The Innocents (1961)

Frank knew he often sounded like a broken record, but sitting on the old pier in Esperanza, looking out over Puerto Real and to Cayo de Afuera and out to the vast blue Caribbean (and beyond to what? Port-of-Spain? Caracas? Maracaibo?), it didn’t seem to matter much. “Convengo, Capitán,” he agrees with Jose Ortiz Príncipe, the old hombre surveying the beach with him, “Verdad, el mundo sería perfecto, si la amabilidad era persuasiva.” “Sí. El amor es como una elección,” he claps Frank on the back, “Cada hombre deseó ser contado. Pero, deciden a los ganadores ya.” “¡Perros y perras!” At this, Jose Ortiz chuckles, then goes back to his stories of the “pequeños hombres obscuros” that he and his sons had seen while emptying their land crab traps in the mangrove fringes around Red Beach. Stories about spacemen and UFO both in the skies and coming out of the sea, are not uncommon on Vieques.

To be fair, though, UFO sightings are common in a five-mile radius of just about every US military base, and in the past, the US military controlled about 2/3 of the 20-mile long island. And here too, spaceships are most often spotted flying towards the neighborhood of Fajardo and Ceiba (where the navy’s mainland operations were held in NS Roosevelt Roads). However, on Vieques, UFO stories hold a special reverence. They go hand and hand with the hatred of the Navy presence. Spacemen, like accidental death and cancer, are just another negative consequence of the military bombing and firing ranges. But Frank was more interested his stories about island visitors from an even farther flung galaxy: Hollywood. In the past the island was the principal location for movies such Lord of the Flies (Brook 1963), Heartbreak Ridge (Eastwood 1986) (as a stand-in for Grenada), and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (Huston 1957) (as a stand-in for the WWII Pacific theater). In fact, it was in that Huston movie that, as a young Marine, Jose Ortiz stood in as an extra with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr. Jose Ortiz was absolutely in love with Kerr after his scene, despite the clash between the nun’s habit she wore for the part, and Jose Ortiz’ Catholic upbringing.

At this, Jose Ortiz pulls out from under his linen shirt, the scapular medal he’d worn since the Korean War. Frank frowns at it briefly; he always found the Jesus of the Scared Heart iconography a tad disturbing. Instead, he asks if he had ever seen Kerr in The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s 1961 telling of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. He hadn't. Frank recomends it. It was new on DVD (6 September 2005, 20th c. Fox) and Frank had picked it up in San Juan the last time he had flown in for supplies. As Frank had been recently thinking a lot about the Gothic films (or ‘no horror’ horror as Frank put it) of the past few decades, The Innocents is certainly one for the list. Now, the acting can be a tad “theatrical,” an artifact of 1950s Hollywood or of Truman Capote’s assist in the screenwriting, but it is also appropriate for the Victorian setting. Moreover, Kerr’s prim governess is a great foil for the creepiness of the kids Miles (Martin Stephens) and Flora (Pamela Franklin) whom she is taking care of following the mysterious deaths of their previous caretakers Peter Quint and Miss Jessell. Quint and Jessell have a vague sort of beyond the grave power over the children (for those of you who haven’t had to read Henry James in some High school lit class), and it the vaguery of their ghostly influence that makes the kids creepy. Miles has been expelled from school under mysterious circumstances. Kerr catches glimpses of the spirits when one else can see, supplied by snippets of gossip about Quint and Jessell’s tempestuous relations. With Kerr’s repressed Victorian manner it’s as if Quint is a distinct threat to her own virtue, no the kids. But the spirits are abstracted and remote, a figure on a tower, a face in a windowpane, a candle blown out at an opportune moment. The finale, Kerr’s exorcism of Quint, while again may be more theatrical than natural, is however, beautifully shot, and makes the whole movie. The audience gets an almost ghost’s eye-view of Quint rocketing up to heaven, his hand lifted over the scene. Visually a climatic, sudden treat, after a vastly visually calm movie. It is, for example, the same effect as the finals shots of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). The not-subtle visual impact of suddenly being transported out of Jimmy Stewart’s apartment, which has enclosed and framed every other shot in the movie until that point. In The Innocents, we become accustomed to a slower paced phantasm, suddenly bolting form the scene. For his part, Frank wants to make it back to the Crow’s Nest for happy hour, so he’s about to bolt from this scene and leave Jose Ortiz once again alone on the pier, mulling over crabs, Korea, Kerr and the little spacemen in his mind. Hopefully making more sense out of it all than Frank has. “Adiós, Capitán,” Frank salutes. “Buena suerte, Frank” He smiles again tapping Frank on the bill of his cap and his chest, “Utilice sus herramientas: Cabeza y corazón.” “Si, Capitán.”