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The Turn of the Screw vs. The Innocents vs. Ambiguity How successfully does, The Innocents, the black-and-white film version of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, render the ambiguity of James' original text? Ambiguity, the art of deliberately creating something that can have more than one meaning, lends itself to the written word in James’s The Turn of the Screw. A written story can involve ambiguity in the characters, plot, narrative - every factor in the story can have to it a sense of uncertainty. However, uncertainty concerning ambiguity is subtly different from uncertainty involving vagueness sometimes a writer can make a reader feel uncertain of an interpretation the reader bases on his own imagination. Whereas vagueness that comes from a writer’s lack of detail in his work is probably due to lack of talent or attention. With The Turn of the Screw, Henry James crafted a complex and highly ambiguous book - there is nothing vague here; when Jack Clayton decided to make the novel into a film, it seemed as though he had a tough task ahead of him. Adapting a book for a film is always difficult - the written word has the ability to be far more subtle than the projected frame - but capturing the ambiguity of The Turn