Cinema: The Tarn and the Screw

THE NIGHTCOMERS

Directed by MICHAEL WINNER Screenplay by MICHAEL HASTINGS

Here is Marlon Brando in a slept-in tweed jacket, sashaying around an Edwardian country estate complete with a genuine tarn (the better to drown you with, my dear!), and carrying on in various ways with a pretty governess and a pair of fresh-faced children borrowed from Henry James. Brando is Peter Quint, the ghostly valet of The Turn of the Screw turned into a gardener. The governess is Miss Jessel (Stephanie Beacham), his haunting paramour. The film's Big Idea is to make precise what James left terrifyingly ambiguous: just how Quint and Jessel died, and what they did to corrupt poor young Flora and Miles before James' story begins with the arrival of a new governess.

Properly handled, such a gimmick might have launched a spoof of James' involuted style or a parody of Freudian criticism (scholars have wrangled for decades about whether the ghosts of Quint and Jessel are merely figments of the new governess's sexually starved imagination). Director-Producer Michael Winner, however, tries for a pretentious shocker in fancy dress. He serves up a pastiche of sexual sadism, witchcraft (two dolls are burned in chamber pots) and a pair of Quintessential messages: love and hate are synonymous; the dead just hang around wherever they are killed.

Moreover, Winner wants the audience to believe that the children (aged about 9 and 11) regard any thing Quint says as literally true. Chil dren are often cruel but rarely that stupid. Quint lapses into a sodden, brogue-trotting Irishman, who mumbles to Miles, "If you love someone, sometimes you really want to kill them." Pow! Wilde! The governess drowns in the tarn — from an acute case of sabotaged rowboat. Quint is struck down, like St. Sebastian, by Miles' bow and arrow.

In all this, there is hardly enough of either terror or common sense to impose upon the average tufted titmouse.

Christopher Ellis and Verna Harvey, however, are radiant and accomplished as the children, and Brando, 20 years on from Stanley Kowalski, still has the presence to make bullying cruelty captivating.