films, page 24 of 31

A companion to the two other films about the imaginative lives of children (Spirit of the Beehive and Kes) that I covered in an earlier entry, Whistle Down the Wind could well be the most disturbing of the lot, especially as it’s the most obviously aimed at children. Its cheery music, quoting jauntily from “We Three Kings”, and the rather jolly, Famous Five style of innocent adventurousness the three children start out with (we first see them rescuing kittens thrown into a lake), seem to be setting us up for something far simpler than the film actually is.

Kathy (played by Hayley Mills), is the eldest of three children living on a farm with their father, and an aunt who has taken on the task of looking after them since the death of their mother (a background detail which isn’t dwelt upon, but which infuses Kathy’s subsequent actions with an underlying desperation the style of the film doesn’t quite confront.) After making a careless remark about Jesus not being able to look after the kittens they’ve rescued because he’s dead, Kathy finds an injured man hiding in a barn, and immediately thinks he’s Jesus, come to prove her wrong. She convinces her younger sister and brother to keep his existence a secret, and together they sneak food out to him (at one point spending money meant for their aunt’s groceries and pretending to lose the receipt to hide the discrepancy). But the man is in fact Blakey, a murderer on the run from the police. He at first doesn’t realise why the children are treating him with such reverence, even when Kathy says they’re doing it because they love him. It’s only after he finds himself with a growing congregation of young disciples that he understands. (They beg him for a story. Instead of reading from the Bible they bring him, he reads from a girl’s comic.)

Things start to go awry when the youngest of the three children, the boy Eddie, finds that the kitten he gave to “Jesus” to look after has died, and Blakey can’t give a reason for why he let such a thing happen. Kathy, determined to believe in him (and, perhaps more importantly, to believe that death has meaning), takes her brother to the local vicar for an answer. But the vicar is so pettily materialistic that, after giving a totally inadequate argument about old people dying to make way for the new ones being born, returns to harping on about the guttering and lead being stolen from the church — something that preoccupies him far more than the fact a murderer is on the lose amongst his flock. Kathy is intelligent enough not to be satisfied with this answer, but is all too ready to believe Blakey when he says he let the kitten die because he had too much on his mind. Seeing how ready she is to believe him, he asks her to retrieve a pistol hidden in a nearby railway tunnel, which she does, without question.

It was in the face of this almost absurdist irony (a child believeing a murderer to be Jesus) that I felt a disturbing possibility beginning to loom out of the plot. Kathy has already quizzed a well-meaning but out-of-her-depth Sunday School teacher about what would happen if Jesus were to return to the world: “bad people” would try to crucify him again. So when her father inevitably learns that a murderer is hiding in his barn, Kathy is going to see his perfectly normal actions (summoning the police, taking the man away) as the actions of a “bad person” crushing the goodness and meaning from the world.

The most distressing scene comes shortly after, when a tearful Kathy begs Blakey to forgive her as the police bear down on the barn where he has holed himself up with his revolver. At this point, it seems that, if he resists arrest and gets himself shot (most likely by Kathy’s father, who, aside from Blakey, is the only adult we know to be armed), Kathy is doomed to live a life of guilt at her part in re-crucifying Christ, and alienation from her father and all the other adults who quite rightfully want to take this murderer away.

Thankfully, we hit a redemptive note. Moved by Kathy’s innocent belief in him, Blakey throws his gun outside and gives himself up. But still, the redemption is his, not Kathy’s. She remains entrenched in the illusion that he is Jesus — is in fact further confirmed in it by the way Blakey seems to adopt a crucificial pose when the police search him before taking him away.

Perhaps the message of the film is that treating any human being, even a murderer, with the love and reverence due to a figure like Christ, will redeem them. But, for most of the time I spent watching Whistle Down The Wind, I felt it was teetering on the edge of throwing poor Kathy into the arms of a conclusion far more bleak and brutal — one perhaps best captured by the casual destruction of innocence in the film’s opening sequence of a man throwing three kittens, trapped in a sack, into a lake to drown. Are the Bostock children (as hinted by the incidental music) really Three Wise Kings who are the first to kneel before a returned Christ, or in fact three innocent kittens almost drowned by an uncaring adult world?

Not really meaning to, I seem to have given myself a themed, mini film festival these last two nights by watching a pair of films, both of which were about the secret, inner lives of children.

The first was The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), set in a rural nowhere in Civil War era Spain. I’d put it on my Amazon list after seeing it mentioned as a possible influence on Pan’s Labyrinth, but this was my second watching, because after getting it on rental, I liked it enough to buy it. In the film, six-year-old Ana is deeply affected by a showing of the old Universal Frankenstein at her village cinema (where the screen is a rectangle painted on the wall, and everyone brings their own chair), and when her sister tells her that Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t actually killed because he is a spirit that lives in a nearby abandoned house, Ana starts visiting, and talking to, this gentle, invisible monster. But, rather than characterising her as a child, this seems, in the film’s world, to be putting her on her first step to adulthood, individuality, and isolation: Ana’s father, spending all his time in his study with his glass beehive, seems to live in a world of his own; her mother cycles regularly into town to post letters to a man (a brother? a former boyfriend?) who never replies. One day a wounded soldier, fleeing the Civil War, turns up in the abandoned house, almost like a realisation of the spirit of Frankenstein’s monster, and Ana starts to take care of him.

The other film was Kes (1969), which I put on my Amazon list after hearing Mark Kermode praise it, and realising it was another one of those films I’d heard so much about but hadn’t seen. Set in a pretty grim Barnsley, Kes is about a fatherless boy, Billy, pretty much a loner, ignored by his teachers and bullied by his much older brother. Resigned to getting nothing out of life, he’s nevertheless passionate, almost poetic, about a young kestrel he trains to feed from his hand.

Both films encase their young leads in private imaginative worlds, and both get remarkable performances in return. It’s amazing to think Ana in the first film is just six — in some of the later scenes her face seems ageless, almost ancient — while Billy in Kes looks already hardened against all that the adult world can throw at him. (Almost, but not quite.) In both films the kids find an intensely private focus for their burgeoning individuality and imagination, only to have it broken by the cruel harshness of an uncaring world. The difference is that, with Spirit of the Beehive, because Ana’s world was so much of the imagination to start with, even when events in the real world take it away from her, she’s still left with something. Kes is far more brutal and hopeless, but all the same I felt there was hope for Billy despite his obviously grim prospects, simply because he at least had something he felt strongly about, something that would always be there as a refuge against his unremittingly bleak world, which is more than can be said of his endlessly bickering, selfish, mother and brother.

I love subtle, suggestive horror & weirdness in films, but really effective spookiness is quite hard to find. The industry itself — whether in the form of its producers, its studio executives, or its “audience” (someone’s idea of its audience, anyway, because they certainly don’t include me in that) — can’t help but give in to the urge to sensationalism, and even a little bit of sensationalism can ruin a perfectly good fright. For me, the more subtle and understated the horror, the more your imagination is teased and your rationality piqued, the better. That tense balance where your conscious mind can’t understand what it’s seeing but your subconscious can is what it’s all about. As soon as you add in other elements — a jump, a laugh, a gross-out — and you give your rationality enough excuse not to have to pay it any more attention. The effect is ruined. The Innocents, a 1961 adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, is a classic example of a horror film that really does work on this level, even if it does have flaws.

The flaws, to my mind, are almost all in the person of Deborah Kerr, who plays Miss Giddens, the inexperienced (and highly ineffectual) governess sent to look after a pair of orphaned children on a big, lonely estate. The previous governess, Miss Jessel, has died, and Miss Giddens soon learns there was another death shortly before, that of the sadistic manservant Peter Quint, and that the two deaths might have been linked. But the real tension in the story comes from what can and cannot be said about this mysterious history. Miss Giddens is forbidden from mentioning the tragic Miss Jessel to either of the children — supposedly because it might upset them too much — but, after witnessing two ghostly figures, one of a wicked-looking young man and the other of a mournful young woman, Miss Giddens starts to suspect that Jessel and Quint are present in a way the dead shouldn’t be — and, what’s more, that they’re still in touch with the children.

The real menace in the story is not in the existence of the ghosts, nor in the influence these “horrors” might have on the minds of the supposed innocents. The film becomes truly disturbing once we see how obsessed Miss Giddens becomes with getting the children to confess to seeing, and conversing with, their deceased former governess and her cruel lover. As she can’t mention the names of Quint or Jessel, the whole thing becomes a tortuous psychological game in which Miss Giddens, ever more insistently neurotic and entrenched in her belief, persecutes the children over what, the viewer knows, could well be nothing but hallucination on her part.

This is how it should work, anyway. To my mind Deborah Kerr doesn’t play Miss Giddens with anything like the subtlety or ambiguity required. Perhaps it’s just down to how the film has dated — the governess’ stilted upper-class accent (and the chirpy gosh-oh-golliness of the kids’ dialogue) masks any possible subtlety of emotion, and in the main the music seems to put forward the idea that this is a period melodrama rather than a spooky story.

But one way in which the film hasn’t dated — in fact, what seems to jolt it right into the 21st century, alongside the surreal suggestiveness of Ringu‘s haunted videotape — is in Miss Jessel’s ghostly appearances, which are so staunchly under-sensationalised, and often so brief and matter-of-fact, that they have an effect like a cold brick between the eyes. (The music stops dead each time, too, which helps.)

Take this example, which may be the best in the film. Miss Giddens and her young charge Flora are sitting by a lake. Flora is humming a tune which, we come to learn, is associated with the departed Miss Jessel, but doesn’t answer when quizzed about it. Miss Giddens starts to look disturbed. (The ghosts always appear after we have first focused on Miss Giddens’ look of growing horror. She always sees them before we do.)

Abruptly we see it: Miss Jessel, an out-of-focus, slumped figure in black, standing, quite bizarrely, among the reeds in the middle of the lake, just staring at us, not moving.

Then she’s gone.

It’s the almost surreal details which make it work, for me. The fact that Miss Jessel’s ghost is standing in the middle of a lake. The fact she’s not in any sort of frightening pose, but seems almost bored or tired. The fact she’s in broad daylight. Her being slightly out of focus and off-centre underplays the whole scene wonderfully, as if even the cameraman can’t see her, only we can, and that not too well. She’s beyond the clear, sharp grasp of the rational mind, and staring right into you out of some… other place.