TV Films of the Week: The Innocents and Promising Young Woman

OLD-school thrills. Peter Weir’s swashbuckling adventure, adapted from Patrick O’Brian’s novels, is a proper swashbuckler . Captain “Lucky” Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) and the 197 crew of the HMS Surprise are ordered to intercept the French Privateer Acheron and “sink, burn or take her as a prize”. The first altercation between the two vessels leaves Aubrey’s ship badly damaged and many crew injured. Aubrey heads for the Galapagos Islands to replenish supplies while the ship’s doctor, Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), tries his best to minimise the casualties. Russell Crowe famously took to Twitter to defend the film’s merits when someone dared to criticise it.

TUESDAY

Commando (1985) (Film4, 11.20pm)

POSSIBLY my favourite Arnie Schwarzenegger movie. Utterly silly, but totally entertaining, and with a surprisingly homoerotic undertone. After his daughter is kidnapped by South American terrorists with whom he has old scores to settle, retired army colonel John Matrix (you know who) boards the next available flight and wages a one-man war against those who were foolish enough to harm his nearest and dearest. Cue guns. Big ones. And lots of them. The bad guys are all wonderfully hateable and Rae Dawn Chong is such fun you wonder why she never became a bigger name.

WEDNESDAY

Notorious (1946) (Talking Pictures TV, 9.05pm)

HITCHCOCK, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman. All you need to know, really. Bergman stars as a Nazi’s daughter who is blackmailed into marrying ruthless German collaborator Claude Rains – only to fall madly in love with US undercover spy Grant. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

THURSDAY

Animals (2019) (Film4, 9pm)

ADAPTED from the novel by Emma Jane Unsworth, this raucous comedy drama set in Dublin stars Holliday Grainger and Alia Shawkat. When Laura (Grainger) falls in love with classical pianist Jim (Fra Fee), she contemplates turning her back on parties, drugs and debauchery. Her best friend Tyler (Shawkat) is not best pleased. Grainger excels.

FRIDAY

FILM OF THE WEEK

The Innocents (1961) (Talking Pictures TV, 9pm)

IT MIGHT be spring, but there's still a chill in the air. Or maybe it's just that one of the greatest ghost stories on film is returning to the small screen this week.

Jack Clayton's 1961 film The Innocents, an adaptation of Henry James' novella The Turn of the Screw, was rather dismissed when it was first released, but its reputation has grown in the years since. It's a dark flowering of talent and intent that now seems like the archetypal haunted house story; a vision of beetle-infested statues, flickering candles and malevolent faces at the window.

It's a clever, insidious film, less obvious than The Woman in Black, less hysterical than Robert Wise's 1963 The Haunting which also looked at a repressed woman possibly on the edge of sanity.

In The Innocents that woman is Deborah Kerr, giving a performance that she herself felt was her best, as Miss Giddens, an unworldly governess who comes to believe that her two infant charges may be under the supernatural control of their former governess Miss Jessel and the Heathcliffesque servant Quint, both now deceased.

What follows is a Freudian-flavoured film that revels in shadow and insinuation, helped by Freddie Francis's evocative black and white CinemaScope photography (which will have you constantly peering anxiously into those shadows) and George Auric's film score, supplemented by Daphne Oram's (uncredited) electronic sound design.

The screenplay was based on a play written by William Archibald. Archibald himself wrote the film's first draft which was then tweaked by John Mortimer and also overhauled by no less than Truman Capote, who brings a real Southern Gothic sensibility to play. As the critic Christopher Frayling once noted of the film, "everything looks beautiful but is decaying."

Clayton's film plays on the notion that Kerr's sexual repression may be affecting her sanity and we never know if she is actually seeing Jessel and Quint or just imagining it. Meanwhile, her relationship with her charges Flora and Miles is complicated, and at times fraught. In a scene that would later inspire Kate Bush to write the song The Infant Kiss, she even shares a kiss with Miles; a scene that may be even more shocking today than it was when the film was released.

Is Miss Giddens seeing ghosts or not? Cinema's materiality almost inevitably always suggests the former because, well, we can see them too. (And is there a more chilling cinematic ghost than the actress Clytie Jessop as Miss Jessel, a woman in black, standing in the reeds? Who needs CGI effects?)

But there is room for doubt. In the editing, with one exception, we see Deborah Kerr react to the appearance of the ghosts before we see the ghosts themselves. Perhaps it is all in her mind after all. It is left to us to decide.

Following the film's release Clayton was dining one night in London in the same restaurant as none other than Francois Truffaut. The French nouvelle vague director passed his fellow director a note in which he said, "The Innocents is the best British movie since Alfred Hitchcock left for America."

Not quite true perhaps, but it's not a ridiculous suggestion.

AND ONE TO STREAM

Promising Young Woman (2021) (Sky Cinema/Now, from Friday)

Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman

TO another woman in extremis. In a bar at night a 30-year-old woman called Cassie is lolling drunk on a banquette. She is being talked about by three men at the bar. "They put themselves in danger, women like that. You'd think they'd learn by that age, right?"

One of the men decides to help her out, which means pouring her into a taxi and taking her back to his place, laying her on the bed and beginning to undress her. At which point Cassie turns out to be not quite as drunk as she first appeared.

Carey Mulligan is the star turn of Emerald Fennell's divisive rape revenge movie Promising Young Woman, so much so that her performance is the one thing everyone is agreed on (it's even won her an Oscar nomination).

Otherwise, Fennell's film has been lauded and loathed in equal measure, with people taking pot shots at its "inappropriate" candy-coloured style (though, you could equally argue, it only emphasises the poison that is flowing underneath the sugar-coated surface), its snickering humour (some of it, I thought, very funny) its resort to stereotypes and, in particular, that ending (no spoilers here but some will find it problematic).

In truth, dramatically the movie is thin at times and you can raise an argument on both sides as to the rightness or not of the climax.

What I think Fennell, previously showrunner on the second series of Killing Eve, gets right, though, is her vision of straight white boy toxic masculinity and the silent complicity that surrounds and excuses rape culture. In the end, that's scarier than any ghosts.