Our Mother’s House didn’t get the acclaim of Jack Clayton’s previous film about spooky kids, The Innocents, when it debuted. Partly because The Innocents is one of the all-time greats. But also because Our Mother’s House appeared in 1967, and with its message of children going to the bad because of a lack of parental supervision it was out of step with the letting-it-all-hang-out ethos of the age.
Lovers of Victoriana, feast your eyes on the interiors of the huge house where seven children and their rabidly religious but mortally ill mother live, with only a daily help in the shape of Mrs Quayle (Yootha Joyce) to keep the show on the road.
Mum is played by Annette Carell, in her final role before a barbiturates overdose took her to the great beyond, and she’s not long for this world on this screen either. Mum is mouth-agape dead within minutes of the film opening, leaving the kids facing the prospect of the orphanage.
Determined not to let that happen, they decide not to tell anyone what’s happened. So they bury mum in the garden and then carry on as normal, fending off enquiries about their well-being from do-gooder teachers. They have to fire Mrs Quayle, of course, a deed which will eventually return to bite them. But in the interim all goes well, thanks to one of the children’s knack at copying mum’s signature – access all financial areas.
Then at halfway through its 100-ish minutes running time dad turns up. He’s a feckless, womanising charmer played with a half-hearted lunge towards a Cockney accent by Dirk Bogarde, whose performance improves as dad reveals his true colours.
The seven children, ranging from five to 14, are the stars. One of the two wonders of the movie is how well Clayton directs them, getting naturalistic performances in scenes that are emotionally and technically complex. Among them is Mark Lester, who’d be the lead in Oliver! the following year, and he’s great here. Though really the film’s focus is on the two oldest girls, bossy, sensible Elsa (Margaret Brooks), and wilful and emotional Diana (Pamela Franklin). Brooks plays the older sister, but is in fact four years younger than Franklin. Presumably the reason for this is because Clayton has something in mind for Diana – she’ll get her knickers in a tangle over dad – and he needs someone with a touch of the worldly about them to pull that off, which older Franklin (about 16) has and younger Brooks (12-ish) doesn’t. She’d also been one of Clayton’s juvenile stars in The Innocents six years before, so he obviously went for experience.
Really, though, the set-dressing of this Victorian house is the star of the film. A darkly gothic place with woodwork almost invariably painted black, it’s stuffed to the rafters with brass bedframes and hazed mirrors, velvet curtains and fringed lampshades. In the early scenes around the ailing mother and in the immediate aftermath of her death, Clayton and DP Larry Pizer shoot everything almost sepulchrally dark, as if the house were conniving with the kids. Later, whenever there is a big decision for the kids to make collectively or when they commune with their dead mother in seances they call “mother-time”, Clayton and Pizer do the same – it’s dark, very very dark.
The Innocents created its tension slowly. It hinted that the kids at its centre were weird and then built on that. Our Mother’s House cannot do that. These kids are not weird. They’re just normal youngsters cast adrift. What we see is what we get. In the earlier film the audience got wrapped up in the process. In this later one there isn’t one, just an event, which we can start guessing at from the moment of dad’s arrival on the scene.
Put another way, effective though the whole thing is, the beginning and the end are the film’s best bits.
Our Mother’s House – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
