Richard Davies wrote (about Jack Clayton's _The Innocents_): > All this may sound trivial but the 2 cuts make the movie much less > frightening. Also make it more likely the governess is seeing things, etc. > Such tiny cuts seem likely to be the work of the director. I think he may > have wanted to make the movie less ambiguous - but at considerable cost to > the movie, IMO I haven't seen the film, but having taught the original James novel I'm moved to ask if you mean the movie absent those cuts pushes the psychological interpretation (that the governess imagines the ghosts). Because if the events in the film can be taken equally convincingly as involving either hallucinations or the presence of real ghosts, then it would seem Clayton's cuts (if indeed his) would keep the adaptation very close to the James work--and thus more, not less, ambiguous. It's easy to read the original fiction as a ghost story, and as such it will be frightening (given that children are endangered); but there's also a lot of evidence in the work that points to instability in the governess, who's under great psychological and cultural pressures to protect the sexual innocence of Miles and Flora. Yet if the governess is imagining the ghosts the terrible effect this has on both her and the children also makes the story frightening (if in perhaps a less obvious way). If Clayton decided sometime after the original cut that excising those few seconds would actually make the film closer in ambiguity to the novel, that would seem a good decision. BTW, anyone interested in pursuing the long critical history of discussion and arguments about James's novel might check out the edition published by Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, edited by Peter G. Beidler, as part of its Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. --Jim Marsden, Bryant College ---- For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives: http://bama.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html