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) of Dockery and Johnston. Dowling also picked out the performances of Lindsay and Sayer as worthy of note, while Whitelaw praised MacLiam, who was able "to personify pure evil with scarcely a line of dialogue". Segal, by contrast, felt MacLiam was badly cast, which resulted in "one of the story's primary dark forces [looking] more like a member of Elbow than the very essence of evil". James's novella "The Turn of the Screw" has been much analysed in academic literature, and, given that it has been frequently reinterpreted in the arts, discussion of many of the adaptations has found a