I’m pleased to report that the Fairfield Library is relaunching the monthly “Fringe & Foreign” film festival tomorrow night at 7 p.m. with a free screening of “The Innocents,” the great 1961 film version of the Henry James novella, “The Turn of the Screw.”
I co-hosted the monthly gathering last year with my pal, Drew Taylor of The Weekly, The Playlist and Media Wave in Fairfield. He picks the fringe titles and I do the foreign.
This season we are focusing on movies made from classic novels, so I thought “The Innocents” would be a perfect pre-Halloween treat — the British production is one of the very best supernatural dramas and Deborah Kerr’s performance as the terrified governess Miss Giddens earned the actress a well-deserved Oscar nomination.
What makes “The Turn of the Screw” — and the movie adaptation — so unsettling is that it allows us to decide for ourselves if the secluded mansion where Miss Giddens goes to work is haunted or if she might be a religious hysteric who is projecting her own twisted fantasies on the two children who are her responsibility.
Something terrible happened at the country home a few months before Miss Giddens arrived — a murder that grew out of the sexual relationship 
between the previous governess and a brutish gamekeeper. The new governess begins to suspect that her two young charges — Miles (Martin Stephens) and Flora (Pamela Franklin) — were witnesses to all sorts of unspecified sexual “evil” before the violence erupted.
The adaptation for “The Innocents” was a collaboration between Truman Capote and John Mortimer (the latter would go on to write the wonderful “Rumpole of the Bailey” mysteries). The script and the direction by Jack Clayton are full of very subtle suggestions of the possible corruption of innocence. We are drawn so deep into Miss Giddens’s terror and hysteria that the scares in the movie are much stronger than the shocks in a standard horror potboiler.
It’s a movie that leaves lots of room for discussion afterwards, so it should be a perfect picture to launch this fall-to-spring series. Please join me if you are free tomorrow night.
(The Fairfield Library is 1080 Old Post Road in Fairfield Center.)
