The Nightcomers ** (1971, Marlon Brando, Stephanie Beacham, Thora Hird, Harry Andrews) – Classic Movie Review 5,872

Michael Winner filmed with some of cinema’s biggest names – here in the 1971 British horror film The Nightcomers it is Marlon Brando.

The ever-enterprising producer-director Michael Winner was a great entrepreneur and managed to film with some of cinema’s biggest names – here in the 1971 British horror film The Nightcomers it is Marlon Brando. Michael Winner was a great showman. The movies, well, they were something else.

Based on characters from the Henry James classic 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, Michael Hastings’s screenplay is a prequel spin-off, with the children from the Henry James story watching as gardener Peter Quint (Brando) and governess Miss Margaret Jessel (Stephanie Beacham) enjoy sadomasochistic sex games.

No doubt because of this, the children are a few years older than in the Henry James novel, with actress Verna Harvey 19 years old.

It is a provocative, interesting film, atmospherically made and involvingly performed by a talented cast, catching Brando in the last phase of his prime, though his fake Irish accent is a liability. Michael Hastings’s idea of a prequel to The Turn of the Screw is a fascinating one, and he writes quite well. But the film is all too scrappy and sensationalist to be distinguished. If it is unedifying with its sex and violence, it is also quite untidy, disorganised, and not at all well made.

Also in the cast are Thora Hird as Mrs Grose, Harry Andrews as the master of the house, Verna Harvey as Flora, Christopher Ellis as Miles and Anna Palk as the new governess.

It was shot in February and March 1971, and premiered at the 32nd Venice International Film Festival on 30 August 1971. Michael Winner claimed: ‘It was only the sex and violence that made it profitable. It was rather an intellectual piece, but without the violence it would have gone nowhere at all.’

For his original screenplay, Michael Hastings started with the beginning of The Turn of the Screw and worked backwards. He said he wanted the two lead characters to be ‘plausible, based on their strange eroticism’.

Michael Hastings (2 September 1938 – 19 November 2011) is best known for his 1984 stage play and screenplay for the 1994 film Tom & Viv, about the poet T S Eliot and his wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood.

Sawston Hall.

The film’s manor house is Sawston Hall, a Grade I listed 16th-century Tudor building in Sawston, Cambridgeshire. It features extensively, with many scenes providing interior shots throughout the house.

Turn of the Screw was earlier filmed, and very well, as The Innocents in 1961.

The cast

The cast are Marlon Brando as Peter Quint, Stephanie Beacham as Miss Jessel, Thora Hird as Mrs Grose, Harry Andrews as master of the house, Verna Harvey as Flora, Christopher Ellis as Miles, Anna Palk as new governess.

The Nightcomers is directed by Michael Winner, runs 94 minutes, is made by Scimitar Films, is distributed by AVCO Embassy Pictures. is written by Michael Hastings, is produced by Elliott Kastner, Jay Kanter, Alan Ladd Jr and Michael Winner, is shot by Robert Paynter, is scored by Jerry Fielding.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5,872

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