‘THE HOUSEKEEPER’: STORY IN SHAMBLES

During the very last seconds of a ruination of a film called “The Housekeeper” (Brentwood Cineplex and Beverly Center Cineplex) these words appear on the screen: “Dust, ashes, waste, want, ruin, despair, madness, death, cunning, folly, words, wigs, rags, sheepskin, plunder, precedent, jargon, gammon and spinach.”

Savor them. Novelist Ruth Rendell plucked the list from Dickens, to symbolize the ruination brought on by her central character in “A Judgement in Stone,” the excellent novel from which this awesomely bad film was made. And even projected on a screen and read aloud, these isolated words have more rhythm and more of a jangling sense of a mind going wrong than all the literal-minded and wrongheaded 96 minutes that precede them.

It’s a shame, because the splendid Rita Tushingham is at the center of “The Housekeeper” and she makes too few films. Directed by her husband Ousama Rawi, a cinematographer in his directing debut, in a screenplay adapted by Elaine Waisglass, Tushingham works hard to project the inner disintegration of Eunice who, at 40, cannot read or write.

Because she’s illiterate, Eunice is virtually unemployable; because she can’t work, her spiteful, nagging father uses her as a virtual servant. But because one day she smothers widowed Dad and gets away with it, all hell breaks loose--within Eunice and with the mechanics of the movie, particularly its casting.

Her twin secrets of illiteracy and murder still safe, Eunice emigrates from Britain to Canada. She’s hired as housekeeper to a comfortably off doctor, his second wife and their two teen-age children, a son and daughter from each parent’s previous marriage.

A few hallucinations notwithstanding, all goes relatively well until the retiring and justifiably private Eunice is befriended by Joan Smith, an over-the-hill prostitute who has found God. Envious, covetous and the maddest hatter there ever was, the high point of Joan’s life comes as she regales her congregation with detailed confessions from her scarlet past--roughly every other week.

Joan Smith is not a terribly good influence on the already unsteady Eunice, but the director’s approach to Smith’s character is the movie’s final undoing. She is played by Canadian actress Jackie Burroughs, Richard Farnsworth’s outspoken lady love in “The Grey Fox.” Burroughs pounces on the role with the savor of a jaguar let loose in a butcher shop, mugging, writhing, flinging herself into eye-rolling frenzy, pounding the door frame as she recites biblical imprecations.

What worked as narrative in the novel is absolutely ludicrous onscreen as, for different but equally crazy reasons, the two women go on a killing spree. There is very little left of an interesting premise--the isolation of illiteracy--and only a shambles of a book by a writer called “one of the best crime novelists writing in Britain today.” Although “The Housekeeper” emerges as collectible only for those logging acting overkill, it has a ringing message for other first-time directors: let a florid actress anywhere near a beaded curtain and you will live to regret it.

‘THE HOUSEKEEPER’

A Rawfilm Inc./Schulz Productions presentation of a Castle Hill release. Producer Harve Sherman. Executive producers David Pady, Ousama Rawi, Sherman. Director Rawi. Screenplay Elaine Waisglass based on the novel “A Judgement in Stone” by Ruth Rendell. Line producer Jim Cole. Editor Stan Cole. Camera David Herrington. With Rita Tushingham, Ross Petty, Shelley Peterson, Jonathan Crombie, Jessica Steen, Jackie Burroughs, Tom Kneebone, Donald Ewer, Aisha Tushingham.

MPAA-rated: R (persons under 17 must be accompanied by parent or adult guardian)

Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes.