Hollywoodizing Henry James: Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961)

This article suggests that Jack Clayton's film of "The Innocents" was conceived by the director and the producing studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, not only as a star vehicle for Deborah Kerr, but as an example of a "quality" production of a literary classic, similar in content and outlook to other adaptations produced at the same time such as Jack Cardiff's "Sons and Lovers" (1960). The article also argues that Clayton transformed James's novella and Archibald's play into an analysis of female sexuality, produced at a time when texts such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique helped to lay the foundations for the modern feminist movement.