Nanny, The (1965)

                                           “So over the bridge from Flushing to the Sheffield’s door,

                                           She was there to sell make-up but the father saw more,

                                           She had style. She had flair.

                                           She was there.

                                           That’s how she became the Nanny.”

                                              - The Nanny Named Fran by Ann Hampton Calloway

Whoops, wrong Nanny.

Alas, a point of grand cinematic debate still rages on. Whether, in 1965, an 8-year-old Fran Drescher, the yenta with the nasal-cooled machine gun laugh, would have carved a more imposing figure as a possibly deranged British caretaker than Bette Davis.

This is why film forums exist.

Well, that and unemployment among 20-50 year old males. 

I digress.

In the 1960s, Bette Davis’ legendary career was morphing into a fantastically campy autumn. It was the “Grand Dame Guignol” period of film history. An era where the established female stars of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” (Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Gloria Swanson) were reduced to playing haggard old bags with attics full of madness.

Yet, that is misleading. They were never “reduced”.

Sure, the new breed of method-acting females were usurping the plum dramatic roles. And yes, Hollywood had always discarded its aging, formerly reigning screen queens like a pimp would a dying, syphilitic whore.

But it was different now. Two whole generations of filmgoers had grown up on these women and their pictures.

They did not want to let go so easily.

There was still a demand to glimpse their greatness, albeit as axe-wielding psychotics (Crawford’s Strait-Jacket), damaged southern belles (Davis’ Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte), or disturbed ex-stars trying vainly to make an unwanted comeback (Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Swanson in Sunset Blvd.).

Sometimes life is art.

More importantly, these Grand Dames gave homosexual males costume ideas and someone else to obsess over, other than a dead Marilyn Monroe or James Dean.

Greer Garson was originally cast for the role of The Nanny but ditched pre-production, citing that the role would be bad for her career. Apparently, she had no such qualms concerning the damage that her follow up projects, The Singing Nun (1966) and The Happiest Millionaire (1967), could wreak on her reputation.

So it fell to Bette Davis, who had no misgivings about playing deranged elderly women. Unlike Baby Jane Hudson and Charlotte Hollis however, the camp value would be absent for Nanny. This is a straightforward chiller. An exquisitely paced cat and mouse game, full of the sort of psychological volleyball that separates it from the tepid predictability of inferior thrillers of its ilk.

Producer/screenwriter Jimmy Sangster had made his mark with Hammer Studios in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s penning the scripts for many of the popular Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee projects directed by Terence Fisher, films such as The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy. It was after the success of these horror films that Sangster began to branch out into the realms of psychological thrillers, films relying more on the unseen horrors of the mind and its nefarious capabilities. A stream of solid and economical films followed; 1961’s Taste of Fear, Paranoiac (1963), Nightmare (1964) and Hysteria in 1965.

Sangster adapted The Nanny from the novel by Marryam Modell (writing as Evelyn Piper) who also had success (and a screen adaptation) with her other novel from 1965, Bunny Lake is Missing. Both novels deal with intensely dysfunctional family structures, missing or dead children and dark secrets from a haunted past. Fertile ground for the type of mental games necessary for any thriller of this subgenre.

The last black and white film from Hammer, The Nanny has Bette Davis as an elderly caretaker for a troubled young family. She was the nanny for the mother (Wendy Craig) and her sister Pen (Jill Bennett) since both were little girls. She now tends to Craig’s family solely.

A tragedy surrounds the household. The young daughter drowned in the bathtub a few years back and her eight-year-old brother Joey (William Dix) was blamed for her death. He has been at a psychological institution for two years and is now returning home. His Mother is very fearful of this homecoming. She is also quite neurotic in general and a bit unhinged, overly pampered and condescendingly “gaslighted” by the Nanny who brushes her hair for her, coddles her, spoon feeds her at one point and allows her to wallow in a self-pitying, alcoholic stupor for most of the days.

The Father (James Villiers) is aloof and relatively uninvolved, more concerned with his career as a Queen’s Messenger and keeping up appearances than he is with the emotional and mental health of his family. His detachment from the family’s ills occasionally falters and, in his need for tidiness and order, he verbally lashes out at his wife and child. There is even a slight visual hint that he and Aunt Pen may be having an affair.

Nanny is the bedrock of the clan. She keeps the Mother calm and assured, provides the Father with his sense of high station, and continually tries to comfort and understand Joey, who blames her for his sister’s death. However, all does not seem well with Nanny either. Something in her eyes hints at loss and the possibility of an impending breakdown.

Joey is seemingly the monster here. It appears he has “fallen out his pram”. Like Harold Chasen in Harold & Maude, he feigns a suicide attempt for shock value. He nearly kills a milkman by pushing a large flowerpot off the patio edge of the apartment. We learn he has been an insufferable little shit even before his sister’s demise. He possesses an “antipathy for middle-aged females” thus; he will have nothing to do with Nanny.

There is an underlying sense of sexual abuse. He refuses to eat the special foods that Nanny prepares for him and he demands to have a bedroom at the back of the apartment where he can be more secluded. He is obsessively against the idea of Nanny coming into the bathroom while he takes his bath and makes her swear she will not in front of others. He will not allow her to touch him and leaves the room constantly whenever she enters. He rarely speaks to her directly and often berates her or accuses her of atrocious acts.

Dix is so good at making Joey a miserable, intolerable brat that the abuse he may have suffered or his innocence is almost of no consequence, you just want him destroyed. Anything to wipe that fucking pout off his face.

Therein lays the strength of the film; the continual second-guessing, and volleying of guilt and suspicion between the boy and the nanny. Each tries to outwit the other to gain the trust of the parents and Aunt Pen. We must decide whether Nanny is manipulating the boy for some horrid plot of retribution or Joey is, simply, a demon spawn.

The film cleverly borrows elements from other well-crafted thrillers. Reminiscences from Psycho, Les Diaboliques, Gaslight, The Innocents, Village of the Damned and The Bad Seed are noticeable. Interestingly, David Cronenberg would use some themes and visuals from The Nanny in his 2002 masterpiece Spider.  

Ultimately, The Nanny acts as an indictment of a system that has others performing the fundamental tasks of child rearing in lieu of the actual parents. This leaves people in service having to be ersatz mothers and fathers to children whose parents are either too wealthy, too lazy, too unconcerned, or all of the above to assure the mental and emotional well being of their own offspring.

It is a recipe for familial disorders and luckily for us, quality psychological thrillers.

Now, back to the debate, would the nanny named Fran have allowed all this unpleasantness to foster, or scolded Mr. Sheffield for his neglect? Discuss.