Word: quints
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
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...