Though British studio Hammer was best known for its sanguinary vampire films and gothic horrors, in the early ’60s it started to include psychological dramas in its production slate. The guiding force behind the best this output was one man: producer and writer Jimmy Sangster. True, he made his fair share of Dracula and Frankenstein features but his best work were lean and arresting thrillers like Taste of Fear, The Snorkel and Paranoiac. Add to that list 1965’s superbly tense The Nanny, which weaves and twists and leaves the audience guessing all the way to the end credits.
We begin in a comfortable London apartment. Mother and father are at breakfast anticipating the return home of their son, who’s been away at school for two years. A cause for celebration you might think, but something is amiss. From their first scene we know this is a loveless marriage. The father’s heartless opening line is to tell his wife to “pull yourself together”. More engrossed in his morning paper than her he scarpers off to his club whenever household events prove too much. The mother is clearly a broken woman, so highly strung she breaks down into tears and hides in her bedroom at the prospect of her beloved son Joey returning home. The one crutch she does have is the nanny of the title. Nanny (for she is afforded no given name) has been with her family through the generations and brought up Virginia from birth, moving with her through courtship, marriage and motherhood, all the while enabling her infantalised state.
We glimpse where this familial anxiety comes from when the father arrives at his son’s school to bring him home. Here Joey is introduced rigging up a noose in his bedroom so as to terrify the matron with a faked suicide (anticipating Harold and Maude by half a dozen years). The headmaster just shakes his head and muses “he has an inborn antipathy to middle aged females” before lamenting that Joey has been the only child in his care he has been unable to help.
It turns out Joey has been, how shall we say? difficult since the death of his baby sister two years before. The drowning was an accident but in a series of flashbacks and expositions it becomes clear the young boy has been held somehow to blame for it. He alone feels very differently about the traumatic moment and this manifests as an increasingly hostile attitude towards Nanny in the car ride home. When they get back to the apartment and Joey settles in this descends into a spiteful cold war, the boy turning the house upside down with his antipathy.
From this point on the two antagonists slowly circle, sizing each other up like a couple of prizefighters as they wait for the inevitable clash and in doing so expose their contrasting fighting styles. Joey is the sullen, lumbering thug launching feints and shadow plays while Nanny plays the stoic long game – the rope-a-dope in boxing parlance – trying to kill the boy with kindness.
He is an unsympathetic character but the relentlessness with which young Joey presses his claims against Nanny and the stubborness of his actions slowly work their way into the viewers’ sympathy to the extent that we begin to question whether he may have a point after all. Can there be malevolence behind that kindly visage, what really happened to Joey’s baby sister and is that steak & kidney pie Nanny is so lovingly creating really poisoned?
In this the films shares a theme with a more famous, earlier Bette Davis vehicle, All About Eve which saw the star convinced, alone amongst the cast, that the young Ann Baxter hides mischief behind her puppy dog eyes. Here Bette may be the victim again or equally could be the aggressor. You’ll have to watch to find out which it is.
This review is part of the 2013 TCM Summer Under the Stars blogathon that lasts through the month of August, and specifically celebrating the Bette Davis day on August 14th.
TCM Summer Under the Stars Blogathon at @tcmSUTSblog
The Nanny – directed by Seth Holt (1965)
In Short
A young boy returns home after two years away to engage in a cold war with the nanny he alone holds responsible for his sister’s death.
Trailer here
