3

Scriptwriter for the Stars Capote’s Screen Adaptations of Indiscretion of an American Wife, Beat the Devil, and The Innocents

Long before he penned his first screenplay, Capote rewrote films spontaneously and exuberantly, employing his quick wit and ear for dialogue to amuse his friends when they found themselves bored with a picture playing on the screen. As many dissatisfied filmgoers have discovered, a tedious film can produce ready pleasures if one rewrites and redubs it while viewing it, and Capote enjoyed such pastimes throughout his teen years. His friend Phoebe Pierce Vreeland reminisced about their high school excursions to the cinema: “As we sat there, we would rewrite the movies at the top of our voices, screaming with laughter: ‘She should have said . . .’ ‘He should have said . . .’ ‘Well, he’s hopeless anyway, but if he had only said . . .’ It was awful, I mean, from the point of view of the Pickwick [Theater]. ‘Out!’ We were thrown out of the Pickwick more often than the dust.”1 Such an inauspicious beginning could not foretell the depth of screenwriting’s influence on Capote’s career, yet even at the beginning of his literary endeavors he aligned himself with the film industry, proclaiming on his application for a fellowship to the artists’ colony Yaddo to have “read manuscripts for a motion-picture office.”² Along with the pseudobiographical tidbits suggesting that he had “written speeches for a third-rate politician, danced on a river boat, [and] made a small fortune painting flowers on glass,” the authorial blurb for Other Voices, Other Rooms reiterates this claim of script reading to create a Bohemian image of Capote in which the cinematic world serves as yet another sign of his precocious talents and varied interests.3 Furthermore, as explored in chapter 1, Capote’s writing is often cinematic in its vision, which explains why filmmakers turned to him at various stages throughout his career.

Despite the cinematic sympathies evident in his writing and the screenplays he penned throughout his career, Capote on several occasions expressed his dissatisfaction with the screenwriter’s art in particular and filmmaking in general. Primarily he rejected the cooperative nature of such endeavors, finding that he lost the “true gratification of writing” throughout the process: “The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. . . . That’s why it’s so absolutely boring to write a film script. The great sense of self-obligation doesn’t enter into it because too many people are involved. . . . I must admit that in a peculiar way I enjoyed [writing film scripts], but the true gratification of writing was completely absent; the obligation was to producers and the actors . . . and not to myself.”⁴ As Capote and countless other screenwriters have learned, directors often sacrifice writers’ artistic visions to their own. Indeed, in Observations Capote quotes John Huston as saying, “I became a director because I couldn’t watch any longer how my work as a writer was ruined,” acknowledging that, to be in control of one’s story in the cinematic world, one must sit in the director’s chair (O 10). Capote, although he did not aspire to directing, voiced a sentiment similar to Huston’s in a 1957 interview: “I don’t think a writer stands much chance of imposing himself on film unless he works in the warmest rapport with the director or is himself the director.”⁵ Beyond the ways in which virtually any writer’s vision can be overshadowed by the director’s, midcentury Hollywood severely restricted films that might evince a queer sensibility, further crimping Capote’s style. Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin explain these circumstances: “queer writers, including Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Truman Capote, came to Hollywood to oversee or collaborate on films adapted from their plays and novels, but . . . their input was still hampered by the Production Code and Hollywood’s formulaic heterocentrism.”⁶ Capote, who so daringly portrayed homosexuality in Other Voices, Other Rooms, was hampered in his freedom to write film scripts by the corporate and moral concerns of Hollywood and its censors. Queer themes nonetheless emerge in his screenplays, but in a more submerged fashion than in his fiction.

As much as Capote braved the challenges of screenwriting throughout his career, he repeatedly privileged his literary endeavors over his cinematic ones. Quite simply, writing fiction represented an art of the highest calling and the highest challenge for him, whereas he casually dismissed the art of screenwriting, deriding it as a simple process of construction for one sufficiently gifted to write credible dialogue: “The only thing that’s easy for me to write is film scripts. There’s a reason why. You assume you can write dialogue, take that for granted. The thing that’s difficult about screenwriting . . . is it’s all construction. Once you have the thing constructed in your mind, scene by scene, how it will open and how it will end, the problem’s solved.”7 In sum, Capote found much of screenwriting and filmmaking to be tedious, mechanical, and exhausting; worse, it distracted him from his literary efforts. In mid-1953, the hectic year witnessing the production of Indiscretion of an American Wife and Beat the Devil, Capote wrote to his friend Mary Louise Aswell of his distaste for screenwriting: “I loathe writing for films—the fact that it is undermining is no mere myth. I think the bit I’ve done so far has done me a certain kind of good (though neither of the pictures is any good at all—but that isn’t what I mean)—but that is as far as it should go.”⁸

Capote’s dismissal of his 1953 pictures has proved premature: Indiscretion of an American Wife, notwithstanding its many production difficulties, unites, improbably yet hauntingly, Italian neorealism with Hollywood stars in a story of adultery, loss, and longing, and Beat the Devil enjoys a cult following appreciative of its quirky mix of international intrigue and domestic betrayal, as told in Capote’s snappy dialogue. Of Capote’s screenplays, his masterpiece is undoubtedly The Innocents, a 1961 adaptation of The Turn of the Screw that chillingly captures Henry James’s unsettling tale of children possessed by the dead. Capote’s protean talents illuminate each of these screenplays, which represent distinct cinematic genres and sensibilities. Despite their many differences, they are all recognizably Capotean in their shared concerns with issues of identity, community, sexuality, and love, a mix of themes that Capote imbues with his queer touches.

Indiscretion of an American Wife

Vittorio De Sica’s Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953) tells a simple story: Mary Forbes (Jennifer Jones), a married woman, falls in love with another man, Giovanni Doria (Montgomery Clift), while visiting with relatives in Rome. After anguish and indecision, she realizes she must leave him and return to her family in Philadelphia, but Giovanni finds her at the train station and desperately tries to persuade her to abandon her family for him. Mary’s nephew Paul (fourteen-year-old Richard “Dick” Beymer), who brings her luggage to the station, reminds her of her love for her family through his obvious devotion to her. Having presumably departed, Paul loiters around the station so that when Mary wavers in her decision and almost absconds with Giovanni, Paul is there to tacitly remind her of her familial responsibilities. After the lovers share heart-wrenching conversations, a torrid farewell in an empty train car, and a humiliating ordeal when they are caught in flagrante delicto, Mary leaves Giovanni to reunite with her family. Such a minimalist plotline was conceived as a cinematic landmark, one that, producer David O. Selznick believed, would unite Italian neorealist cinema with Hollywood stars and glamour in a prestige production destined for critical acclaim.

Italian neorealism, as Millicent Marcus explains of the genre, favors “a filmmaking approach free of artifice, unhampered by fixed screenplays, inspired by real-life subjects, and resolved to tell the unvarnished truth.”9 Marcia Landy, while cautioning against the formulaic nature of defining a diverse corpus, observes neorealism’s investment in such features as “location shooting, the use of nonprofessional actors, the focus on contemporary events and not on the historical past, the loose construction of narration, the intermingling of fiction and nonfiction, and the privileging of marginalized and subaltern groups.”¹⁰ Whereas Italian neorealism garnered much critical acclaim for its aesthetic achievements despite austere production values, as well as for its progressive (if sentimental) intervention into social issues of post–World War II Europe, Hollywood productions were carefully scripted, relied on star power, and were always conceived with an interest in their financial viability. These two sensibilities share little common ground aesthetically or commercially, yet in its conception Indiscretion of an American Wife was to harmonize them into one film.

Among the many midcentury Italian neorealist masterpieces, including Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943), Federico Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria (1957), and Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), Vittorio De Sica’s films stand out as esteemed works, particularly Shoeshine (1946), The Bicycle Thief (1948), Miracle in Milan (1951), and Umberto D (1952). Bert Cardullo praises the director’s achievements: “De Sica . . . aspired to, and frequently achieved, the highest cinematic standards, challenging the audience to respond to his unflinching social insights and psychological portraiture.”11 In the early 1950s these artistic triumphs and his status as a preeminent auteur earned De Sica the attention of Hollywood and particularly of Howard Hughes. At Merle Oberon’s house De Sica screened Umberto D for such Hollywood heavyweights as Charlie Chaplin and Samuel Goldwyn, but as Chaplin cautioned, De Sica’s films were not likely to please an American audience accustomed to Hollywood fare: “De Sica, it’s great, a great film. . . . But it won’t please the Americans, or very few of them.”¹² Nonetheless, in 1952 Selznick expressed interest in joining De Sica to film the story “Stazione Termini,” the seed from which Indiscretion of an American Wife grew. De Sica realized that compromises would inevitably result from working under Hollywood financing, but his vision of neorealism was sufficiently supple, or so he believed, to accommodate American production styles. De Sica affirmed that neorealism transcends reality in its creation of poetry: “Because neorealism is not shooting films in authentic locales, it is not reality. It is reality filtered through poetry, reality transfigured.”¹³ This aesthetic creed guided his efforts to create cinematic poetry, albeit in this instance under the aegis of a Hollywood production. For as much as De Sica advocated neorealist principles, he also realized that, to a large extent, all cinematic styles create a necessary world of narrative illusion. From this perspective, he expressed surprise that some viewers of Indiscretion of an American Wife expected unvarnished reality, apparently believing the shooting of the film to be a simple exercise in allowing the camera to roll and thereby capturing “real life”: “Work on it was very complicated. For some extraordinary reason, many people think that all the scenes shot of the station life were authentic, ‘stolen from reality.’”¹⁴

The screenplay of Indiscretion of an American Wife was adapted from the story “Stazione Termini” by Cesare Zavattini, who collaborated with De Sica on numerous projects, including many of his finest. Indeed, Capote declared that Zavattini was “in good measure responsible for the successes of De Sica” (O 8) and, on another occasion, pronounced, “Eighty percent of the good Italian movies were made from Zavattini scripts . . . all of the De Sica pictures, for instance. De Sica is a charming man, a gifted and deeply sophisticated person; nevertheless, he’s mostly a megaphone for Zavattini, his pictures are absolutely Zavattini’s creations.”¹⁵ As production of Terminal Station continued under Selznick’s control and De Sica’s direction, an English-speaking screenwriter was needed. Before Capote was hired for the job, several famous authors, including Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding), Paul Gallico (The Snow Goose, Lou Gehrig: Pride of the Yankees), and Alberto Moravia (Time of Indifference, The Conformist), were enlisted to pen the screenplay.16 The project frustrated the talents of these esteemed writers, and Selznick then hired Capote, paying him a thousand dollars per week, for “entire redialoguing to our satisfaction in fast time.”¹⁷ Selznick wrote to John Huston, with whom Capote would collaborate on Beat the Devil later in 1953, and credited the young author with salvaging the project at a time of artistic jeopardy: “I think Terminal Station has a chance of being quite an extraordinary picture, despite the difficulties that were imposed upon us by the dates, but the picture, however good, will not be so good as it could have been and should have been had we had just a few weeks longer, because we didn’t get into our own stride on the script until we finally got Truman Capote.”¹⁸ Capote positively assessed his first screenplay in a letter to his former lover Newton Arvin: “I rewrote the scenario for the new De Sica picture . . . and it had to be finished in 3 weeks, as the picture was already in production. Anyway, the whole experience had its amusing moments, and I think I did a pretty good job, all things considered.”¹⁹

While Capote resolved the difficulties with the script, professional and personal conflicts plagued the filming of Indiscretion of an American Wife. Primarily, De Sica and Selznick clashed over their respective visions of the film as an exemplar of Italian neorealism or of Hollywood romance. De Sica complained that Selznick attempted to manage every detail of the production, and so he simply ignored Selznick’s advice: “Every day he sent me forty- or fifty-page letters, detailing everything. . . . I stopped reading them and began throwing them away as soon as they arrived. I would agree with everything he said and do things my own way.”²⁰ As Montgomery Clift’s biographer Patricia Bosworth tells it, “Selznick wanted the movie to look like a slick little love story, complete with a happy ending. Monty sided with De Sica, who thought the picture should depict a ruined romance.” She also records that Clift lambasted Selznick as “an interfering fuckface” for his meddling.²¹ With the producer and director arguing over key elements of the film, artistic decisions concerning photography mushroomed into major sparring points. Primarily, De Sica’s cinematographer Aldo Graziati preferred long shots of the station and the people bustling about in it, in keeping with the neorealist emphasis on everyday faces, lives, and environments. Selznick, however, brought in his preferred photographer Oswald Morris to counterbalance Graziati’s compositions, instructing him to film Jones and Clift in lush and glamorous close-ups, the better to accentuate both their passion for each other and their sheer beauty. Jones’s biographer Paul Green wrote that Graziati’s “neo-realistic approach was at odds with Oswald Morris who was hired to shoot close-ups of Jones and Clift with the task of making them appear more glamorous in a style in keeping with Hollywood sensibilities.”22 Morris recalled in his autobiography: “By the time I arrived in Italy, [Selznick] had come to a totally crazy arrangement with De Sica whereby I would photograph anything closer than a full-length figure on the two principals, but [Graziati] would shoot the rest.”²³

Personal altercations and egotistical tantrums also disrupted the film’s production. Jennifer Jones, Selznick’s protégée and wife, was often upset on the set. Since shooting had to be done in the late evening after the train station closed each day, the filming schedule was grueling. Capote believed that Jones’s outbursts were sparked by her attraction to Clift: “Jennifer’s got some sort of crush on Monty, and believe it or not she didn’t realize that Monty really liked fellows. When she found out she got so upset, she went into the portable dressing room and stuffed a mink jacket down the portable toilet.”²⁴ While not stating the motivation for Jones’s behavior, De Sica likewise reported that “she threw her hat in the toilet, so that we had to fish it out because we had only one which she used in every scene in the film.”²⁵ Tensions also flared between Capote and Clift, as the film’s line producer Wolfgang Reinhardt observed: “there was some kind of competition going on between Monty and Truman. It was the one personal problem that I knew Monty was having.”²⁶ In a letter to Andrew Lyndon, Capote mentioned his initial dislike of Clift, but then the agreeable resolution to their dispute: “I got started on a great feud with Clift—for six weeks we really loathed each other—but then (this is for your eyes alone!) we suddenly started a sort of mild flirtation, which snowballed along until it reached very tropic climates indeed.”²⁷

For a film so focused on the heterosexual passion of an adulterous affair, Indiscretion of an American Wife contains numerous queer undertones, particularly in its treatment of children, children’s sexuality, and maternal desire. The film stages a stark contrast in its depiction of children and sexuality: Mary’s daughter Kathy, always offscreen but keenly present in Mary’s memories, symbolizes the innocent child for whom Mary must sacrifice her sexual desires, whereas her nephew Paul represents children’s curiosity and nascent interest in sexuality. His implied competition with Giovanni to win Mary’s affections undermines the cultural fantasy of children’s sexual innocence, for his insistent courtship of his aunt carries with it erotic undertones. The film thus vacillates in its treatment of children: Kathy, who is frequently represented by a blank and lifeless mannequin in a souvenir store, regulates her mother’s sexuality, and Paul, while he determinedly pursues Mary, also monitors her sexuality by stymying her desire for Giovanni. In a final erotic contradiction, this adolescent boy seeks the type of sexual transgression that he denies her with Giovanni. Children desire Mary as mother and as potential lover, yet her desires for adult passion must be sacrificed to protect these ostensibly innocent children.

Foremost, Mary is torn between her desires as an adulteress and as a mother, and Capote stages numerous scenes dramatizing this plight. Her connection to Kathy is evident in the film’s opening sequence when she buys a Sicilian peasant dress for her daughter. When she sits down in the train to commence her journey home, she strokes it gently while Italian children play roughly around her. This compartment scene stages in miniature the conflict between familial and sexual desires that plagues Mary’s consciousness throughout the film. Furthermore, it is obvious that the man with whom she shares the compartment is sexually attracted to her: he did not offer the seat next to him to the man who preceded Mary onto the train, and he gazes furtively yet hungrily at her. When Mary leaves the train, a buxom woman walks down the aisle and evokes much vocal male admiration, but, more important, she models for Mary the ways in which a wholesome love for one’s family preserves a woman from objectification, as this woman calls out “Mamma” as she enters a compartment and thereby escapes the wolf whistles. Within the refuge of the compartment she shares with her mother, this unnamed female character is preserved from the sexual aggressors surrounding her. This brief scene foreshadows the extended sequence in which Mary tends to a pregnant woman who falls ill in the train station. Toward the close of this plotline, the woman’s husband intones, “Always her family. Never her,” and this lesson in self-abnegation—a woman must deny herself and her needs in order to preserve the sanctity of her family—is realized at the film’s conclusion when Mary leaves Giovanni for the final time.

For Giovanni to win Mary from her family, a task he ultimately fails to accomplish, he must overcome her love for her daughter and the innocence encoded in her. When he finds Mary at the train station, he urges her to remain in Rome with him, but thoughts of her child compel her to return to America. “Then I thought of Kathy. Her hair. Her sweet little neck. Most of all, her eyes. But it was all in separate pieces, like a puzzle I couldn’t put together,” she cries, as she concludes, “She’s a child—my own—and I can’t give her up.” In reply, Giovanni stresses his willingness to accommodate the child in their relationship: “Have I ever suggested you should give up Kathy? You know I want her to be with us. You know I want us to be together.” Mary then explains that her husband is also a child, one who needs her as much as her daughter does: “He sounded so vulnerable, so—so lost. So like a small boy in the dark, calling over and over, ‘Where are you? Where are you? When are you coming home?’” Mary’s husband, infantilized yet adult in her description of him, encodes both the innocence of the child, one lost without a maternal figure to protect him, and the sexuality of adulthood, a man who presumably desires his wife’s return to enjoy sexual pleasures with her—pleasures that she, in his absence, has pursued with another man.

Upon seeing Giovanni, Mary’s determination to return home to her daughter and childlike husband yields to the allure of unrestrained carnality. When the 7:30 p.m. train that was to take her away pulls out of the station, her eyes glimmer with desire and anticipation. Departing with Giovanni for his apartment, Mary gazes upon a Sicilian dress similar to the one that she bought for Kathy in the souvenir store, realizes that she has forgotten it on the train (and that she has thus lost this metaphoric representation of her daughter), and then espies her nephew Paul, who has not yet left the terminal. Giovanni and Paul compete for Mary’s affections in a homosocial struggle waged in numerous distrustful glances and suspicious posturings. Adolescent sexuality serves as a pervasive theme in Capote’s fiction, particularly in Other Voices, Other Rooms, The Grass Harp, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (in the novella’s backstory of Holly’s marriage to Doc Golightly when she was barely fourteen). Complementary to Capote’s thematic interest in adolescent sexuality, Selznick sketches the dramatic potential in Paul’s erotic attraction to his aunt: “Paul should already have entered puberty . . . and be conscious of and deeply interested in and curious about sex, which won’t be dwelled on in the picture but which should be obvious from his age, interests, and reactions.”28 To heighten this sexual competition between man and boy, Clift and Beymer are costumed similarly, with each wearing an overcoat that appears slightly too big for him. Moreover, despite his advantage in years, Clift stands only a few inches taller than Beymer, and shots of the two thus visually posit them as equals. Mary latches onto Paul as a reason to leave Giovanni and return to her family—“I wouldn’t have thought there was a chance of our running into Paul. Yet there he was”—and Giovanni impulsively slaps her when she tells him goodbye. Paul is horrified by Giovanni’s violence—“I saw it! He hit you, Aunt Mary! He hit you!”—which allows him to tend to his attractive aunt during a moment of emotional vulnerability.

FIG. 3 Indiscretion of an American Wife: An intergenerational love triangle, with Mary Forbes (played by Jennifer Jones) forced to choose between familial love, represented by her nephew (Richard Beymer), and erotic love, represented by her adulterous lover (Montgomery Clift). Clift’s and Beymer’s similar costuming marks the difficulty of the decision Mary faces.

Paul may appear to be a more sympathetic companion for Mary, but he cannot compete with Giovanni for her love, for she seeks sexual passion beyond the chaste affections available to her from her family. Later, after Mary nurtures the Italian woman who falls ill, she again finds Paul, who is now eating an apple, biting freely of the fruit so suggestive of human sexuality and illicit knowledge. Mary dismisses her nephew—“I’d like you to go home now,” she says—but she also invites him to visit for Christmas. She then kisses Paul on the forehead and gently slaps him on the cheek, affectionately reenacting Giovanni’s assault on her. As Giovanni physically punished Mary for choosing her family over her sexuality, she replays this scene to free herself of the child denying her access to adult sexual pleasures.

After dismissing Paul, and after Giovanni proves his devotion by jumping across the tracks to reach her despite an oncoming train, Mary is again ready to be seduced by Giovanni, and they steal into a deserted train car for a passionate rendezvous. The tryst is staged as a masterpiece of midcentury sexual obfuscation: Jones and Clift are filmed in full dress, but viewers know the characters have consummated their reconciliation because, when their lovemaking is interrupted, Jones whispers in anguished horror, “Giovanni!” and casts down her eyes in shame, while Clift straightens his tie. A necktie in need of realignment was a certain sign of erotic consummation in 1950s cinema; as Leonard Leff trenchantly notes, “straightening one’s tie in 1953 was like pulling on one’s shorts in 2003.”29 Deepening her sexual humiliation, one of the security guards mugs at Mary childishly through the window in the compartment door, enacting a symbolic revenge for the children whom she has momentarily forgotten in her passion for Giovanni. The two lovers are paraded through the station to the magistrate, and an old man tells a tourist, “They caught them making love,” another cinematic euphemism suggesting the obvious while not clearly stating it. As Mary grows worried about the possibility of arrest and ensuing scandal, and as Giovanni grows more aggressive with the officers who apprehended them, the commissioner asks her, “Are you separated from your husband?” to which she replies, “No,” while again casting her eyes down in shame. The commissioner then inquires, “Any children?” Mary denies Kathy’s existence before confessing the truth in a monosyllabic trajectory from denial to acceptance: “No. Yes. One.” As she corrects her falsehood and prepares herself to return to her family, she casts her eyes down yet again. Accepting the necessity of returning to her role as an American housewife in Philadelphia, Mary renounces sexual passion, leaves Giovanni behind, and privileges the needs of others over her own.

The queerness of Indiscretion of an American Wife emerges in its depiction of a woman disciplined into sexual submission through the intercession of children, as these avatars of ostensible innocence regulate her desires in service to their own, yet it also arises in Clift’s performance, which received mixed reviews from critics. Bosworth feels that Clift “plays the cliché situation (the breakup of two lovers) with drama and urgency and a sense of style. Passion clings to his every move, every gesture, every look,”³⁰ but the performance is also at times stilted and not entirely convincing, for the role of an Italian professor does not suit him well. Selznick starkly pronounced that “the thought of Clift being a professor is funny,”³¹ acknowledging the disjunction between the star’s American roots and his role. Although his homosexuality was not widely known during his acting career, Clift’s film persona plays on the strength of his stunningly good looks while also fashioning a subtler form of Hollywood masculinity. His performances relied less on physical stature and more on brooding introspection, contrasting sharply with the more virile masculinities of such contemporary stars as Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, and Burt Lancaster. This contrast in masculinity shines through in several of Clift’s films, such as Red River (1948), in which he costars with Wayne, and From Here to Eternity (1953), in which he costars with Lancaster. Furthermore, as Kylo-Patrick Hart posits, “Clift’s gay male spectators . . . have been able to use their awareness of the actor’s physical appeal, sexual appeal, and personal history to engage in an active search for the gay subtexts and alternative readings offered by the actor’s films.”³² Such a quest may be simpler in such films as The Search (1948), Red River, and From Here to Eternity, in which Clift plays characters living in homosocial environments where men support one another despite their conflicts: for example, the mortal combat between Clift’s and Wayne’s characters that concludes Red River peters out when Clift’s girlfriend, in desperate exasperation, points out to them that “anyone with half a mind would know you love each other.”³³

FIG. 4 Indiscretion of an American Wife: Caught in flagrante delicto, Giovanni Doria (Montgomery Clift) straightens his tie, while Mary Forbes (Jennifer Jones) cowers in embarrassment, with the lighting and shadows indicative of sin, shame, and transgression.

In contrast, the torrid heterosexual affair of Indiscretion of an American Wife may appear an unlikely site to locate another of Clift’s queer performances, yet it should be noted that his character exits the narration emotionally unscathed. After he leaps from Mary’s departing train and tumbles roughly on the platform, a passerby inquires if he is hurt, with the question taking on the subtextual meaning of whether he has been hurt emotionally by the loss of his lover, but he simply dusts himself off and intones, “No.” Some critics derided Clift’s performance because of the actor’s homosexuality. In an interview between De Sica and Charles Thomas Samuels, Samuels declared, “Another problem with the film is that Clift doesn’t seem too masculine and some of the dialogue, by Capote, doesn’t give the right impression either,” to which De Sica replied, “Yes, they were both pederasts.”34 The movie’s creation relied on the talents of these gay men, yet they serve as convenient scapegoats for its perceived failings.

In the end, two separate movies were made: Terminal Station, reflecting De Sica’s neorealist vision, and Indiscretion of an American Wife, reflecting Selznick’s Hollywood sensibility. For the American release of the film, Selznick cut De Sica’s version to the bone, and it runs only slightly over an hour, which necessitated that he add an introductory short of pop star Patti Page singing two songs, “Autumn in Rome” and “Indiscretion.” These melodies are thematically consistent with the film, even if the short does not organically cohere with it. Selznick told De Sica, “If a comment is made to you that my version is short, you have only to ask the unimaginative people who ask you this, [would they] rather have it better in sixty-four minutes or worse in eighty minutes.”³⁵ In reply to Selznick’s aggressive editing of his film, De Sica gamely stated, “I cannot pass judgment. . . . Perhaps Selznick cut a little too much. But one kiss more or less shouldn’t make such a difference.”³⁶ In the popular press, reviews were mixed at best. Time praised the cinematography—“The camera finds in the terminal . . . a certain metal delight”—yet pilloried the film: “but in almost every other respect Indiscretion is, for the gifted men who made it, an indiscretion indeed.”³⁷ Such a mocking turn of phrase appeared so regularly in reviews that Moira Walsh, writing in America, confessed its clichéd allure: “As has undoubtedly been remarked elsewhere, this is the indiscretion of a distinguished American producer (David O. Selznick) and a distinguished Italian director (Vittorio De Sica).”³⁸ Arthur Knight, writing for the Saturday Review, derided Jones’s and Clift’s characters and performances: “We can’t feel deeply for people we scarcely know, and well before the film is over Clift and Miss Jones have become simply a singularly ill-matched and uninteresting couple.”³⁹ The reviewer for Catholic World likewise lambasted Jones’s performance, decrying her “phony dramatics” and her acting “as if there were a bad smell on the set.”40 On the other hand, the reviewer for Newsweek praised Clift and Jones—“Two fine performances”—but panned the film’s plotline as “flagrantly sentimental [and] melodramatic.”⁴¹ With grim equanimity, Philip Hartung, the reviewer for Commonweal, deemed that the film “labors hard with only so-so results,” suggesting that it “isn’t really bad; it’s just that we expect so much more from De Sica.”⁴²

Despite the initial optimism he expressed to Newton Arvin, Capote called the film “lousy” and “a stinker.”⁴³ De Sica, on the other hand, came to believe that his film survived its production difficulties with its allure and aesthetic accomplishments intact: “I must say that I like the film: it is full of faults but it convinces me, even moves me. I would not make it again as I would all my other films.”⁴⁴ The film remains an extraordinary example of Hollywood cross-pollination with international cinematic sensibilities, and viewing the two resulting versions of the same story—Indiscretion of an American Wife and Terminal Station—illustrates the ways in which a talented director and a determined producer can compose the same raw footage into films strikingly distinct in tone, atmosphere, and emotion. If, in the end, Indiscretion of an American Wife could not suture Italian neorealism and Hollywood glamour into an organic whole, it succeeds in telling its simple story of a woman’s conflicting desires for sexual passion and for her family. The contrasting camera styles of Aldo Graziati and Oswald Morris highlight the disparities in aesthetic sensibilities as they also reveal the artistic potential of this ill-fated plan: the stark realism of the terminal station, as populated by two of the most beautiful actors in the world speaking Capote’s queer words of desire and regret.

Beat the Devil

In a send-up of Humphrey Bogart’s hard-boiled fare, such as The Maltese Falcon (dir. John Huston, 1941) and The Big Sleep (dir. Howard Hawks, 1946), Beat the Devil lampoons the dark intrigues of film noir with its breezy style and comic sensibility. The film features four international crooks—Peterson (Robert Morley), O’Hara (Peter Lorre), Ross (Ivor Barnard), and Ravello (Marco Tulli)—who have employed Billy Dannreuther (Humphrey Bogart) to act as their agent in a scheme to steal mineral rights in Africa. This basic premise is coupled with a romantic farce as Gwendolen Chelm (Jennifer Jones) woos Dannreuther, with the high-minded adulteress dreaming of abandoning her husband Harry (Edward Underdown) for her new lover, despite Dannreuther’s lack of interest in leaving his wife Maria (Gina Lollobrigida) for her. As Gwendolen and Dannreuther’s relationship percolates, Maria in turn increasingly succumbs to Harry’s physical allure. These various story lines converge, first in Italy and then in Africa, as Gwendolen’s exaggerated claims about her husband spark suspicion and intrigue, with the criminals fearing Harry will reveal their plot to the authorities. The film concludes with the ne’er-do-wells arrested and the marriages restored, with Capote’s screenplay rewriting its queer transgressions of normative sexual mores into a tidy conclusion, albeit one that refuses to fully undo the topsy-turviness preceding it.

Prior to Capote’s screenplay, John Huston’s production of Claud Cockburn’s novel Beat the Devil, written under the pseudonym James Helvick, encountered numerous problems. Cockburn himself wrote an initial draft of the screenplay and, in a letter to Huston, explained his fidelity to the novel and his primary divergence from it: “The screenplay follows the book closely except for one more divagation, which is that in the screenplay they actually get to Africa. . . . It seemed to me, after writing it twice the other way, that this is the best way to get an up-beating climax instead of the diminuendo of the book: deliberate in the book but, I felt, nothing much to look at.”45 This concession to an “up-beating climax,” to which Capote’s screenplay adheres, gives the screenplay a sense of direction and motion, yet Cockburn’s script failed to translate his engaging caper tale into an organic whole. Tony Veiller and Peter Viertel were then enlisted to pen the screenplay, but their draft was likewise deemed unacceptable, despite their prior successes, Veiller with such films as The Killers (1946) and Moulin Rouge (1952), and Viertel with Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Saboteur (1942).

The various screenplays lacked a sense of cohesion, touching upon Cockburn’s various plotlines but with little sense of an overarching genre. In a letter to Huston, Bogart raised concerns about the meandering plotline and registered his ambivalence about the project: “I am not what you’d call disappointed with it, but, on the other hand, I am not delighted. . . . At this moment, it is hard to tell whether it’s a drama, a comedy, or an action picture.”⁴⁶ A week later Bogart expressed similar reservations: “The script seemed to me to lack the comic flavor that the book had, if you know what I mean. It didn’t seem to know what it wanted to be, a comedy, a melodrama, or just a yarn.”⁴⁷ In correspondence with Huston, Bogart, and Capote, David O. Selznick tersely pinpointed several flaws in the script: “Difficult even [to] determine whether intention drama melodrama comedy farce satire or even in third act slapstick akin [to] Abbott and Costello in Africa.”48 He particularly criticized its inability to focus the audience’s sympathy: “Since no audience sympathy single character or relationship, plus no emotion plus no rooting interest, burden is on entertainment values, which at best in minor characters, and on adventure, inherent lacks in which make superb writing of characterizations and relationships more necessary for compensation.”⁴⁹ (Selznick did not produce Beat the Devil. Huston wryly noted, “Selznick had no connection with the picture except that his wife, Jennifer Jones, was in it. It didn’t matter: when she signed a contract, David started his memorandums.”⁵⁰)

To compound Huston’s, Bogart’s, and Selznick’s concerns over early drafts of the screenplay, Joseph Breen of the Motion Picture Academy of America informed Jess Morgan of Santana Pictures, Bogart’s production company, that the proposed film failed to comply with the Hays Code and warranted substantial editing if the resulting picture were to be released theatrically. “Throughout the story,” his report read, “there appears to us to be an excessive amount of physical contact—kissing and fondling—between Dannreuther and Gwendolen. In view of the fact that these are both married people, this should be eliminated whenever possible.” Since the affair between Dannreuther and Gwendolen is central to the narrative, the demand to whitewash it would result in a film fundamentally removed from its satiric treatment of marriage and romance. Some criticisms of the screenplay—“Please eliminate the belch”—were minor, yet they attest to an overriding hostility to the production.⁵¹ The following year after various drafts, Breen reiterated his condemnation of the screenplay’s treatment of adultery—“We believe a story of this type, involving characters of this kind, cannot handle an adulterous relationship in a manner acceptable under the Code”—while also rejecting its sly treatment of homosexuality: “There appears to be a slight suggestion of a homosexual attraction between Conquest and Wagwood, which of course should be deleted.”⁵² Indeed, Conquest and Wagwood, minor characters in Cockburn’s novel, were excised altogether from Huston’s film.

Given these mounting script troubles, Selznick urged Huston to hire Capote for a major rewrite. In a detailed memo, he praised Huston’s artistic genius as a director and writer, while encouraging him to hire Capote to assist with the production’s screenplay:

Once again, if you feel you are at all stale, I do urge you to consider calling in Capote, even if it is only for two or three weeks. . . . He is, in my opinion, one of the freshest and most original and most exciting writing talents of our time—and what he would say through these characters, and how he would have them say it, would be so completely different from anything that has been heard from a motion picture theatre’s sound box as to also give you something completely fresh—or so at least I think. Moreover, I know you very well, and I know of very few writers other than Capote whose work is of the sort that I know would appeal to you. He can also be quite fast, but only if he is whipped every day. In this case, he can turn out at least one solid scene a day, and more if necessary, and certainly more in collaboration with you. Also, he is easy to work with, needing only to be stepped on good naturedly, like the wonderful but bad little boy he is, when he starts to whine.

I would not presume to suggest that you get someone in under other circumstances, because I can honestly say to you, without flattery . . . what I had said to many others—that you are perhaps the most gifted screenwriter in the world, apart from your directorial talents. But I qualify this by saying that you are good only (a) when you are not preoccupied with problems of getting a picture into work in fast time, as you are now; (b) when you are in the mood; (c) when you catch fire. But in this case I know that you are preoccupied; I sense that you are not in the mood; and I fear that you have not caught fire. I think therefore that you need the stimulus of a talent of sufficient size to merit your collaboration and respect; and as you are presently playing in luck to a degree that for the first time matches your talent, I think that this good fortune has also made Capote available at this present moment—for there is no-one, no-one in Hollywood, or Paris or New York whom I feel could give you what Capote can give you . . . and here he is in Rome, ready, eager and willing to go to work with you.53

The memo’s rhetorical flourishes, with its sense of urgency coupled with disarming, almost fulsome, praise of Huston’s genius, showcase Selznick’s persuasive talents—and, indeed, Huston followed the advice offered. Selznick’s characterization of Capote as a “bad little boy” prone to whining infantilizes him, yet the words about his writing abilities proved true, as Capote’s screenplay, often written moments before shooting, kept the project progressing when it otherwise might have floundered. Furthermore, Capote envisioned how the basic premise of Cockburn’s novel could be used to parody Bogart’s prior films—“I thought that instead of a straight melodrama, it should be a sort of satire or takeoff on all those movies Bogart and Sidney Greenstreet used to make”54—and this satiric touch unifies the otherwise disparate elements of the story.

Capote and Huston share screen credit for writing Beat the Devil, yet controversy remains over who penned it. According to Jeanie Sims, Huston’s personal assistant, Capote and Huston wrote the lion’s share of the script together: “The balance of the final script, i.e., those portions not underlined, are the work of Mr. Huston and Truman Capote jointly. My own estimate, based on the comparison of the two scripts, is that 23% only of the final script can be attributed to Mr. Veiller and Mr. Viertel jointly.”⁵⁵ Veiller and Viertel agreed with Sims’s assessment, and in correspondence with Huston, they relinquished any claim to the film: “We have both read the final script on Beat the Devil and we waive any claim to screen credit thereon.”⁵⁶ Capote and Huston, however, disagreed over their respective contributions, with Capote claiming full responsibility. He insisted that, while Huston was “also credited with me for Beat the Devil, . . . he never wrote a word.”⁵⁷ Huston, for his part, asserted, “We wrote together.”⁵⁸ In his autobiography he recalled their professional collaboration as well as their pastimes: “When Truman and I weren’t working on the script, we were sitting in on the poker game.”⁵⁹ He suggested as well that despite the chaos of the shoot, they pursued their work with diligence: “Truman Capote and I rewrote . . . on the spot, but it wasn’t done frivolously, as has been described. We worked very hard and tried to keep ahead of the picture.”⁶⁰ Additionally, Patrick Cockburn, Claud Cockburn’s son, insisted that his father’s screenplay remained the film’s foundation and that Capote stole credit for its subsequent success: “For admirers like [Capote’s biographer Gerald] Clarke, Capote provided ‘words that were completely fresh.’ In reality, his contribution was limited to a few concluding scenes which had to be altered at the last moment. . . . In subsequent years, as the film acquired a cult following, Capote did nothing to contradict exaggerated accounts of his own connection with the movie.”⁶¹ With screenplays upon which multiple hands toil, it becomes virtually impossible to disentangle precisely who wrote which line, but the resulting screenplay of Beat the Devil bears Capote’s mark in its camp and queer sensibility. Thus the film is in many ways consistent with Capote’s corpus, even if such consistency cannot be traced exclusively to him.

These various preproduction difficulties surrounding the screenplay resulted in a rushed shooting schedule, with Capote often writing the dialogue immediately before it was handed to the actors. As Capote recounted, “I worked on [Beat the Devil] with John Huston while the picture was actually being made on location in Italy. Sometimes scenes that were just about to be shot were written right on the set. The cast was completely bewildered.”62 He explained in an interview with Gloria Steinem that “there was no script at all. I was writing it day by day, literally. I worked all night, and the parts would be handed out in the morning; the whole thing was quite mad.”⁶³ Amid such pandemonium, the actors found themselves at a loss about their roles and how they should play them. As Robert Morley’s biographer (and daughter-in-law) Margaret Morley writes, “The film continued in fits and starts as the script got rewritten every evening. Robert wasn’t quite sure who the character he was playing was supposed to be.”⁶⁴ Jennifer Jones delivered a relaxed performance as the airy and agreeably mendacious Gwendolen, yet she recalled her constant sense of disequilibrium arising from the erratic filming schedule: “I always wanted to know where my character was going . . . whether she was going to drop dead or jump in the ocean or be knocked over the head. The beginning, the middle, and the end was the way I was structured, so it sometimes threw me a little bit not to know from day to day what she was going to do or not do.”⁶⁵ Beyond the frenetic pace of the filming, a bacchanalian spirit sparked endless opportunities for mirth and merrymaking, if not dissolution and depravity. Capote narrated in a letter to his friend Andrew Lyndon, “The last few weeks have been filled with peculiar adventures, all involving John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, who’ve nearly killed me with their dissipations . . . half drunk all day and dead-drunk all night.”⁶⁶ Huston memorialized the improbable vision of Bogart and Capote wrestling: “One night there was arm wrestling. Bogie and Truman were engaged, and it almost became a fight. It did, in fact, turn into a wrestling match. And Truman took Bogie! He pinned Bogie’s shoulders to the floor and held him there. Truman’s epicene comportment was downright deceptive: he was remarkably strong and had pit bulldog in him.”⁶⁷

With Capote’s queer script, Beat the Devil has been celebrated as a camp classic, although with some disagreement concerning the applicability of the term. Certainly Capote viewed it in this light, calling it “a mad camp” and “the camp of all time.”⁶⁸ Roger Ebert observes that it “went straight from box office flop to cult classic and has been called the first camp movie.”69 Susan Sontag, in her groundbreaking essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” considers camp to be “a vision of the world in terms of style. It is a love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not,” and succinctly summarizing a camp vision, she theorizes, “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’”⁷⁰ Sontag includes Beat the Devil in her discussion of camp, although she argues that the film fails in this regard: “Probably, intending to be campy is always harmful. The perfection of Trouble in Paradise and The Maltese Falcon, among the greatest Camp movies ever made, comes from the effortless smooth way in which tone is maintained. This is not so with such famous would-be Camp films of the fifties as All About Eve and Beat the Devil. These more recent movies have their fine moments, but the first is so slick and the second so hysterical; they want so badly to be campy that they’re continually losing the beat.”⁷¹ As Sontag’s excursus evinces, defining camp elicits endless taxonomical troubles, and the fifty-eight theses in her essay identify various examples of camp while failing to pinpoint the exact meaning of this quicksilver term. It is nonetheless apparent that Capote believed his film to be campy, and viewing it through such a light illuminates its quirky and queer appeal. Certainly one could posit, apropos of Sontag, that Beat the Devil is not a caper film but a “caper film,” one that knowingly nods at the tropes of the genres while stripping them of their typical registers.

With its tongue-in-cheek style and insistent insouciance, Beat the Devil evinces Capote’s queer and campy sensibility in numerous scenes. John Huston laughingly said of the film’s characters, “The formula of Beat the Devil is that everyone is slightly absurd.”⁷² Foremost, the four villains—Peterson, O’Hara, Ross, and Ravello—are depicted, not as homosexual, but as sexually ambiguous in their homosocial syndicate. When Gwendolen first espies them, she cautions her husband, “Harry, we must beware of those men. They’re desperate characters.” Harry is confused by her unexpected declaration and wonders aloud, “What makes you say that?” to which Gwendolen replies with arch naiveté, “Not one of them looked at my legs.” Harry raises his eyes in mock surprise, but his wife’s words effectively undermine any sense of heterosexual desire among these men, as do their professed trades: they pose as merchants of domestic products such as vacuum cleaners and sewing machines as a front for their nefarious dealings. In a later scene Dannreuther states to Ross, “We’re drinking to women,” but Ross replies with strident misogyny, “Take the drink, but I won’t join you in the toast. . . . Women! Hitler had the right idea—keep them in their place.” Believing that Peterson and Dannreuther have died in a car accident, Ravello offers Harry a stake in their operation, and as he does so, he leans in closely to him, uncomfortably invading his personal space. Furthermore, when the foursome boards the SS Nyanga, the ship that carries them to Africa, they repeatedly sing “Blow the Man Down” for approximately thirty seconds of screen time. The song is, of course, a well-known sea shanty, but its title is also queerly suggestive. (Indeed, if Capote did not intend anything queer in this peculiar moment of homosocial camaraderie and song, viewers attuned to a queer sensibility could nevertheless see in it an allusion to homosexuality. For example, novelist Don Holliday, author of such 1950s and 1960s pulpy queer fiction as The Sin Travelers, AC-DC Lover, and So Sweet, So Soft, So Queer, took advantage of the double entendre of the phrase “Blow the Man Down” for one of his titles.⁷³) Within the homosocial world of Peterson, O’Hara, Ross, and Ravello, desires are so focused on pecuniary gain that no trace of heterosexual, or even heterosocial, desire remains, rendering them a queer troupe indeed.

FIG. 5 Beat the Devil: In the background, from left to right, O’Hara (Peter Lorre), Ross (Ivor Barnard), Peterson (Robert Morley), and Ravello (Marco Tulli) look on in curiosity as Maria Dannreuther (Gina Lollobrigida) flirts with Harry Chelm (Edward Underdown) in an image of heterosexual romance that coincides with the foursome’s spirited singing of “Blow the Man Down.”

In particular, Peter Lorre’s performance as O’Hara brims with queerness because in a metacinematic joke he modeled his character on Capote. As the film’s unit publicist Julie Gibson explained, “Truman had that crazy little hairdo, the bangs, and the blond hair, so Peter came down with his hair bleached and bangs cut exactly like Truman’s.”74 The resemblance between Capote, twenty-nine years old at the time, and Lorre, who was then forty-nine, is fairly striking. Impersonating Capote in his physical appearance, Lorre also delivers his lines with an affected innocence, such as when he scampers out of Dannreuther’s room while commenting, “To be trustworthy is not more important than to seem to be trustworthy,” a line reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s witticisms yet in this instance applied to the Machiavellian machinations of a crook. His trenchant musings on the shifting cultural meaning of time—“The Swiss manufacture it. The Italians squander it. The French hoard it. The Americans worship it. But time is a crook”—also speak to his cosmopolitan sensibility coupled with a cynic’s outlook on life and its depredations.

Even Bogart’s masculine, tough-guy persona became ripe for queer satire in Huston’s and Capote’s hands. Stefan Kanfer explains that Huston envisioned Dannreuther as “a very Continental type fellow—an extreme figure in a homburg, shoulders unpadded, French cuffs, regency trousers, fancy waistcoats and a walking stick.” To such a startling and effeminizing reimagining of his screen persona, Bogart bluntly replied, “As regards your brilliant conception of my wardrobe, may I say that you’re full of shit. . . . As regards the cane, I don’t have to tell you what you can do with THAT!”⁷⁵ Over their careers Bogart and Huston worked together on six films—The Maltese Falcon (1941), Across the Pacific (1942), Key Largo (1948), Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The African Queen (1951), and Beat the Devil—and as Huston noted of Bogart, “His sort of person fitted into my kind of picture.”⁷⁶ Notwithstanding their esteemed history of collaboration, Bogart was hesitant to abandon his preferred persona as the taciturn, hard-edged antihero, one straddling the line between the licit and the illicit while traveling through a morally corrupt underworld. In Peter Bogdanovich’s memorable description of Bogart’s standard persona, “He was a man who tried very hard to be Bad because he knew it was easier to get along in the world that way. He always failed because of an innate goodness which surely nauseated him.”77 Although Bogart prevailed in resisting Huston’s wardrobe selections, he played along with the campiness of the film, delivering his lines with a knowing wink, as when he declaims to Gwendolen: “I’ve got to have money. Doctor’s orders are that I have lots of money, otherwise I become dull, listless, and have troubles with my complexion.” It is difficult to imagine Sam Spade or Rick Blaine, Bogart’s characters in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942), uttering such a line, indicating the character’s effete attention to his physical appearance in phrasing lifted from women’s cosmetics ads, yet in Beat the Devil even Bogart allows a queer chink in the armor of his masculine persona.

A camp sensibility need not be limited to undermining the masculinity of the film’s villains and protagonist, and the film’s romance between Gwendolen and Dannreuther likewise brims with campy twists. Their conversations sparkle with witticisms, exaggerations, and deceptions that remove these exchanges from the typical fare of caper films. When Gwendolen asks Dannreuther about his childhood, he responds, “I was an orphan until I was twenty, and then a rich and beautiful lady adopted me,” ironically revealing his prior career as a gigolo. Gwendolen, who is prone to absurd yet endearing flights of fancy, tells Dannreuther why she believes he is traveling to Africa: “You’re going to found a new empire and make yourself master of the riches of the world. But you need a beautiful blonde queen to impress the natives as the incarnation of the Queen of Sheba. That’s why you’re making a pass at me.” Dannreuther parries quizzically, “Am I?” to which Gwendolen declares, “Of course. I don’t generally go sightseeing with strange men. You don’t believe that, do you?” Gwendolen’s insistence on her amatory innocence is merely the latest façade she constructs for Dannreuther to view, and when he gamely if wearily affirms, “I believe anything you say,” she replies in turn, “Do you? Well, you shouldn’t, you know. You really shouldn’t.” Throughout this exchange, Bogart looks as if he is going to break character and burst out laughing. Thus the scene undermines the film’s convincingness while imbuing it with the charm of its failings. Such failures adorn the film with its camp appeal, for these artistic and aesthetic lapses cascade out into unrestrained pleasures.

Jones’s performance as Gwendolen has been lambasted by various critics. In Sight and Sound Lindsay Anderson suggested that Jones was “plainly less happy in comedy than in strong emotional drama,” and Oswald Morris, the film’s cameraman, saw her struggling with the role: “I do not believe that Jennifer ever thought she was playing for comedy. She played it straight all the way through with that terrible, phony English accent and Huston felt it best to leave her alone and let things slide.”⁷⁸ Yet from a camp perspective Jones plays the part with an appealing sense of the game afoot, no matter how confused she might have been by the antics on the set. Gwendolen’s determined pursuit of Dannreuther marks her as the sexual aggressor, and she also stands up to the criminals determined to remove any obstacles, including her husband, obstructing their path. When confronting Peterson, she preaches Harry’s virtues without believing a word she speaks: “Since the war, my husband has been almost exclusively concerned with spiritual values. He feels that, if he can get away there, in the heart of Africa, he will come face to face with essentials. He wants to work out the problem of sin.” Peterson confusedly replies, “Sin?” to which she affirms, “Why, yes, of course. Isn’t that what we’re all most concerned with? Sin?” A knowing arch creases her left brow, and a gleam in her eye informs the viewer of her willful deception. In Jones’s performance, Gwendolen appears as an artless yet cagy reimagination of film noir’s femme fatale, one who pursues her desires always with a comic edge to her performance and yet as single-mindedly—although not as ruthlessly—as such legendary antiheroines as Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944) and Lana Turner’s Cora Smith in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

FIG. 6 Beat the Devil: Humphrey Bogart as Dannreuther and Jennifer Jones as Gwendolen, in a flirtatious scene in which both appear to be on the verge of breaking character.

The film’s conclusion escalates and completes its camp antics, as it also brings the story back to its opening shots: the four villains are paraded across the town square chained together in pairs, Peterson and Ross, O’Hara and Ravello, literally bound together in homosocial union. In the film’s opening, Bogart pronounces in a voice-over of gentle sarcasm, “These are four brilliant criminals at the climax of their most magnificent effort.” At the film’s conclusion, however, they are outwitted, if accidentally so, by the apparently innocuous Harry, who reports in a telegram to Gwendolen his triumph over the conspirators: “Have myself acquired land Peterson planned to steal. Will be uranium king if survive shocking chill on liver. Am willing overlook your extraordinary behavior providing you join me at once with hot water bottle.” Harry, a narcissist who preens in front of a mirror while remaining oblivious to Maria’s erotic interest in him, and whose sexual interests seem transposed to the comforts of a hot water bottle, stands triumphant in absentia as the film makes a “hero” of its least heroic and, indeed, least interesting character. As the film closes and Dannreuther intones, “Oh, this is the end . . . the end,” one can hear in the words an arch and exaggerated valence appreciative of its subversion of the caper genre. The metacinematic valediction of “this is the end . . . the end” concedes that the film has been excessive in its play, as it winds down with Bogart proclaiming both its completion and its camp.

Upon its release, Beat the Devil was panned by critics. While B. G. Marple complimented it as “the amiably maniac product of a decidedly outré combination: John Huston and Truman Capote,” these slight words of praise were drowned out by voices such as Lindsay Anderson, who denigrated the film as a private joke unmeant for public viewing: “Beat the Devil has the air of an expensive house-party joke, a charade which enormously entertained its participants at the time of playing, but which is too private and insufficiently brilliant to justify public performance.”79 The New York Times labeled it “singularly unorthodox,” complaining that “the fun wears mighty thin” and that “‘Beat the Devil’ ends up beating itself.”⁸⁰ In a review of Huston’s career, Peter Barnes laments the film’s “witless inanities” and launches particular opprobrium at Capote’s screenplay: “Actors of the caliber of Bogart, Morley, and Lorre can do nothing with dialogue (Truman Capote) which lacks wit and meaning.”⁸¹

After the discombobulating filming of Beat the Devil and its anemic box-office receipts, many of the various talents were surprised by its cult success when it was rereleased in the 1960s. In 1966 a brief essay in Film Society Review praised the film as pioneering—“Ten years or more ahead of its time”—and suggested that “John Huston’s satire of his own best early work, and The Maltese Falcon in particular, turns out to be his most enjoyable film.”82 Jennifer Jones wryly lamented, “They don’t remember me for The Song of Bernadette,” for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1944, “but for Beat the Devil.”⁸³ Upon Robert Morley’s return to London, he had cabled producer John Woolf and wittily warned him of the film’s likely failure: “We have now returned to our capital and we hope that yours will return to you. But we doubt it.”⁸⁴ Yet Jack Clayton, the associate producer of Beat the Devil, with whom Capote later collaborated on The Innocents and The Great Gatsby, declared the film “a masterpiece,” while also cautioning against its excesses: “I view it with enjoyment, but only the enjoyment that such a thing could happen. It’s a film that shouldn’t have been made.”⁸⁵ Lorre believed that the film’s failure at the time of its release resulted from the advertising blitz accompanying it: “It was a deliciously sardonic comedy, meant for art houses; and they opened it with a blood-and-thunder campaign. The people just didn’t get it.”⁸⁶ Huston called it “an amusing, good picture,” suggesting as well that it was “ahead of its time” and concluding, “Its off-the-wall humor left viewers bewildered and confused.”⁸⁷ He also confessed to the joys of self-satire: “It was a bit of a travesty—we were making fun of ourselves.”⁸⁸ Capote too seemed surprised by the subsequent success of Beat the Devil, as he wrote to Selznick: “I’ve met a lot of people who, for one reason or another, seem to have seen Beat the Devil—apparently it is rather good.”⁸⁹ Gerald Pratley argues in his assessment of Huston’s corpus that with Beat the Devil, Huston and his crew were “years before the times,” since such a “fragmented, erratic incidental type of black comedy . . . was entirely unexpected when this film was first shown.”⁹⁰ Likewise, Pauline Kael speaks affectionately of the film, aware of its limitations yet appreciative of its madcap and campy style: “Beat the Devil is a mess, but it’s probably the funniest mess—the screwball classic—of all time. It kidded itself, yet it succeeded in some original (and perhaps dangerously marginal) way by finding a style of its own.”⁹¹ At a time when Hollywood employed gay talent yet resisted portraying homosexuality on the screen, Capote imbued a caper film with a queer sensibility through homosocial villains, subversions of heterosexual romance, and an overarching campiness. Audiences of the 1950s found Beat the Devil off-putting due to its outré stylings, but later generations have come to appreciate it for its refusal to take itself seriously and for its queer subversion of Bogart’s and Huston’s standard fare.

The Innocents

Among the railleries of shooting Beat the Devil, Capote and Huston encoded an inside joke in the film by naming a minor character, the inspector played by Bernard Lee, in homage to Jack Clayton, the film’s associate producer. Clayton assumed the director’s chair to critical acclaim with Room at the Top (1959). On the basis of their friendship and past collaboration, Capote agreed to write the screenplay for The Innocents, Clayton’s production of Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw as mediated through William Archibald’s 1950 theatrical adaptation, also titled The Innocents. Clayton had originally hired Archibald for the film adaptation, but the resulting screenplay adhered too closely to his stage script. In Clayton’s words, “while I am a great admirer of the play and I feel that certain elements of it should be incorporated, I think the script follows the play too closely.”92 More bluntly, he also described himself as “saddled with Archibald because he had a contract with Fox stating he must be given the first shot at writing the script.”⁹³ John Mortimer, best known as the creator of the Rumpole of the Bailey mysteries, was brought in to doctor the screenplay, but as Clayton remarked, “we only had him for three weeks because he had other commitments.”⁹⁴ Capote was then summoned for a major rewrite. He declared that his admiration for Clayton influenced his decision to collaborate on The Innocents—“I was paid very little for it, and only did it because I’ve always thought it would make an excellent film and (mainly) because the director is a great friend and someone I admire”—as he likewise reminisced about his distaste for the filming process: “I had to be on the set . . . all the time because of the way the director worked. I really thought being around movie sets, and going to the thing day after day, intolerably boring.”⁹⁵

Capote shares joint billing with Archibald for the screenplay in the film’s opening credits, with Mortimer credited for additional scenes and dialogue, but Clayton asserted that Capote wrote it in its entirety: “Although he only got half credit, he wrote the whole script, really. . . . It was a very difficult script to do, because you had to keep the Victoriana and at the same time bring the dialogue up to date. It was brilliant.”⁹⁶ On another occasion, blaming the Writers Guild for the necessity of crediting Archibald for Capote’s efforts, Clayton affirmed: “The result on the screen is Truman’s version, totally, with a few changes, which I always do on the set. . . . The reason why Archibald is coupled with Truman Capote on the credits is because the Writers Guild in America have a silly rule that the first writer automatically shares the credit if it is based on a book. Very unfair, I think.”97 Although Clayton proclaimed Capote’s complete responsibility for the screenplay, this assertion is incorrect: his screenplay differs markedly from Archibald’s theatrical script, but several scenes are directly inspired by Archibald’s staging of them.

Upon reviewing The Turn of the Screw, Capote discovered that an adaptation would present difficulties due to the subtle style of James’s fictions, which so richly plumb the psychologies of his characters: “I thought it would be a snap because I loved The Turn of the Screw so much. But when I got into it, I saw how artful James had been. He did everything by allusion and indirection.”⁹⁸ The Turn of the Screw challenges its readers to undertake a quest for an answer—are the children Flora and Miles possessed by the ghosts of Miss Jessel and Quint, or are these phantoms merely the figments of their governess’s depraved imagination?—yet it does so by balancing these possibilities against each other, imbuing every scene with mystery and innuendo that unsettles these opposing interpretations. The governess wonders in the novella’s climax, as she ponders the possibility that Miles was guiltless, “if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?”⁹⁹ With these words, she acknowledges the possibility that she misrecognized the source of corruption as a ghost, or even as a child, but never as herself. Edmund Wilson observes in his classic essay on James and the ambiguity of his narration that “nowhere does James unequivocally give the thing away: almost everything from beginning to end can be read equally in either of two senses,” and Neil Sinyard documents that Clayton kept a copy of Wilson’s essay with the film’s First Master Script.¹⁰⁰ Following James’s lead, Clayton expressed his desire to maintain the novella’s ambiguity: “I don’t want, you know, to say absolutely what the picture means. There should be an area of uncertainty; that’s what I think James intended. I want the audience to exercise its intelligence.”¹⁰¹

In accordance with Capote and Clayton’s determination to maintain the novella’s ambiguities, the cast and crew imbued their performances and other contributions with indeterminacy so that viewers, like James’s readers, would grapple with the film’s ultimate meaning. Deborah Kerr, playing the lead role of the governess Miss Giddens, stated that in her performance she “tried to tread a very narrow tight-rope between Miss Giddens being an internally and sexually tormented woman, and a completely normal human being who found herself beset by evil powers. I think Jack [Clayton] and I both wanted to leave it to the audience, which resulted in the film’s strangely disturbing quality.”102 The film’s director of photography, Freddie Francis, a two-time Academy Award winner for cinematography for Sons and Lovers (1960) and Glory (1989), framed his shots to accentuate the story’s mysterious aura: “our audiences probably didn’t realize . . . that one of the things that contributed towards the horror of the film is that I had these filters made up so only the center of the screen would be fully illuminated. The edge of the screen would always be a little bit dark so that you didn’t know whether there was anything there or not.”¹⁰³

Indeed, as Capote similarly realized, James’s great achievement in the novella, and the genius behind its magic, is that so little happens in a plot upon which so much mystery hangs: “I let several weeks go by before I reread it and then I got the shock of my life. Because Henry James had pulled a fantastic trick in this book: it doesn’t stand up anywhere. It has no plot! He’s just pretending this and this and that. . . . I kept building up more plot, more characters, more scenes. In the entire book there were only two scenes performable.”¹⁰⁴ In Capote’s quest to emulate James’s ambiguities on film, he needed to dramatize the fantasies generated in the governess’s fervid imagination but also to depict her interacting with these visions in some manner. Nonetheless, in a movie so focused on sexuality and its ambiguities, a concrete indication that the ghosts were real would undermine its psychological depth.

Given this emphasis on ambiguity, the film’s greatest crux for many viewers arises in its depiction of a teardrop: when Miss Giddens sees the ghost of Miss Jessel in the children’s schoolroom, Miss Jessel weeps, and a single tear falls onto her desk. Clayton believed that this moment would increase the terror but also the pathos of this supernatural encounter: “And then I thought how it might be if I actually saw a ghost sitting at my desk. What would be the most terrifying thing for me? I might think I was having a hallucination, or that it was some trick of the light. But if I suddenly saw a tear mark on a piece of paper, I think it would really frighten me very much, as well as being very sad.”¹⁰⁵ Such a teardrop, however, might prove the physical existence of the ghosts, and from this perspective, Capote regretted Miss Jessel’s teardrop as a critical error: “I made only one mistake. At the very end, when the governess sees the ghost of Miss Jessel sitting at her desk, I had a tear fall on to the desktop. Up until then it wasn’t clear whether the ghosts were real or in the governess’ mind. But the tear was real, and that spoiled everything.”106 In an otherwise favorable review of the film, Pauline Kael echoes Capote’s self-recriminations, condemning the teardrop for stripping the film of its complexity: “All else can be more or less compromised within the system of the repressed governess’s madness; but not that little wet tear, that little pearl of ambiguity.”¹⁰⁷

Capote’s self-criticism and Kael’s astute observation notwithstanding, fixating on this single tear to resolve the film’s mysteries ultimately fails because its ambiguities encourage viewers to question the reliability of Miss Giddens’s perceptions. James Palmer argues of this crux that “even the tear is no absolute proof of the reality of the ghosts. . . . The tear is on the desk, but the viewer is also made to wonder if the governess hasn’t hallucinated this Doppelgänger.”¹⁰⁸ Indeed, why should one presume this tear is real, even if viewers see it? Clayton’s direction continually balances out these opposing interpretations. Another moment that might appear to confirm the ghosts’ existence occurs in the film’s climax when Miss Giddens forces Miles to confess that he sees the ghost of Quint. The camera appears to assume the spectral Quint’s over-the-shoulder perspective as he gazes down at Miss Giddens and Miles, but the subsequent shot from this vantage point replaces Quint’s shoulder with that of a statue. Thus the second shot posits either that Miss Giddens imagined the ghost looking down at them in the first shot or that Quint, as ghosts are wont to do, simply disappears. One can never be sure whether the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel exist or whether Miss Giddens summons them from her own submerged psychosexual fantasies that she expresses through her relationship with Miles and Flora. Indeed, one can never be sure what is happening in The Innocents, for Miss Giddens’s perspective guides the viewer, and one can never discount the possibility that she is psychologically unbalanced.

The haunting ambiguity that the film achieves, so true to James’s literary vision in its transposition to film, adds an intellectual depth to the standard thrills and chills of the horror genre. Building on this element in its advertising campaign, The Innocents’ trailer proclaimed its goal of elevating the horror film into a genre appropriate for serious audiences: “There has never been a ghost story created especially for the adult moviegoer until The Innocents,” its narrator ominously intones.¹⁰⁹ As much as this lofty appraisal is underpinned by the film’s pedigree—literary roots in Henry James, dramatic roots in William Archibald, screenplay by Truman Capote, filming by an acclaimed new director—it is ironic that this film “for the adult moviegoer” features children as the catalysts of its horror. The Innocents appears to be a horror story of ghosts possessing the bodies of innocent children, yet it is also a stunning case study of one woman’s psychosexual obsession with children’s innocence and her inability to conceive of childhood sexuality other than as corruptive. As James Kincaid pithily declares in his groundbreaking study of depictions of children’s sexuality, “We all know that there is a difference between a healthy and normal love of children and a love which is sick and freakish,”¹¹⁰ but the narrative pleasure both of The Turn of the Screw and of The Innocents arises in the ambiguity of the governess’s love as outwardly protective yet, at least potentially, inwardly perverse. In this manner The Innocents, in its treatment of the sexuality of childhood, aligns with Capote’s queer themes in his literature, particularly in the ways in which it echoes the gothic treatment of children’s sexuality in Other Voices, Other Rooms. Capote’s novel and The Innocents differ markedly in their settings on a decaying southern plantation and a lush English estate, but they unite in their treatment of the queer potential in children’s sexuality and its intersection with gothic terrors.

FIG. 7 The Innocents: This shot reflects the perspective either of Quint’s ghost or of Miss Giddens’s feverish imagination. By counterbalancing such readings, director Jack Clayton ensures that ambiguity clouds the viewer’s ability to determine whether Miss Giddens is protecting or preying on the children.

The Innocents begins eerily, with a young girl’s voice singing, “We lay, my love and I, beneath the weeping willow, but now alone I lie.” In its depiction of lovers lying underneath a willow tree, with the child mourning the loss of her beloved, the film announces its interest in children’s understanding and experience of adult sexuality. (The lyricist of this song, “O Willow Waly,” was Paul Dehn, a British screenwriter best known for Goldfinger [1964] and Murder on the Orient Express [1974].) Following the child’s voice, which viewers later learn is Flora’s, and implying a thematic contrast between children’s sexuality and adults’ nurturing of children, a woman’s voice is heard whispering while her hands are shown clasped in agitated prayer: “All I want to do is save the children, not destroy them. More than anything, I love children. More than anything.” The voice, which viewers later recognize as the governess Miss Giddens’s when the film concludes circularly with this scene, admits the possibility that she will destroy the children whom she seeks to protect. She then subsides into a whimper and adds, “They need affection, love, someone who will belong to them and to whom they will belong.” The voice trembles with desperation, betraying that she seeks to sate her need for affection and love through children and that her unfulfilled desires to belong to someone will be projected onto her young charges. These scenes do not appear in Capote’s screenplay, which instead begins with a “first-person flashback recalled by Miss Giddens” in which she “is attempting to explain to Miles’s outraged uncle and to a spurious Mrs. Grose what had happened at Bly.”111 Clayton’s version of the film’s opening, by veering from Capote’s screenplay, rejects the explanations that Miss Giddens might offer for the tragic events that took place on her watch, thus heightening the ambiguity of the story and the inherent unreliability of her perspective: seeing the mysterious events unfold through her eyes imbues the viewing experience with uncertainty, for the audience is frequently unsure if what the camera captures is what Miss Giddens sees or merely what she thinks she sees.

As the narrative proper begins, it becomes readily apparent that children do need protection, at least from their dissolute guardians. Michael Redgrave plays the role of Flora and Miles’s nameless uncle with casual indifference to his wards, explaining as he interviews Miss Giddens for the position of governess at his country estate, Bly: “And as for my London life, well, it amuses me, but it’s not the sort of amusement that one could suitably share with children.” Such an innocuous statement glides over the uncle’s secrets: what precisely are these “amusements” that he cannot share with his orphaned niece and nephew? As the film proceeds, it seems unlikely that his urban pastimes could be more threatening to the children than the ministrations of their new governess who aspires only to nurture them. Reading her application letter aloud, he reminds her of her words—“More than anything, I love children”—as Kerr chimes in with a heartfelt “yes.” The uncle disappears from the narrative after this initial scene, forbidding Miss Giddens to trouble him about his wards, but Mrs. Grose (Megs Jenkins), the housekeeper, later states of him: “Many’s the time he’s worked his magic on me. Even when he was a boy, he could twist you around his finger, and the children are the same way.” The uncle thus represents what Flora and Miles may become if Miss Giddens does not intervene in their lives: a practitioner of deceit, secrecy, and a sordid urban lifestyle, pursuing decadent pastimes from which children must be protected, despite the irony that the roots of the uncle’s duplicitous adulthood were apparent in his youth.

Because the uncle was played by Michael Redgrave, many viewers assumed that he would return for the film’s climax, but his unswerving disregard for the children contrasts sharply with Miss Giddens’s unswerving concern for them. Despite the incongruity of casting Deborah Kerr, who was forty years old at the time of the film’s shooting, in the role of the young governess Miss Giddens, her performance brilliantly plays on her star persona and her previous box-office hits playing a governess in The King and I (1956) and a romantic heroine in An Affair to Remember (1957) to subvert the audience’s expectations. With such an understanding of her typical roles, viewers might foresee a romance unfolding in the film’s climax—with the uncle rushing in to rescue her and the children—but Clayton cagily uses her screen history to hint at a sexual attraction to the uncle, only to then focus on her obsession with the children. When Miss Giddens and Mrs. Grose, walking in a churchyard, discuss the unsettling events at Bly, she fears that the uncle will think her fears are merely “some stupid trick to get him to notice me,” a subtle admission of her attraction to him. Also, when the uncle offers her the position of governess at Bly, he employs phrasings—“the person whom I engage,” “give me your hand, give me your promise”—evocative of a marriage proposal. By encoding Miss Giddens’s attraction to the uncle in the narrative, Capote and Clayton subtly parallel her sexuality—presumably virginal, as evidenced by her propensity in the film’s opening sequences for white dresses—with the children’s, positing that she too is one of the innocents needing protection to whom the film’s title refers, but also hinting at her desire to sully this innocence by engaging in a sexual relationship.

Upon arriving at Bly, Miss Giddens meets Flora (Pamela Franklin), but the first shot of her young charge is the girl’s reflection in a pond, a deft employment of the camera to frame the film’s mysteries of image and actuality. Following James’s themes, Capote depicts Miss Giddens as initially believing that she has arrived in a paradise: James’s governess describes the children as “cherubs” and Miles in particular as an “angel,”112 and in Capote’s screenplay Mrs. Grose, discussing the manor with the new governess, asserts a similar viewpoint: “But what I always say is, it’s a heaven for children.” Miss Giddens further builds this theme of Bly as a celestial paradise for children, saying that Flora “certainly looks angelic.” From these initial observations of her new setting as a prelapsarian paradise of eternal innocence, Miss Giddens succumbs to the children’s charms. While bathing Flora, Miss Giddens wonders aloud, “And is the other one just as remarkable? Is he too as enchanting?” to which Mrs. Grose responds, “Well, if you like this one, you should be quite carried away by Master Miles.” They tickle Flora, snuggled naked in her towels, in a scene that begins to undermine the viewer’s belief in children’s innocence, for as much as children’s nudity, in family photographs of bath-time play and toddlers’ guileless exhibitionism, often reflects their innocence, a naked child projected on the screen, no matter the intentions of the director, bears the possibility of being viewed—or, worse, enjoyed—as pornographic. In a letter to Frank McCarthy of Twentieth Century–Fox, censor Geoffrey Shurlock cautioned against Flora’s bath for the slightest possibility of a salacious interpretation—“The scene of the little girl running naked from the baths should be handled with proper discretion”—as he also warned against the film’s subject matter: “We urge you to recommend that the references to ‘obscenities’ and ‘filth’ from a child’s mouth be toned down. These words, in connection with a small child, may very well give offense.”¹¹³ Shurlock’s criticisms, perceptive yet untenable, capture the thematic heart of the film: what precisely is the sexuality of childhood, and can this sexuality be depicted cinematically? Can a young girl’s bathing scene remain innocent, if the barest possibility emerges that it might titillate some? Miss Giddens finds Flora’s bath time a “remarkable” and “enchanting” experience rather than a pedestrian chore in a governess’s day; she is clearly so fascinated with childhood and children’s bodies that virtually any activity with them affords a pleasurable frisson. Furthermore, Capote and Clayton appear to have ignored Shurlock’s concern about “filth from a child’s mouth,” for this phrase is used verbatim when Mrs. Grose tells Miss Giddens of Flora’s obscenities during the child’s hysterical breakdown. Capote and Clayton balance these scenes between innocence and sexuality, but the film demands that viewers consider the possibility that childhood sexual innocence is merely a social façade intended to protect adults from recognizing the predatory nature of their own desires.

With such hints of pedophilic desire circulating around Bly, it becomes apparent that what Mrs. Grose sees as a heaven for children may actually be their purgatory. As Miss Giddens puts Flora to bed after her prayers, the child wonders: “And if I weren’t [a good girl], wouldn’t the Lord just leave me here to walk around? Isn’t that what happens to some people?” From this clue that these children might not be little angels, Miss Giddens perceives that Bly could be a purgatorial realm of eternal stasis. Along these lines, Mrs. Grose tells Miles that “nothing ever changes here,” and Miles wishes, “if only everything could go on just as it is now.” Along with its registers as purgatory, Bly represents hell itself, as Miss Giddens discloses when she shares her fear with Mrs. Grose in the schoolroom that the children “live and know and share this hell.”

Attempting to determine whether Bly is heaven, purgatory, or hell, Miss Giddens becomes increasingly troubled by the unfolding events. Flora’s bath-time chant that Miles will return home proves uncannily prescient when Miss Giddens receives a letter indicating that he has been expelled from his boarding school. To enhance the simmering tension, Capote accompanies this revelation with a bit of obvious symbolism as Flora plays with, in her words, “A lovely spider, and it’s eating a butterfly.” This staging exaggerates Archibald’s depiction of Flora’s fascination with a dead beetle: “Oh, look—a dead beetle! . . . You’d never know it was dead except that it’s on its back and isn’t kicking.”114 In both instances the symbolism of the devoured and dead insects unsettles Miss Giddens, but it is as yet unclear to the viewer whether the children or their governess is predator or prey. Miss Giddens learns that Miles has transgressed by being “an injury to the others,” a euphemistic phrasing that states not a specific offense but more a state of depraved existence. When discussing this turn of events with Mrs. Grose, who defends the boy, Miss Giddens replies, “You mean you like a boy with spirit. Well, so do I, but not to the degree to contaminate.” The camera cuts to a close-up of Miss Giddens as she states “contaminate,” registering her dawning fear that this innocent child may infect others with his moral lapses. Mrs. Grose laughs heartily. “Oh, miss, are you afraid he’ll corrupt you?” But this is precisely what Miss Giddens fears: that the depravities of this child will bleed not only onto other children but onto herself as well.115

Clayton underscores Miles’s and Flora’s sexual precocity through costuming and framing.¹¹⁶ At the train station where Flora and Miss Giddens await Miles’s return, Flora rushes to kiss him as if she were more his lover than his sister, and their clothing—Miles sports a young man’s suit, complete with vest and ascot, while Flora models a beribboned dress with matching hat—presents them as adults reuniting passionately after a long separation. Miles quickly begins his courtship of Miss Giddens, bringing her flowers and lavishing her with compliments—“I think you’re far too pretty to be a governess”—to which she smilingly replies, “And I think you’re far too young to be such a deceitful flatterer.” Miles’s flirtations with Miss Giddens undermine a sense of the character as merely a young and sexually innocent boy, for his words distract her from questioning him about his expulsion from school. These questions are never answered conclusively, even in the film’s climactic sequence.

The film also suggests the children’s sexual experience in contrast to Miss Giddens’s sexual innocence in the scene where Miles rides a pony, with Clayton’s fast cuts accentuating Miss Giddens’s growing uneasiness. As James Palmer argues, “The sexual implications of this dizzying scene are worthy of D. H. Lawrence.”¹¹⁷ Miss Giddens is surprised by the young boy’s equestrian skills until Mrs. Grose explains that he learned to ride from the deceased servant Quint, but this revelation frightens her, for his horsemanship thus signifies his eager embrace of Quint’s immoral tutelage. When the children and Miss Giddens play a game of hide-and-seek that takes them to the attic and its many secrets, Miss Giddens first sees a picture of Quint. Also in the attic, the children play with a rocking horse while they count to one hundred so that Miss Giddens can hide herself from them. Rocking horses, perpetually in place while energetically in motion, have long symbolized children’s sexuality and masturbation, perhaps most famously in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” and Flora and Miles’s play with this toy further hints at their sophisticated knowledge of sexuality while also resisting such an interpretation, for the apparently eroticized symbol is a simple children’s toy. Only a depraved mind would see a rocking horse as indicative of children’s sexual precocity, yet only a naïve mind would overlook these children’s uncanny sophistication. Yet again, Clayton puts the audience in Miss Giddens’s position, as viewers waver in interpreting this prop as indicative of children’s innocence or of their provocative pleasures.

In contrast to the children’s bustling activity, Capote and Clayton often depict Miss Giddens restlessly sleeping, with her moaning indicating both her fears for the children and her submerged sexual desires. In the first such scene, she lies in bed with Quint’s image superimposed on her, suggestive of her desire for Quint or of her identification with Quint due to their shared pedophilic interest in children. Then, in a later extended dream sequence, she envisions numerous symbols indicative of her fears of the ghosts and for the children—the music box playing “O Willow Waly,” Miles warning Flora about their secret, the vision of Quint on the tower, Miles and Flora holding hands more like lovers than siblings, Flora dancing with Miss Jessel, and Quint guiding Miles with his hand on his back. Clayton describes his use of such montages and dissolves as “faintly original,” for he sought to create through them “images which hang there, and have a meaning which applies both to the end of the last scene and the beginning of the next.”118 Miss Giddens’s dream montages make apparent the sexual undertones in her concern for the children, and Clayton’s dissolves enhance the provocative nature of her fears, as images emerge from one another in her dark fantasies. Throughout the film, Clayton’s dissolves compel the viewer to confront this indeterminacy of image and reality. In one striking instance Miss Giddens and Mrs. Grose converse about the children in the estate’s solarium while Mrs. Grose waters plants, with the final shot framing her in the right of the screen and a chained and half-naked statue in the left. This scene dissolves to the train station, where Miles comes into focus through the fading statue, a striking allusion to the Pygmalion myth as the young boy appears to come to life from a cold marble statue in response to Miss Giddens’s burgeoning desire for him. When Miss Giddens first sees Quint, he too appears to emerge from a statue. Such scenes reinforce the possibility that these visions spring from Miss Giddens’s feverish mind, as they also allow the possibility that she animates these artworks through her repressed desires.

As Miss Giddens becomes increasingly fearful for the children’s souls, she learns from Mrs. Grose about the mysterious Quint, the uncle’s former valet whose ghostly presence seems to contaminate the children: “He was a peculiar man. There were things in his life that could account for violence done him—vicious things. Well, it doesn’t do to speak ill of the dead.” Despite her hesitations to gossip, this is Mrs. Grose’s primary function in the narrative—to give Miss Giddens elliptical clues about the past that further feed her obsessive concern for the children’s souls. Mrs. Grose soon tells more, hinting at the improper relationship between Quint and Miles: “You didn’t know Quint, miss. Such power he had over people. You can’t blame the child. A lonely boy with no father. Quint took advantage, that’s all. It made me sick to see Miles trotting after him like a little dog.” Again belying her aversion to speaking ill of the dead, Mrs. Grose explains how she caught Quint and the children’s former governess, Miss Jessel, together. Archibald’s dialogue maintains a sense of Victorian modesty in Mrs. Grose’s account of their indecorous liaison—“Using this house, every room—any room—I came upon them once in this very room sitting together, laughing together, loudly”119—whereas the screenplay indicates that Mrs. Grose caught the lovers in flagrante delicto. In a masterful elision, which Clayton’s wife Haya credits to Mortimer rather than Capote, Mrs. Grose says, “Rooms . . . used by daylight as though they were the dark woods.”¹²⁰ Concentrating on the location of their trysts rather than their activities, Mrs. Grose obfuscates precisely what she saw. Her meaning is nevertheless clear, and Miss Giddens asks in shock: “They didn’t care that you saw them?” Mrs. Grose shakes her head, and Miss Giddens’s thoughts immediately turn to her wards. “And the children?” Mrs. Grose replies: “I can’t say, miss. I—I don’t know what the children saw. But they used to follow Quint and Miss Jessel, trailing along behind hand in hand, whispering. There was too much whispering in this house, miss.” The ghostly calls that Miss Giddens has heard since entering Bly—the voice calling for Flora that she mistook for Mrs. Grose’s, the children’s murmuring to each other, the ghosts hissing the suggestive phrases “the children are watching” and “knock before you enter”—hint at secrets kept from Miss Giddens. They also point to the possibility that these secrets are sexual in nature, that the children were privy to the lovemaking of Quint and Miss Jessel and attained an adult knowledge of sexuality that corrupted their innocence.

Miss Giddens’s fears reach fever pitch when the children play dress-up on a claustrophobically rainy day, with Miles performing a ballad lamenting the death of his beloved lord. The ballad’s speaker is unidentified, but in invoking the lord as a lover and imagining the lord’s ghost entering the speaker’s chamber, the ballad takes on a homoerotic cast of anticipated otherworldly consummation. The young actor in the role of Miles, Martin Stephens, plays this scene as if channeling Quint’s spirit, imbuing his performance with the uncanny implication that the young boy serves as the puppet to a ghostly presence. With Francis’s camera framing him and his face lit against a dark backdrop, he stares upward and intones:

What shall I sing to my lord from my window?

What shall I sing, for my lord will not stay?

Here the camera focuses on Miss Giddens, who grows increasingly uncomfortable with the erotic undertones of Miles’s ballad. She sits next to an embroidered seat depicting a man wooing a woman, and the mise-en-scène thus contrasts her desires for conventional romance (presumably with the uncle) with Miles’s performance of ghostly desires. Casting his eyes down, he continues his eerie poem calling for his lord to come to him. The camera crosscuts between Miss Giddens’s mounting horror and tracking shots as he walks to the window.

Concluding his recitation of homosocial desire between lord and liege, Miles whispers, “Welcome, my lord,” indicating that his ghostly lover has arrived for him. Capote borrows this scene almost verbatim from Archibald, with the specter of pederasty lurking in both stagings as Miles reaches out to his dead companion.121 Later when Mrs. Grose defends Miles’s relationship with Quint, declaring, “The poor boy needed someone to—,” Miss Giddens interrupts: “To corrupt him?” Capote’s ambiguous dialogue echoes James’s in numerous ways, but particularly in its refusal to state what precisely this corruption might be. Had Miles interrupted Quint and Miss Jessel making love, as Mrs. Grose’s words “Rooms . . . used by daylight as though they were the dark woods” suggest, he would have learned of heterosexuality, not homosexuality, yet Miss Giddens fears that their relationship veered into pederasty as well. For Miss Giddens any sexuality, whether heteroerotic or homoerotic, corrupts children equally, because she conceives of sexuality, whether in regard to the children or to herself, only as traumatic—despite the many hints that she keenly desires sexual experience herself.

And indeed, one might well wonder, what do these ghosts desire? Although Miss Giddens perceives pederastic undertones in Quint’s relationship with Miles during his performance of the ballad, she also attempts to understand the children’s spiritual possession in terms of adult heterosexuality, believing that Quint and Miss Jessel “can only reach each other by entering the souls of the children.” From this perspective, Flora and Miles are unwilling vessels of a heterosexual passion transcending the grave, and their preternatural sexuality thus reflects a normative desire that becomes tainted by its corrupting influence on children. Yet both James and Capote imply a latent queerness in the presumed possessions by pairing Miles with Quint and Flora with Miss Jessel. Various scholars have noted the sexual symbolism of the ghosts’ appearances—Quint on a phallic tower, Miss Jessel in a vaginal lake, with the children respectively associated with these settings—and thus the queer potential of this haunting multiplies in the ambiguity of the ghosts’ motives: to love each other, to love each other through the children, or, like Miss Giddens, to love the children?

The question of Miles’s sexual desires, amorphous as they are, drives the film to its climax. When Miss Giddens confronts him about his misbehavior, he affirms his desire to remain appealing to her: “Well, I thought I might be becoming a bore. . . . I mean, good children do get a bit boring, don’t they?” He continues, “So I thought, why not go out tonight and wander about in my bare feet? It was a shocking thing to do, wasn’t it?” A young child sneaking out of bed and into a garden is perhaps not a shocking act in itself, but Clayton builds the sexual symbolism in the encounter by cutting to a shot of Miles in bed wiggling his bare feet for Miss Giddens. Bare feet are a longstanding symbol of genitalia,122 and the metaphoric eroticism of the scene is graphically realized when Miles demands, “Kiss me good night, Miss Giddens.” Capote’s screenplay requires the kiss to be shot “on the mouth, like a man,” and the camera records an extreme close-up of their lips pressed together, lasting for a full five seconds.¹²³ The length of the shot freezes the viewer with the disturbing image of a child amorously embracing an adult, but it is not Miss Giddens who pulls away in disgust, shock, or terror; rather, Miles ends their embrace, as she inhales deeply with the camera focusing on her lips. It is an uncomfortable scene to watch, for Clayton strips away the pretense of children’s innocence as Miles pursues his governess sexually. The scene ends with a dissolve matching Miss Giddens with Miles’s dead pigeon, which she earlier found hidden beneath his pillow, suggesting the possibility that she too has fallen victim to this cruel child. Subsequently, when discussing Miles with Mrs. Grose, Miss Giddens avers, “Oh yes, he wanted to reveal himself and ask for my help,” indicating that she refuses to recognize that he did reveal himself to her—that he could hardly reveal himself more without the film becoming pornographic. Refusing to see that Miles metaphorically stripped himself in front of her and demanded an adult kiss from her, Miss Giddens preserves herself from the necessity of believing these children to be anything other than the innocents that she insists they be, so that she may remain an innocent as well.

FIG. 8 The Innocents: Miles (Martin Stephens) is about to kiss his governess Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), in a close-up that soon focuses almost exclusively on their caressing lips.

Building on this scene of puerile seduction, the film’s climactic sequence begins with Miss Giddens confronting Miles about his knowledge of ghosts and, thus, of human sexuality. He enters the drawing room for tea and declares, “How very grand and grown-up,” with Miss Giddens agreeing, “Yes, and we can talk together now, like adults.” In recognizing Miles as an adult, Miss Giddens admits that he is not the child she believed him to be, yet when Miles reaches for Miss Giddens’s hand over the tea table, he then pulls it away after slapping a gelatin mold in an immature and childish gesture. Miles asks her, “Why did you want to be alone with me?” In words that echo Archibald’s, Miss Giddens affirms her willingness to hurt those whom she seeks to help: “My father taught me to love people and help them. Help them even if they refuse my help. Even if it hurt them sometimes.”124 As Miss Giddens avowed in the film’s opening her desire, “Save the children, not destroy them,” it becomes increasingly evident that hurting children is a necessary tactic in her efforts to rescue them.

As this sequence develops, Capote’s queer themes emerge when Miles elliptically confesses the reason for his expulsion from school. In James’s novella, Miles discloses that his transgressions at school involved other schoolboys—“Those I liked”—which adumbrates a homosocial attraction as the foundation of his troubles.125 “It must be because I’m different,” he states in the film, walking away with his back toward Miss Giddens to hide (yet also to indicate) his shame. She, however, refuses to hear his confession: “But you aren’t. You’re like any other boy.” While Miles does not define the nature of his difference, he admits it, yet Miss Giddens will not recognize any difference that would render the boy anything other than an innocent. Regardless of the exact nature of Miles’s difference—whether he is sexually precocious, is homosexual, or was raped by Quint—his confession reads as queer, but Miss Giddens will not acknowledge the queerness standing before her. Miles then points out to her that she does, in fact, recognize his queerness but that she seeks to protect herself from this knowledge: “If you really thought that, we wouldn’t be having these conversations. No, my dear, you don’t think I’m like any other boy. That’s why you’re afraid.” At this moment, Miles suavely affirms his indeterminate queerness as comfortably as his uncle carries himself in the film’s opening when declaring that his decadent pleasures in London take precedence over these children. All the men whom Miss Giddens knows, or thinks she knows—Miles, the uncle, and Quint—are comfortable in their sexuality, and so she can hardly distinguish between Quint and Miles at this point. The screenplay notes, “the two faces, MILES’S and QUINT’S, seem to blur and merge—as though MISS GIDDENS, the observer, were on the point of fainting.”¹²⁶ Because she is unable to distinguish between a child and an adult, the viewer cannot trust Miss Giddens’s perceptions. At the moment of Miles’s death, the screenplay reads: “As [MILES] screams, the figure of QUINT is gone, as though it never existed.”¹²⁷

After Miles collapses, Miss Giddens declares her triumph over Quint: “He’s gone, Miles. You’re safe. You’re free.” Stroking his hair, she avows, “I have you. He’s lost you forever,” only to discover that her young ward has died from the shock of her ministrations. In the film’s final moments, she kisses his dead lips, manifesting her desire for him in an act that replays their earlier kiss. Clayton recorded in his screenplay notes, “she kisses this cold, beautiful dead little face. She kisses it fully, completely on the lips as one would with one’s lover.”¹²⁸ The virginal Miss Giddens finds and kills her first lover, preserving both of them from the degradations of human sexuality, for their love can never be consummated. This provocative finale caused an uproar at the studio: Fox executive Spyros Skouras reportedly sputtered to Clayton, “You can’t finish a film like that! Because . . . because . . . it’s not done!” Clayton reported, “Every two days for two solid weeks, he called, begging me to change the ending, which I would not and did not do.”129 The film ends with the possibility both that the ghosts were real and that Miss Giddens’s feverish concern for the children has killed Miles, that what she wished to believe an external menace represented her own denied desires.

In a letter to Alvin and Marie Dewey, Capote expressed his opinion that The Innocents was “very good” and that they should “be sure to see it.”¹³⁰ For the most part, contemporary reviewers agreed that The Innocents succeeds as a masterpiece of psychological horror. Pauline Kael avowed that the film’s “beauty is what makes The Innocents the best ghost movie I’ve ever seen: the beauty raises our terror to a higher plane than the simple fears of most ghost stories.”¹³¹ Bosley Crowther, reviewing for the New York Times, stated that audiences should find themselves “beautifully frightened and even intellectually aroused” by the film, and the magazine America celebrated the film for “restor[ing] the . . . lost art of the psychological horror story to its honorable place among screen genres.”¹³² Kerr received enthusiastic praise in numerous reviews, among them Arthur Knight’s paean: “Deborah Kerr deftly touches . . . every aspect of this pivotal character—her unworldliness, her piety, her love for the children, and her deep-seated fears.”¹³³ McCall’s extolled her “excellent” performance, as well as Jack Clayton’s “moody, roving camera” that “catch[es] very mysterious shadows in the mansion and builds up suspense in one long crescendo.”¹³⁴ The Newsweek reviewer likewise commended Kerr for her “perfect” performance and Clayton for his “fine and frightening job.”¹³⁵ While many reviews overlooked the performances of the child actors Franklin and Stephens, the Variety reviewer singled them out for praise: “their performances are extraordinary blends of innocence and sophistry.”¹³⁶ Ironically, given the determination of both Capote and Clayton to honor the novella’s ambiguity, commentators faulting the film accused them of resolving its complexities by leaning too heavily on the psychosexual interpretation rather than on the possibility that the ghosts were real. Stanley Kauffman, reviewing for New Republic, noted “the tear-drop that Miss Jessel leaves on the schoolroom desk” as evidence of the film’s “contradictions,” and the reviewer for Time criticized Capote for “pressing hard, much harder than James did, for the psychiatric interpretation.”¹³⁷ Brendan Gill, writing in the New Yorker, dismissed the film as a pale imitation of its illustrious forebear: “With James, the ghosts are always whispering away inside our heads, and no amount of hanky-panky with thunder and lightning and blowing curtains and candles winking out can achieve that interior frightfulness.”138

Such quibbles aside, The Innocents insists that viewers contemplate the queerness of children and the cultural horror of their sexuality, and therein arises its lasting appeal as a story of the indeterminacy and latent terror of sexual desire. As Ellis Hanson brilliantly summarizes, “In The Innocents our relation to the sexual child becomes an allegory for queer cinematic spectatorship, cinema as illicit projection, as an inanimate image brought spectrally to life for the seduction of our look.”¹³⁹ It does so, in the end, by counterbalancing one woman’s horror of sexuality with the inherently quotidian nature of eroticism. When Miss Giddens first enters Bly and touches a bouquet of flowers, some dead petals fall; the screenplay records that “at her slight touch the petals seem to shiver off every bloom.”¹⁴⁰ The symbolic “deflowering” of this bouquet, with its analogous relationship to the botanically named Flora, indicates that the loss of a flower is a mundane, not an earth-shattering, event. Miss Giddens apologizes profusely, but Mrs. Grose simply replies, “That’s all right, miss. It’s always happening.” And so it is always happening with children, as Capote demonstrates in fiction such as Other Voices, Other Rooms and The Grass Harp and in films such as The Innocents and, to a lesser extent, Indiscretion of an American Wife: young children grow into puberty and then adulthood, and in so doing, they develop adult sexual desires, whether heterosexual or homosexual, and the hand that seeks to protect them from sexual knowledge or their own sexual identities can only harm them. Would it be so horrible, Capote asks his viewers, if these children grew up to be like their uncle? Surely only those sharing Miss Giddens’s fear of sexuality would shudder at the possibility.