Last night, I watched "THE INNOCENTS".....one of the several adaptatations of Henry James' end of the 19th C. novella, "THE TURN OF THE SCREW"......This brought back memories of an 'oral book report' that I delivered during a 12th Grade High School English Class, during which...I was interrupted a couple of times...by classmates that objected to my unredemptive lack of Religiosity.....although the class' teacher, later, awarded me the only "Excellent" as a reward for my precocious efforts......Some of my classmates would have preferred that I be smothered by a pillow of repressive punishments, if only a few 'tongue lashings', for being a 'free thinker' during an Era of Ultra-Conservatism....especially in The South.....just a couple of years before the massive cultural upheavals and unrest of the middle 1960's.....My refusal to acknowledge 'GOD', later, led me to be sent to the auditorium to 'sit alone with my thoughts', before returning to the classroom.......lest I challenge the cursive mediocrity of most of the other 'Book Reports'........I, certainly, 'got' the reasons that Miles had been expelled from boarding school...for being a 'smart ass', and that his prim and proper Righteous Christian Governess was a nut job, working behind any real intellectual depth, because of her own straight-laced corseted childhood, denied any sojourns in the moonlit garden of Good and Evil..... It's 11:31, Miss Giddens,.......time to pull the covers over your head and return to The Big Sleep....but, first, blow out the candles, in a gust from George Auric's beautiful soundtrack, lest the shadows twix dreamers' lids' initiate any fearful introspections or the faint light provide an exit venue from your fixed, guilt-ridden view, obfuscated...momentarily... by the fall of scented flower petals....(as photographed by Freddie Francis)....I thought, then: "In six minutes, I'll be seated...securely....in Mamie Steger's Solid Geometry Class....."Safe" from such intolerance, secured by the "Safety of Numbers", Logic and Analytical Thinking.......and out of this stinking 'Bible School'! " I wonder.....hmmm.....what take Rainer Werner Fassbinder would have had, were he to have lived a bit longer, on another remake of this movie....... and what orphaned Miles would have accomplished, as an adult, had he not been smothered to death by his Governess' pre-encephalopathologically-assuaging pillow of choking ambiguity.......
