL - "THE TURNING OF THE SCREW"

Ok so moving on. Period pieces are very well and good but they do come in different shapes and sizes, a point I want to illustrate now. The turning of the screw is a tale by Henry James scary enough to chill the marrow of your bones. In these enlightened days of modern science and such like, ghost stories have sort of lost a bit of their popularity. But still, if you believe that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than can be seen with a telescope or microscope (and I do), and if you have a particularly good yarn to chew on, I feel that you won’t be able to help feeling well… Just a tad chilly. Especially if the screen adaptation is of BBC quality… Oh yes, this is one to be watched during the day…
Ann is particularly excited as she starts her new job as a governess in Bly manor. The master of the house is handsome, charming, and charismatic and cannot be persuaded to leave London for an instant. This being the case his two young nephews, orphans of whom he is now in charge Miles and Flora, are confided to boarding school and the massive country estate respectively. Now, like every young woman of breeding Flora must have a governess. The problem however, seems to be with getting the governesses to stay. Ann cannot think why as the days at Bly begin by being pure bliss. Ann still can’t help noticing strange flickers of light and whispers around the house. The servants seem slightly surly and quiet, but it’s nothing that cannot be explained away. Then, young Miles is sent home from his boarding school that refuses to have anything further to do with him. The more Ann tries to figure out why, the more she comes up against the memories of Miss Jessel, the children’s previous governess, and her lover Peter Quint. Both appear to have died on the estate and neither was well liked. Both spent a lot of time with the children. And the more Ann looks into things the more convinced she becomes that Jessel and Quint may be dead but they are far from gone. And they refuse to leave their former charges, Miles and Flora alone. Or behind. The thing is will Ann get the people around her to believe her? Or, as they say, are her nerves and imagination actually getting the better of her?
The story may not seem all that original at first; that I grant you. But the atmosphere of the film is such that you get sucked in straight away. It actually has quite a Hitchcock-esque feeling about it, have you ever watched his classic Rebecca? Well, it’s a similar theme in a sense (without the super-natural. Oh you’ll know what I mean if you’ve watched it). And there is a similar feeling of eeriness. The only difference is of course that in this case the strange fears and imaginings that nip at your ankles and whisper over your shoulder late at night actually come to pass. I felt the adaptation was all in all very well done (well that’s the BBC for you!) and there were some rather wily editing tricks at the beginning. I was quite disappointed to see they didn’t continue actually, probably so they didn’t attract attention to themselves. I finally feel the need to add that naturally ghost stories and horror are quite often an acquired taste. But this is a good quality adaptation of a classical tale, and unless you are completely “anti horror” of any kind I doubt you could find much wrong with it…

p.s as there are many adaptations of this classic tale I feel duty bound to tell you that he one I watched was the BBC adaptation and they have gone mighty thin on acting - directing credits... I will check them out and add them in the weeks to come, promise!