Benjamin Britten the apex of his reputation: it was almost universally hailed as a masterpiece." Shostakovich told Rostropovich that he believed it to be "the greatest work of the twentieth century". In 1967 the BBC commissioned Britten to write an opera specially for television. "Owen Wingrave" was based, like "The Turn of the Screw", on a ghost story by Henry James. By the 1960s Britten found composition much slower than in his prolific youth; he told the 28-year-old composer Nicholas Maw, "Get as much done now as you can, because it gets much, much more difficult as you grow older." He did
The Turn of the Screw (2009 film) are explored. Gerard Gilbert, writing both for "The Independent" and The Arts Desk, felt that Ann's relationship to the Master was "unnecessarily sexed up", and that this element added nothing to the story, and, in fact, detracted from it. In his review of the American DVD release for the "Deseret Morning News", Chris Hicks said that he could not see why the changes had been made, and that the literalisation of the sex and violence detracted from the film. Whittaker suggested that "The Turn of the Screw" was "oddly sexually explicit", and that the changes were unnecessary for the plot.