Cinema: Bette Meets Boy

The Nanny is a small sedate British thriller, based on the assumption that one good squirm deserves another. Having mopped up in three earlier blood-letters, moviedom’s Ace Bogeywoman Bette Davis now goes about her grisliness with quiet, unruffled efficiency. The Nanny is her definitive essay on the servant problem, and may be taken as an antidote by those who found Mary Poppins too sweet to stomach.

For this outing, Bette reports in a severe uniform, her brows beetled, her mouth a crumpled rose. Her celebrated ocular choreography is directed mostly toward Joey (craftily played by Movie Newcomer William Dix), an incorrigible ten-year-old who has been sent away for therapy after drowning his little sister in the bath. Though Joey claims he didn’t do it, he is the kind of brat whose idea of fun is to practice tying hangman’s knots. The lad returns home, alas, with one of his psychoses analyzed as “an inborn antipathy toward middle-aged females.” Soon poor beleaguered Nanny has her hands full with the boy’s bad manners and withering accusations—and worse. A doll lying face down in the bath water jolts certain members of the household into some creepy flashbacks. Then one day Joey’s mother (Wendy Craig) is felled by poison. While she is hospitalized, his shapely aunt (Jill Bennett) moves in, only to succumb rather swiftly to heart failure.

Director Seth Holt predictably but expertly flicks the finger of suspicion from boy to nursemaid and back again, and his choice cast can make even the sillier dialogue sound plausible. Still, Nanny’s terrors remain doggedly low key, partly because every audience knows too well that an old spook of Bette’s stature seldom leaves her dirty work to anyone else.