"I don't believe in being fashionable. Try to be and you're usually out of date before you start." ~ Jack Clayton 

Jack Clayton directed less than 10 feature films but amongst them are some of the brightest gems in British cinema, and one of the most sparking and underappreciated is the remarkable entry from 1967, Our Mother’s House. Clayton commissioned Jeremy Brooks to adapt the novel by Julian Cloag and cast Dirk Bogarde as the nominal star but the film belongs entirely to an amazing group of children led by Margaret Brooks (daughter of Jeremy) and Pamela Franklin, who’d made her debut in Clayton’s immortal 1961 feature The Innocents. The film landed at the end of The Summer of Love and the false dawn of Flower Power and flopped with a disinterested public, but the loss was theirs as the film is a stunning and considered masterwork that will live on in the annals of cinema long after the Flower Power buds have wilted to rot. 

In a large, middle-class house in a leafy London suburb a woman lies on her deathbed as a succession of small children tend to her. Mother passes away and her seven children, led by the eldest Elsa (Margaret Brooks) and Diana (Pamela Franklin), decide to bury her in the backyard and keep her death a secret to the outside world. They continue to go to school and dismiss the suspicious housekeeper Mrs. Quayle (Yootha Joyce) and fend for themselves by collecting their mother’s monthly trust fund cheque. The charade holds even as their putative father - the erstwhile Charlie Hook (Dirk Bogarde) - arrives and re-introduces himself to his estranged children. At first Charlie is a breath of fresh air, engaging and caring, but soon he’s showing his true colours and is helping himself to his dead wife’s savings, the deed to the house and to the reemergent Mrs. Qualye.  

Clayton was coming off the critically acclaimed The Pumpkin Eater, which featured one of the finest performances by an actress in all of cinema from Anne Bancroft. That sombre and challenging film was not a huge success commercially, and Our Mother’s House fared no better, coming as it did at the end of the Summer of Love and the sudden blossoming of Flower Power. Clayton could not have been further away from the youthquake of the counterculture in presenting a dark drama about mostly preteen children making sense of a massive loss and negotiating their way in a world they know little of.  

Dirk Bogarde was cast against type to play the roguish loser Charlie Hook and handles the role superbly with his working-class accent and pudding bowl haircut. Bogarde had made the transition from matinee star to serious actor and had left behind his association with the broad ‘Doctor’ series of comedies to become a fixture in dramatic films having won two BAFTA Best Actors for Losey’s The Servant and Schlesinger’s Darling in recent years – his Charlie Hook would see him nominated for the gong again in a role that carried some of the lightness of his comedic touch and some devastating dramatic turns. Clayton originally wanted Richard Burton, but it’s possible his persona would have overwhelmed the role whereas Bogarde hits just the right tone and displays a versatility that he didn’t always get to show. Bogarde regarded the film as one of the happiest experiences of his career and wrote in his biography nearly a decade later that - “On my first morning in the gloomy house in Croydon I was in a bit of a funk. Eight pairs of eyes, ranging from five to fourteen, gazed at me solemnly. Not a smile, no welcoming grin even. In the little caravan in the scrubby front garden which I had been given to change in there was a jam jar stuffed with privet and some wilting Michaelmas daisies. Under it was a note: 'Let's hope you're as good as you're cracked up to be. You'd better be. Sincerely, The Children.'”  

The film works on several levels, but it all is on the back of a remarkable ensemble performance from the children. Clayton had notably directed children in his previous films – Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin in The Innocents and Anne Bancroft’s brood of six children from three marriages in The Pumpkin Eater, where the children are mostly part of the furniture. Here, they are the heart and soul of the film and all are wonderful in providing not a false note in the entire running time, with standouts being Margaret Brooks as the determined Elsa, Mark Lester as the angelic Jiminee and Pamela Franklin as the confused and troubled Diana. Sarah Nicholls, who was in The Pumpkin Eater, does beautifully well as Gerty and went on to a successful acting career, as did Mark Lester (Oliver), where most of the others did not.  

The multitudinous busy scenes involving all the children are deftly handled by Clayton in conjunction with his cinematographer (Larry Pizer) and editor (Tom Priestley) represent a dazzling magic trick of verisimilitude and flow. Never once is there a jarring cut or out of context expression or false emotion to take the viewer out of the experience in a masterpiece of understated technical virtuosity. Clayton still manages to get some poetic or oblique angles and allusions into the frame (the red devilish dress on Charlie’s bed when he brings home a cheap tart) as he maintains the clarity of the narrative and the interconnected relationships between the characters.  

Themes of the supernatural, a trope that Clayton handled superbly in The Innocents, reappears here under the context of Mother’s fundamentalist Christian beliefs. Mother refuses to see a doctor and dies a horrible death in front of her children, so there is real tension when Gerty gets sick and the older children follows their mother’s blind dictum and don’t call for a doctor. Clayton includes scenes where Diana appears to fall into a trance and ‘talks’ to Mother for advice in handling family matters. The story brushes against Lord of the Flies territory when the older children start to use cruelty to keep the younger ones in line, and Gerty’s hair is the signifier of the extent that the insecure-but-in-charge children are ill-suited to cope with the real world when their mother trained them for a fantasy one. 

The real world comes crashing into their hitherto hermetic one in the shape of Champagne Charlie, but after he’s seen the main chance, the tone shifts and Diana for one becomes suspicious. Charlie is revealed for the cheap criminal he is and gives the children chapter and verse on their not so saintly mother. Suffice to say, it doesn’t end well for Charlie. The wrench is enough to set the children on a path of reconnection with the outside world, and the sudden reversal of fortune is deftly handled by Clayton and his marvelous ensemble. Bogarde nails the transition from cheerful and trustworthy to sleazy and creepy superbly and mention must be made of the remarkable Yootha Joyce who manages so much with little screen time, she simply transfixes the viewer whenever she’s on screen and completely holds her own with the on song Bogarde. 

Our Mother’s House is an overlooked masterpiece, once seen, never forgotten. If Jack Clayton had only made this and The Pumpkin Eater he’d be lauded to the heavens as a British Jean Vigo. The film may have not spoken to the zeitgeist in 1967 - like that other British masterpiece from the same year, Bryan Forbes’ The Whisperers – another stunning film set in an old house, this time with an old woman who is near the end of her life, but both films will engage and beguile audiences lucky enough to find them 100 years from now. By all accounts Jack Clayton was a difficult man, caught in the eternal and uneasy struggle between art and commerce, but he left several astonishing films, no small feat.