The Nightcomers
It is safe to say that the career of the playwright, poet and novelist Michael Hastings owed something to the literary figures who came before him, his play Tom and Viv and its subsequent film adaptation for which he wrote the screenplay based on the life of T S Eliot and his adaptation of The American by Henry James, a novelist whose work he had already explored more than a decade earlier with The Nightcomers.
Created as a prequel to James’ novella The Turn of the Screw, adapted numerous times, most famously as The Innocents and most recently as The Turning and even musically as The Infant Kiss of Kate Bush, it was directed by West 11’s Michael Winner and starred Marlon Brando as the sinister valet turned gardener Peter Quint, both of them in a lull before sudden career revivals, Brando first with The Godfather then Winner with Death Wish.
Peter Wyngarde having played the dapper, striking, seductive and ghostly Quint in 1961, ten years later Brando’s interpretation could not be more different, heavyset, unkempt, uncouth and lazy, the bane of Thora Hird’s housekeeper Mrs Grose but a nocturnal visitor to the bedchamber of lonely governess Miss Margaret Jessel, offering token resistance to him but unprepared for his expectations or his forcefulness.
As slovenly, demanding and offhand in his manners behind closed doors as with the absent master of the house played by Harry Andrews, disinterested in the welfare of his orphaned niece and nephew Flora and Miles Tyrrell (Verna Harvey and Christopher Ellis), as yet uninformed of the death of their parents in an accident, it is to Quint that they flock, adoring him for his defiance of the stuffy norm, a flame around which the uppity children circle, adopting his insolent habits and adapting them to their own purposes.
The Nightcomers a story which was not asking to be told, shoehorned into the narrative of the original but more akin to Brando’s later Last Tango in Paris than the shadowy mystery of the established events at Bly House, an abusive man placed in a position of trust with an isolated, vulnerable woman, with hindsight the film is more telling of Winner who gathered a portfolio of credible accusations against him than the odious director might have intended.
Filmed at Sawston Hall, a Tudor manor in Cambridgeshire, the production values of location, costume and lighting and Jerry Fielding’s score are all that carry the film, restored in 4K for a new edition from StudioCanal supported by two commentaries, insights from Kim Newman, interviews with the production crew and, most interesting, a video essay by Kat Ellinger on the film adaptations of the work of Henry James through the much needed lens of feminism.
The Nightcomers will be available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from StudioCanal from Monday 27th April
