Director Robert Mulligan’s 1972 psychological thriller, The Other, may have been set in 1935, but the film had special resonance for American adults who had just spent the last decade with mouths agape while witnessing the Summer of Love and far more shocking things when the season changed for the worse. All-American boys and girls paraded across TV screens as Manson minions and radical bombers and fear of the young and what they were capable of was in the air. Mulligan and writer Thomas Tryon, who adapted the screenplay from his best-selling novel, pressed those buttons with both bloody hands.

Tow-headed nine-year-old twins Nils and Holland (Chris and Martin Udvarkony) pass their days on an idyllic farm in New England, where they live with their extended family. But all is not as well as it initially seems. Dad is nowhere to be found, mom is seemingly a shut-in and Holland keeps pressing Nils to take their mischief into dangerous territory. Watching over them is grandmother Ada (Uta Hagen), a Russian immigrant who encourages Nils to use his imagination and indulges his fantasies. But these flights of fancy are no mere child’s play for the oddly intense Nils, as a growing body count on the farm proves.

In one scene, Nils attends a carnival and figures out how an illusionist does a trick. “Damned phony,” he says to himself in quiet fury, realizing that adults are capable of lies and artifice, a lesson similarly learned repeatedly by longhairs during the Vietnam Era. The movie assures you that such knowledge can be a dangerous thing in a young mind.•