The Nanny

There is a scene early in The Nanny in which ten-year-old Joey Fane arranges a doll face-down in a full bathtub and then invites his Nanny in to have a look. She moans and rushes away. He watches her go. He appears to be taking notes.

Joey has just come home from two years in a school for disturbed children. He was sent there after his baby sister drowned in that same bathroom, and everyone agreed he did it. Joey says he didn’t. He also says the Nanny is trying to kill him, refuses to eat anything she has touched, and locks his bedroom door at night. In a well-bred London household, this registers chiefly as a lapse in manners.

The Nanny is Bette Davis, and she has no other name, because women in this job in these houses don’t get one. She is 57 here and playing a good deal older, gray hair pulled back tight, gray uniform, eyebrows like two caterpillars settling in for the winter. She moves through the flat with tea trays and a small patient smile. After Baby Jane and Sweet Charlotte, you brace for the moment she goes berserk with a serving fork. It never comes. She underplays, holds the English accent all the way through, and gets more menace out of folding a towel than most actresses manage with an axe.

The picture is from Hammer, which normally means fog, crypts, and a stake through somebody. Not this time. Seth Holt shoots a brown London flat, a fire escape, a cavernous bathroom, and the dead hours of an afternoon when nobody has anything to do but watch each other.

For twenty minutes it plays as a very good imitation of The Bad Seed. Young William Dix is remarkable as Joey, mostly because he refuses to be adorable, and his Joey is so relentlessly awful to everyone in reach that the film has trouble winning us back to him later. The cruelty is explained by the end. It still leaves a mark. I suspect that was the idea.

The adults are no help. The father is a Queen’s Messenger, permanently in an airport somewhere. The mother, played by Wendy Craig with a wobbling lower lip, cries at breakfast and is still being buttoned into her clothes by the same woman who buttoned her forty years ago. The only person in the building with any sense is Bobbie, the fourteen-year-old upstairs, who smokes on the landing and talks to Joey like a big sister with better information. Pamela Franklin plays her as half grown woman and half kid, which is the hardest thing in the movie and looks like the easiest.

The trouble is the title. Call the film “The Nanny,” give the part to Bette Davis, and the audience has it sorted before the popcorn is gone. “The Accident” would have been the honest choice, but you don’t get Davis with a title like that.

Once the mystery evaporates, Jimmy Sangster’s script settles into something quieter than his usual box of double-crosses: a study of a woman rearranging the truth daily so she can keep getting up in the morning.

It is well done. And yet, as I sat there watching it, the wind slowly went out of me. The story is really one hour of material, too long for a television slot with commercials and too short for a feature. Stretched to ninety minutes, it has to fill time with corridors and glances and Joey being awful.

Everyone involved was so thrilled to be making a prestige picture with a genuine star that they forgot to make an entertaining one. That may be harsh, but I confess I admired The Nanny more than I enjoyed it.