THE INNOCENTS (1961) **1/2 Someone has a lot of guts, hiring Truman Capote to co-write a script based on a Henry James novel involving "indecent games." Not quite sure why they think this is a better title than "The Turning of the Screw," though. Jack Clayton lets the intensity rise slowly, largely on its own, manifest and magnified in the face of Deborah Kerr. He's also an early master of dissonance and reverb, too bad he never hooked up with Jimi Hendrix. There's a lot of understated stuff meant to shock, and some of it does though the primary effect is to remind us how liberated we are; sexually and socially and also where the twain do meet. Then there's Michael Redgrave, likeable enough and surely there's no reason that charm should consider itself secondary to social circles or economic indexes. There are Casanovas, and Cleopatras, in every bar in town who have benefitted from gentle but odd-fitting lights like these being shown. What's wrong is wrong, the rest, apparently, is not wrong. Ultimately it's a horror flick though, a slow and cerebral, elegantly cast in black and white but lending suspicion that the sculptor may be somehow tainted.
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