Our Lenten Film series continues on Friday, March 1, with Jack Clayton’s 1961 cinematic version of Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw”: The Innocents, featuring Deborah Kerr in a tour-de-force performance, and screenplay contributions from the inimitable Truman Capote.
Thus far, the relationship between innocence and goodness has been our focus—we’ve wondered if innocence and goodness were synonymous; we’ve wondered if some kind of loss of innocence—of truly knowing good and evil as good and evil—is important to actually being capable of desiring and doing the good and eschewing the evil. In The Innocents, we’ll wonder together if it’s possible, in doing evil, to remain innocent of the knowledge that it is indeed evil that one is doing, and we’ll think about the film’s vision of corruption: is it simply a process of becoming consciously wicked, or is it a process by which we can unconsciously fall into patterns of evil from which we are ultimately helpless to extricate ourselves? An anxious governess is hired to watch over two precocious children in a remote manor that may or may not be haunted by the spirits of two previous members of the staff—but is it the house that’s haunted, the children…or the governess? Can the governess save her charges from the evil she believes is threatening them?
Join us Friday, March 1, for a dinner at 6pm and a film at 6:30pm, all in the Parish House.
Subsequent films in the series are:
- March 8: Throne of Blood (dir: Akira Kurosawa, 1957, NR)
- March 15: No Country for Old Men (dir: Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007, R)
- March 22: The Zone of Interest (dir: Jonathan Glazer, 2023, PG-13)
