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The Nanny



cast :

Bette Davis, William Dix, James Villers

crew :

Directed by: Seth Holt
Written by: Jimmy Sangster
Produced by: Jimmy Sangster
DOP: Harry Waxman
Editor: Tom Simpson
Music Score by: Richard Rodney Bennett

release date :

1965

Released in 1965, ‘The Nanny’ is a psychological horror thriller starring Bette Davis as the eponymous character. The story of the film centres around her service to the Fane family as their son Joey (William Dix) is welcomed back to the family home after a two year stay at a home for mentally disturbed children. Young Joey was sent away after an accident where his sister drowned in the bath, the circumstances about this are unclear at the start of the film and at first, we are led to believe that Joey had some part in his sister's demise. It is only as we watch the characters explanations that we find out what actually occurred that day.


Joey had been failed by the doctors at the institution and he harbours an unreasonably strong hatred for middle-aged women, in particular, his nanny, whom he believes was behind Susie's (Angharad Aubrey) death.


Upon leaving the institution, Joey plays a cruel prank on his nurse Mrs Briggs, pretending that he had hung himself with a rope from the ceiling. Mrs Briggs leaves his dormitory hysterically crying and when asked about what he was doing, Joey treats it as a joke. He tells his father he did it because he hates Mrs Griggs (Nora Gordon), and when asked why he hates her he explains it is because she is just like Nanny. Our first impressions of Joey are that he is sick-minded and seriously disturbed and one of his carers refers to him as a "monster". His behaviour is extremely rude and although he greets his father pleasantly, he treats Nanny like a non-entity, directing insults at her and refusing to sit next to her in the car. Nanny does not retaliate and instead persuades Bill (James Villiers) not to punish Joey for his rudeness. Whether she is just trying to keep the peace or try and gain favour with Joey is hard to tell.


When he arrives back at the family home, Joey refuses to let Nanny unpack his suitcase, eat any food that she has cooked for him and will not sleep in a room that she has decorated. This avoidance of anything Nanny can do for him is severe, especially when he tells his mother that Nanny cannot enter the bathroom whilst he is taking a bath under any circumstance as the locks have been taken off the doors, perhaps to prevent another tragedy. On his first evening home, Joey makes several attempts at showing his parents that he is perfectly capable and does not need Nanny anymore by making his own bed, bathing alone, and telling his mother that he will cook for her. After two years away, Joey had hoped that Nanny would be gone by the time he was released from the home as with no children to care for, she would have been made redundant. However, Nanny is proven not that easy to get rid of. His parents rely heavily on her as she has been part of the family for many years, not only in service to Joey and Susie, but also to his mother and her sister.


From the outset, Nanny is portrayed as a sweet-natured old woman who is the backbone of the Fane household. In the opening sequence, she is walking serenely through a park full of children, she feeds the ducks, she buys flowers and is carrying a box which contains a cake for Joey's homecoming meal. Nanny is sickly sweet, polite, and patient until the point of looking incredibly restrained. She is the cook, cleaner and carer for Joey's mentally child-like mother, Virginia (Wendy Craig). We see that Virginia is as petulant as her son (who at least can justify his brattish nature), refusing to go to the institution to collect Joey with her husband as she fears that Joey will no longer know her. She instead pleads with Nanny to go in her place, which could signify that it is Nanny who is in fact the matriarch of the family. After all, it is Nanny, along with Joey's father, Bill who are the main enforcers of discipline in the household although Joey will not listen to anything Nanny tells him. His aunt Penelope (Jill Bennett) comes to visit the family and although she is of a stronger disposition than his mother, Joey finds it hard to convince her that Nanny is not to be trusted to look after him. We learn that Penelope has a weak heart, caused by a traumatic fever as a child and Joey suggests to his mother that Penelope takes Nanny to look after her, but his mother tells him that Nanny vowed to stay with her after the accident as she could not cope without her. Virginia has grown completely dependent on Nanny, she acts like a little girl in her presence, even asking for her hair to be brushed before she goes to bed.


As a Queens Messenger, Joey's father, Bill appears to have no time for his family. When confronted in arguments with his wife in which he conducts himself in the manner of chastising a child, or when dealing with Joey's tantrums, Bill decides to escape to his 'club' when he can no longer control a situation. For most of the film's duration he is on a sudden business trip to Beirut. Nanny comforts his wife with soothing words, attempts to help Joey settle in at home (although he does not want anything from her) and even Bill relies on her to pack his suitcase for Beirut. Once Bill has left, Nanny is left in control of the family. Joey cannot rely on his mother to fight his corner as she is too weak-minded and will not believe a bad word said against Nanny. He manages to convince his teenage neighbour Bobbie (Pamela Franklin) that Nanny is not the Mary Poppins figure that she thinks she is.


Joey's situation could be that of a negative Oedipal complex, wherein rather than wish his father dead to gain his mother’s love, he instead directs his feelings at the matriarch, in this case Nanny, even extending it to all middle-aged women. The fact that Nanny had a large hand in his sister’s death is his main motivation to see her eliminated so that he can assume the role of primary carer rather than any kind of sexual motivation is different to the symptoms that we would see in a classic case of an Oedipal complex as his priority is only to look after his child-like mother. However, Joey seems to have an attraction to the Lolita-esque Bobbie who seems older than her years, smoking cigarettes and talking of entertaining male guests.


The inter-generational conflict between Joey and Nanny does seem to still allude to vague Oedipal overtones due to Joey's desire to eliminate Nanny from his life once and for all and show his mother that he can look after her just as well. Another Freudian theory that is alluded to is that whatever is repressed always comes back to the surface of the mind. Nanny represses her memories of the accident, having blamed Joey for what happened and living in a fake memory where Susie is alive in the bath. Her real memories are triggered again at once when Joey leaves the doll in the bath. They float up into her psyche after two years of being locked away in her unconscious and in order to make sure that she does not slip up and get found out, she decides to stop giving Joey second chances before he manages to convince somebody about the truth and tries to kill him the same way that his sister died.


Upon saving him from drowning at the last minute, Nanny proves to herself that she is not a killer and may in fact be repeating the situation to try and do what she wishes could have happened with Susie. Part of her still wishes that she had known Susie was drowning in the bath and by knowing that none of this tragedy would have occurred. However, this does not excuse her daughter's death and the feelings of blame and guilt that she was not able to stop her daughter from having an abortion that cost her, her life. By looking after the Fane family, she felt like she was getting a second chance, but death seemed to follow her actions as a consequence of this repression. No sooner had she gotten home from her daughter's deathbed and moved on, tragedy struck again in the drowning of little Susie. Nanny could try and repress one death and treat it as a bad dream but as soon as this happened, another would surface and perhaps the reason she made her confession in front of Penelope's dead body is because a new death had caused this deeper memory of her daughter's death to resurface again, seeing Penelope's corpse in bed mirrored the circumstances concerning her daughter. Rather than seeing a calculated killer, we were just seeing an incredibly unlucky woman who was in a mess that not even she could clean up.


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Country: UK
Budget: £6,500,000
Length: 91mins


Pub/2008


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Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without A Face), 1960, directed by Georges Franju
Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, 1971, directed by Seth Holt, Michael Carreras
The Fly, 1986, directed by David Cronenberg