INSPIRED BY THE TURN OF THE SCREW AND THE ASPERN PAPERS

Film Adaptations

Henry James’s chilling tale of ghosts and governesses The Turn of the Screw, with its intense demands on the imagination, makes for excellent psychological cinema. John Frankenheimer directed CBS’s Playhouse 90 version of The Turn of the Screw (1959), which starred Ingrid Bergman and earned an Emmy Award for Outstanding Program Achievement. Sir Michael’s daughter Lynn Redgrave led the cast in the 1974 television film, and Magda Vá sáryová played the famous governess in a 1982 musical adaptation for television. Two additional broadcast productions appeared in 1990, one starring Amy Irving and the other Helen Field. In 1992 Patsy Kensit headed the cast in a flashier version for theatrical release, and in 1999 Jodhi May starred in a period, made-for-television production with Colin Firth.

But it is The Innocents (1961), directed by Jack Clayton (The Great Gatsby), that takes the story of The Turn of the Screw to a level even Henry James may not have anticipated. The power of Clayton’s film springs from two key elements: his faithfulness to James’s text, which gives the film an eerie ambience and an eerier ambivalence, and the brilliant casting of Deborah Kerr as the prim daughter of a country pastor accepting her first engagement as a governess. Sir Michael Redgrave enjoys a cameo as the irresponsible charmer who hires Kerr to look after his orphaned nephew and niece. The children are superb: Martin Stephens (the children’s leader in the previous year’s Village of the Damned) plays a brooding Miles, and Pamela Franklin (The Legend of Hell House) plays Flora, who, upon her first appearance, gives the impression of an angel.

Kerr witnesses apparitions—a man and a woman—floating around the mansion and its grounds, and discovers that the ghosts correspond to the late estate manager and his lover, the previous governess, who died only months before her own arrival. Kerr, whose movie career included memorable performances in An Affair to Remember and The King and I, renders the current beleaguered governess perfectly as the proper and decidedly British Miss Giddens, who slowly goes mad in her efforts to protect the seemingly innocent orphans from the apparitions. With a script expertly written by William Archibald, Truman Capote, and John Morti mer, the film immediately establishes a tension that never relents or diminishes. Gifted cinematographer Freddie Francis (eventually a director in his own right) slides the camera through the mansion’s eerie hallways and corridors, permitting subtle story-telling tricks and creating one of the sleekest pieces ever shot on black-and-white film.

Theater

Actor of stage and screen Michael Redgrave was knighted for his services to the theater in 1959, the same year he adapted James’s novel The Aspern Papers for the stage. The original production opened on Broadway on February 7, 1962, starring Olympia Du kakis and Wendy Hiller, and ran for ninety-three performances. In 1984 the play was produced at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London, starring Christopher Reeve opposite Wendy Hiller (now Dame Wendy) and Sir Michael’s daughter Vanessa Redgrave, who won an Olivier Award for her performance.

Opera

One of the premiere composers of the twentieth century, Benja min Britten had a tremendous success with his opera of The Turn of the Screw, which premiered in Venice in 1954. Britten, who introduced such classics as Herman Melville’s Billy Budd and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice into the operatic canon, scored the opera for chamber orchestra, a choice that helps build the desired unearthly atmosphere. The complex score varies the central title theme for each of the opera’s fifteen scenes and builds a mounting tension that is supported by the conflict between the keys of A minor and A flat major.

The opera calls for a pristine soprano to play the part of the naive governess and treble and soprano voices for Miles and Flora, respectively—all offset by the tenor of Peter Quint’s ghost. The ghosts of Quint and the previous governess, Miss Jessel, seduce the children with creepy chants like “Day by day the bars we break / break the love that laps them round / cheat the careful watching eyes. / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

The libretto was written by Myfanwy Piper, a frequent collaborator of Britten’s. A disturbing element in the libretto is the orphans’ constant singing of Latin nursery rhymes that are both haunting and bawdy. Directors often bring out issues unexpressed in both James’s and Piper’s texts, sometimes interpreting the figures of Quint and Miss Jessel as torturers, even sexual abusers, of the orphans. Britten’s The Turn of the Screw has become a core repertoire opera and one of the most enduring operatic works of the twentieth century.

Throughout his career, preeminent American composer Dom inick Argento has written ten operas, not the least of which is The Aspern Papers, after the Henry James novella. Argento, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf (1975), wrote his own libretto for The Aspern Papers. The two-act, two-prologue opera takes place during the summers of 1895 and 1835—alternating between the time when a young scholar comes to question Aspern’s widow Juliana, and a time Juliana remembers, during which Aspern was involved with a young girl named Sonia and Juliana was merely his mistress. Argento changes the profession of Jeffrey Aspern from poetry to, appropriately, musical composition. In Argento’s piece the “Aspern papers” relate to an opera entitled “Medea” that Aspern is believed to have written for Juliana shortly before his death. Argento’s The Aspern Papers premiered at the Dallas Opera on November 19, 1988, and has aired on PBS’s “Great Performances.”