Martin Stephens remember making The Innocents (1961)

It wasn't only Jack Clayton who identified with the themes of The Innocents. Here's Martin Stephens who, at the age of 11, played Miles, remembering the making of the film. 

He has spoken about his career in general to filminc blog.

I can’t say that I was a natural actor but what I would say is that I was very directable. If you look at my fifteen, sixteen, eighteen films, whatever it was, you will see that when it was a good director I tended to be reasonably good and when it was a weak or poor director I was relatively mediocre. I would absorb what was going on. Also, to be honest, I didn’t have much of an ego in terms of what I was doing. ...

I’ll give you an example. I played Oliver in the musical in London when I was twelve. I did that for about seven months and my mom used to come a collect me.  Every day she would come up and sometimes she would be a few minutes early so she would go into the wings and see the final curtain calls before she would whisk me off to go to bed. 

One day the stage manager actually turned to her and said – as I was taking the bows and there was uproarious applause going on, and curtain call after curtain call – the stage manager actually turned to her and said "do you know that Martin couldn’t care less?" It was just doing a job.  I was enjoying it, but it didn’t really matter to me too much, I didn’t invest my ego into it.

And isn't the opening scene from the film disturbing? I do wonder if Clayton had seen Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw.

Christopher Frayling on the making of The Innocents (1961)

The Innocents, Jack Clayton's adaptation of Henry James classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw, is a wonderful film, and this documentary is worthy of it.

You don't see many of them here, but it's rightly been said that even monochrome behind-the scenes photographs of The Innocents are terrifying.

In which William James uses a ladder to spy on G.K. Chesterton

In 1907 the American philosopher William James was invited to deliver a series of lectures to Manchester College in Oxford. (It was not then part of the University of Oxford: it educated Nonconformist students, who were barred by the university.)

After delivering the lectures, he went to stay with his brother, the novelist Henry James, in Rye. Seamus Perry, in the London Review of Books, tells what he got up to there:

He was very excited to learn that G.K. Chesterton was staying at the inn next door. Intensely curious to see what Chesterton looked like, and much to his fastidious brother’s acute dismay, William leaned a ladder against the garden wall up which he climbed in the hope of getting a sighting. He was unsuccessful, but they did meet subsequently during the visit, and even took tea, and although, as James reported, Chesterton merely "gurgled and giggled", he apparently came across as "lovable".

Getting a glimpse of Chesterton was irresistible partly, no doubt, because he was enormously, legendarily, fat. Rather more respectably, however, James had long admired him, he told Henry, as a "tremendously strong writer and true thinker, despite his mannerism of paradoxes"; he was especially taken by his book Heretics (1905). To like Chesterton despite his paradoxes is a little like liking Venice despite its canals, but you can certainly see what James would have warmed to in Chesterton's exuberant, if somewhat remorseless, celebration of the ordinary world, a world unconstrained by what Chesterton called "modern intellectualism".

Looking back on 'Satanic ritual abuse' and The Turn of the Screw

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Like the December one before it, the Christmas issue of Fortean Times has an article from the era - the late Eighties and early Nineties - when the concept of 'Satanic Ritual abuse' flourished.

Its author, Bob Rickard, is most interested in the way this modern form of witch hunting took on the ideology of the medieval form of the pastime. But I am more interested by the way a humane modern view risked turning supposed child victims into suspects.

Rickard writes:

Where Lady Butler-Sloss's 1988 inquiry into child abuse recommended that a child's allegations "should always be taken seriously", it seemed reasonable that this meant deserving a 'proper' investigation. However, some social workers and childcare professionals sought to interpret the injunction as to believe a child's account literally and as wholly factual.

If a child's account of events had such high status, it was inevitable that it would be the supposed child victims who were grilled rather than the supposed abusers. 

It felt as though what was being sought from them was not so much a witness statement as a confession. There was an anxiety or an insistence that the child should 'disclose' abuse, as it was termed, and everything from browbeating to bribery, according to Rickard's account, was used to obtain it.

I am reminded of the importance of a suspect's confession in Softly, Softly: Taskforce and the varied ways that Chief Superintendent Barlow would set about achieving it.

But. even more, I am reminded of the ending of Henry James's ghost story The Turn of the Screw. where the boy Miles has to name Peter Quint even at the cost of his own life. Whether anything untoward had really happened or it was all in the mind of the governess who narrates the story is debated to this day.