Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

The Chalk Garden

(USA, UK, 1964)

This one strikes me as a lot of angst over not much. Deborah Kerr finds work as a governess at a country mansion. Hayley Mills is the disturbed and thoroughly unlikable (to me, anyway) teenage brat who is setting fire to things. Kerr has a dark secret, which seemed pretty plain to me from the very beginning. Hayley’s father, John Mills, plays the butler, and the great Dame Edith Evans is the dowager grandmother who has alienated Hayley from her mother. I found it all fairly tedious, but the play by Enid Bagnold is a perennial favorite.