The Nanny

This is one of those 1960's black & white British horror films that pack a wallop. I saw it on Tv as a young kid and it creeped me out and Bette Davis' performance haunted me. I saw it again not too long ago and was suprised how well it stood up. A nice simple story told with powerful flashbacks, Bette Davis gives a terrific, controlled performance as the perfect nanny to a dysfunctional family -a non-caring hard working father, a neurotic mother, a troubled boy and a darling little girl, cute as can be. But the family has a tragedy and what really happened? Well acted, well shot, a good late at night treasure.

Bette Davis gives her most chilling performance in this film. Her restraint is remarkable, following Baby Jane as this film did. If you ever want to see what passive aggressive looks like, watch this movie. I've seen it twice, and would want to see it again.

Bette Davis (in thick eyebrows and speaking very precisely and condescendingly) plays a prim English governess who may or may not be responsible for the drowning death of a child left in her care. Oddly muffled, but absorbing, creepy and generally well-acted suspense-melodrama from Britain's Hammer Films. Crack screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, adapting Evelyn Piper's novel, includes a terrific role for precocious William Dix as the nanny's young nemesis, but the tools are not quite present in Piper's original material for Davis to let loose and make a grand show of it (she's "in character" throughout: tense, fake-polite and rather glum). Audiences in 1965 were probably hoping for a macabre camp-thriller, another entry in the "Baby Jane" subgenre of older actresses cast in psychological creep-outs, but the shocks are rather subdued. This restrained approach, however, works to the picture's advantage, as the scenario plays more effectively as a dark character portrait rather than as a screamer. Davis is backed by a solid supporting cast, including Pamela Franklin as an amusingly typical teenage girl who lives in the apartment upstairs, and many film-historians have now hailed the picture as one of the best Hammer productions from this era. *** from ****

You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out who the nut job is in "The Nanny". This is Bette Davis in post "Baby Jane/Sweet Charlotte" mode. She's nanny to disturbed little Joey, (an excellent William Dix), who may or may not have drowned his little sister in the bathtub. Joey is a sulky little sod given to rather extreme practical jokes, (little pretending to hang himself), but one look at Mary Poppins Davis and you might be inclined to run a mile. That fine and underrated director Seth Holt directed his excellent psychological chiller well adapted by producer Jimmy Sangster from Evelyn Piper's novel. Davis is superb but so too are Wendy Craig and Jill Bennett as Dix's mother and aunt. It has now built up something of a cult reputation.

This 1965 thriller starring Bette Davis as the Nanny is pretty much a perfect thriller. This follows her great performance in another classic "Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte". Much different in theme than that movie or "Baby Jane", "The Nanny" is non-stop suspense and tension right from the beginning until the twisty ending. With a superb story, excellent direction, and great performances, including William Dix as Joey, a 10 year old terror of a kid, who was suspected in the death of his little sister and put in an institution for a couple of years, and now has been returned home. His neurotic Mother is not too well herself, and the overbearing Father make this family a little dysfunctional, making the Nanny to be the most sane of them all. But is Joey's action and constant nagging at the Nanny and everybody else, actually the only truth going on, or is he just a truly bad seed? By the end of the movie, that is all too clear. Excellent movie in all departments, and for Bette Davis fans especially, this is a must-have. Seeing this way back when, it was also a pretty scary movie.