Director Jack Clayton is by no means a household name, and is perhaps most familiar to audiences as director of Room At The Top (1959), the film which ushered in the British New Wave, later to be followed by classics from the likes of Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson. But his masterpiece is unquestionably The Innocents, a truly terrifying psychological thriller whose capacity to disturb has only increased in the nearly fifty years since its release.

One first thing to say about The Innocents: it is one of the most stunningly shot films ever committed to celluloid. Cinematographer Freddie Francis, later to shoot the likes of The Elephant Man (1982) and Glory (1989), demonstrated a complete mastery of the camera and lighting, employing deep focus brilliant enough to rival Welles’ Citizen Kane or Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939). The sheer aesthetic beauty of some of the shots brings to mind elegant horror classics Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946) and Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960), and in terms of suspenseful composition, the film can easily hold its own against anything Hitchcock produced, not least Rebecca (1940) and Vertigo (1958), which are both referenced here.

Style on its own is virtually worthless, but the technical brilliance of the film is the key to this film’s dramatic tension and its questioning of narrative perspective. Based on Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw, the film stars Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, the daughter of a country priest, who is hired to be the governess of two young children, Miles and Flora, who are in need of care after the death of their parents. They live on an expansive Victorian country estate, at the centre of which is the intimidating gothic Bly House, and are attended to by a number of servants, including housekeeper Mrs. Grose.

The children themselves are precocious, especially Miles, who despite his meagre years already appears to carry himself in the gentlemanly fashion of that of his uncle, the suave socialite who is briefly glimpsed hiring Miss Giddens at the start of the film. The two children are also both quite secretive, and seem to enjoy playing games with their somewhat stuffy new governess. Her reaction to their games is at first jovial, but a letter explaining that Miles was expelled from his school seems to trouble her – is his tomfoolery illustrative of his disruptive personality which led to his expulsion?

Miss Giddens’ somewhat exaggerated response to the letter appears to stem from her sheltered upbringing; when the children ask her if she used to play games when she was their age, she alludes to the strict discipline of her family home, at odds with the apparent freedom enjoyed at Bly House. So when Miss Giddens soon learns more disturbing secrets, and begins to see apparitions resembling former employees at Bly, we have to question whether what she is seeing is real or just a product of her fevered imagination.

The screenplay borrows more from William Archibald’s stage production The Innocents as opposed to directly from the James novella, this being more suitable for transition to the screen; the book is a much more literary piece, questioning not only the governess’ account of events, but also the narrator telling her tale’s knowledge and motivations. What screenwriters John Mortimer and Truman Capote do to the story is to allow it to have more of a sense of visual ambiguity, allowing both director and cinematographer to use their talents to make the audience question what they are seeing, along with the increasingly frantic governess.

There are some very dark undertones beneath the surface. Freudian imagery abounds, whether intentionally or not, and there is the constant presence of decay and death around the house – witness the flower and insect symbolism throughout the screen duration. There is also a very clear suggestion of misplaced paedophillic feelings that Giddens has for the young Miles, the boy in many ways acting as a surrogate for her feelings towards the dashingly suave Uncle in the film’s first reel; her repressed sexual desires seem to emerge inappropriately during two overly passionate kisses between herself and her charge.

There are so many facets to The Innocents‘ brilliance that it can almost be forgotten just how succesfully the film functions at a basic haunted house horror level. Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) is perhaps better remembered in the popular consciousness for pure jump-value, but Clayton’s film is at worst its equal on the scare front, and in terms of its ability to disturb is virtually unparallelled in all of horror cinema. Many films since have tried to better it, most notably Alejandro Amenábar’s tributary The Others (2001), but nothing is ever likely to come anywhere near close.

Wim Wenders’ best films are populated by itinerant loners, roaming around territories foreign to them with a keen eye for observing the curiosities of a different culture and landscape to their own. Though his earlier films had, to varying extents, exhibited a debt towards the American road movie, it was his 1974 film Alice in the Cities which fully betrayed the director’s love for that type of film, as well as signalling his intent to reinvent it in a European setting and context.

Shot in a choppy, improvisational style belying a debt to Truffaut, the film first follows German writer Philip Winter trawling around the United States, on an assignment to complete a piece of reportage about its culture, from the standpoint of this steadfast European cynic. Mesmerised by its neon-lit boulevards and cheap roadside motels, he takes copious polaroid photographs of everything, but the stifling atmosphere of tacky television and the ever-blaring radio has choked his creative mojo, and he finds himself unable to actually write anything, to the consternation of his agent and publisher.

He decides to return home, but at the airport befriends a woman who proceeds enigmatically to disappear in order to sort out some personal issues, leaving Philip in charge of escorting her precocious nine-year-old daughter Alice back to Europe. It is here that the real journey of discovery begins; Philip, so jaded from his unfulfilling trip to the States, suddenly finds himself responsible for something other than himself, and while initially the relationship between them is frosty, the man and the girl strike up an unusual bond in their search across Germany for her grandmother’s house. He stops taking pictures of everything, and is able to write again. Alice, on the other hand, loses some of her coldness and comes to relish her new found freedom with her newly-found chaperone. For all of her precociousness, we are reminded that she is still a naive young girl – unable to understand why Philip sets his watch back six hours on arrival in Amsterdam.

It is unusual for a ‘road movie’, in that there are no real great revelations, no big surprises, no grand changes in the characters’ outlooks on life; neither is the film a picture-postcard advertisement for travelling around Germany, although there are some wonderfully captured moments – the windmill designs on the Amsterdam hotel room window shutters, the brief monorail trip from Wüppertal, the factories of the Ruhr valley, the pair performing physical jerks in a car park before sunbathing. In their search for Alice’s grandmother’s house, Wenders’ camera scans passing houses, so elegant and provincial compared to the skyscapers and seedy motels we had seen in America earlier.

At times, the film seems almost monotonous, capturing moments where nothing is actually happening – in one extended scene, they order ice-cream in a small cafe whilst watching a boy humming along to a rock and roll song on an old fashioned jukebox; in another the camera lingers for a noticeably long time on a young girl following the pair’s car along a residential side-street on her bike. But these moments in the film give breathing space – an effect similar to the ‘pillow shots’ employed by Wenders’ forefather Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu – and it is the fact that the two of them are increasingly able to do nothing together so easily which illustrates their strengthening bond.

There is little in the way of sentimentality, and unusually for a road movie, it is at times difficult to see exactly where everything is heading. Yet by the end, one cannot help but feel saddened by the pair’s inevitable parting, and moved by the way that they have enriched each others lives in such a simple but unlikely way. Wenders himself cannot bear to split the two, so he finishes with the two of them on the train taking Alice back to her mother, before sweeping away into a panorama of the German countryside, the backdrop to their voyage of self-rediscovery. A similar journey will be undertook in Wenders’ Palme D’Or-winning masterpiece Paris, Texas, though Travis’ and Hunter’s journey will be more about forgiveness and redemption; Alice in the Cities reminds us of the infinite capacity to rediscover ourselves through other people.

Genre cinema relies on certain conventions, tacitly understood rules of engagement between director and viewer which allow feelings such as humour, warmth, dread, mystery, love and hate to be easily communicated by association rather than through explicit spelling-out. Films with somewhat simpler aims will play by these conventions, giving us standard thrillers, comedies, rom-coms, horror pictures, etc etc. But every so often a director will bravely try not only to break these hidden rules, but to play with audience’s preconceptions about the film that they are watching. In delivering the unexpected, a filmmaker can not only expose these prejudices that the filmgoer brings to the cinema, but can also deeply unsettle the viewer, so used to the standard fare.

There is no greater example of this than with Georges Sluizer’s Spoorloos, in English referred to as The Vanishing, though this was also the title given to his subsequent American remake made five years later. The premise is rather simple – a Dutch couple, Saskia and Rex, while holidaying in France stop at a petrol station, where Saskia subsequently goes missing. The film cuts to Rex three years later, with a new girlfriend but still wanting to know what happened on that fateful day.

Another film would give us all of this information, and then show Rex’s descent into madness as he is tormented by a faceless kidnapper leaving a trail of clues in order to lead him to his hidden lair. But Spoorloos plays a different game; in a series of extended flashbacks, the film introduces a third character, the middle-class family man Raymond, and carefully follows his clinical and meticulous planning to capture a stranger. The conventional thriller deliberately skims this kind of information, so why does Sluizer choose to devote so much of the film to the miniscule detail of his villain?

The answer is at least partially, as mentioned above, to wrong-foot the viewer. There is something akin to Orson Welles’ late appearance in The Third Man about the treatment of thriller villains, an almost reverential respect for the privacy of their motives that should really be ill afforded to such criminals. In showing the mundanity of Raymond’s existence – his attempts at calculating how far he could drive with a chloroformed victim, his botched attempts at snaring other would-be victims – the director grants no such star-status to his villain. His meticulous planning, rather than coming from the master-mind of a cartoonlike Bond villain, actually seems pretty geeky – the product of a true madman rather than a comic-book one. In humanising evil, it becomes profoundly more disturbing.

Of a rather lesser note of interest is the early banana skin we are left to fall over; the couple encounter car difficulties in a tunnel, and Rex wanders off leaving a petrified Saskia alone in the dark. The expectation is of course that when he returns, she will have performed the ‘vanishing’ of the title, though she is indeed still in the car on his arrival. It reminds me of the early scene in Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette [Bicycle Thieves] where the protagonist Antonio leaves his bicycle outside of a house for a few minutes while he investigates inside; when he returns for it, there is of course the expectation that it will have been stolen, but this is only because of the knowledge of the film’s title – the bicycle is still propped up where he left it.

What is fascinating about Spoorloos is that despite its reputation as one of the most horrifying, gripping and quite simply disturbing films ever made – indeed the absolutely terrifying ending is regularly voted one of the scariest film moments ever – it was decided that there was nothing materially in the film to find it deserving of anything greater than a 12 rating in the UK on its release (later upgraded on its VHS release to a 15 rating, for ‘strong psychological terror’). This, for me, shows its absolute brilliance – and in an age now where CGI gore is thrown around the screen with little effect, the film’s simple power and utter terror is even more effective.

**EDIT** It’s probably best to mention, for those who haven’t seen it, just how terrible Sluizer’s remake is, dismantling all of the apparatus that made the original so utterly brilliant. What a shame. For all of the stick that Michael Haneke is getting for doing an exact shot-for-shot remake of his notorious Funny Games, perhaps it could serve as reminder that tinkering is not always such a good thing….

Another point of note: the French title of the film was cleverly L’Homme Qui Voulait Savoir (The Man Who Wanted to Know) – a suprisingly insightful alternate title, referring not only to Rex but Raymond.