Showing posts with label Audrey Hepburn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Audrey Hepburn. Show all posts

Monday, July 25, 2016

BLOODLINE 1979

I think one of the main reasons Wait Until Dark was so upsetting to me as a kid was because the person at the receiving end of Alan Arkin’s homicidal abuse was Audrey Hepburn. MY Audrey Hepburn! The sweet, elegant, refined, ceaselessly classy, Audrey Hepburn! I didn’t even think of her as the character in the film. In fact, even today, were you to ask me the name of her character, I couldn’t say. All I could tell you is that Eliza Doolittle is blind; Sabrina doesn’t know she's in possession of a doll full of heroin, and a mean man in a leather jacket chases Holly Golightly around with a switchblade.
Wait Until Dark - 1967
Like many, I fell in love with Audrey Hepburn the first time I saw her on the screen. And it never bothered me one whit that I rarely, if ever, expected her to be anything but her own glorious self from film to film. Hepburn’s screen persona and personal identity were both so intrinsically interlinked in my mind; actress and image remained one and the same. I simply counted on her bringing the same charming, immensely likable personality to whatever role she played—like an insurance policy of goodwill. It got so that no matter what a film’s shortcomings, Hepburn’s reliably enchanting presence assured me of at least a couple of blissful hours spent in the glow of her one-of-a-kind, movie star incandescence.
Two for the Road - 1967
I grew up during the early days of movie-star overexposure (via talk shows, game shows, TV specials), so a significant part of Hepburn’s appeal was scarcity. Not only did she not make many films (contributing to my youthful perception that when she did deign to appear in a movie, it HAD to be special), but Hepburn took a lengthy hiatus from acting precisely at the time I discovered her. I was in the fourth grade when she starred in two of what would become my absolute top favorite Audrey Hepburn films: Two for the Road and Wait Until Dark (both 1967)—only to abruptly drop from sight to raise a family. I was in college when she returned to the screen for Robin and Marian (1976).

I was overjoyed at the prospect of Audrey Hepburn’s comeback (“I hate that word!” – Norma Desmond) but Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag. Hepburn was wonderful as ever, indeed, she’s really rather remarkable, and her scenes with Sean Connery are heartachingly good and never fail to move me to tears. But I always saw Hepburn as a true original and a “star”…someone worthy of the kind of even-handed role Katherine Hepburn shared with Peter O’Toole in The Lion in Winter. In the Richard Lester film, Hepburn’s Maid Marian struck me as being just a shade above a secondary role. Responsible for shouldering all the emotional weight, hers was a mature, glorified but nonetheless typical “supportive girlfriend” role in a male action/adventure film.
Robin & Marian  - 1976
Although it would be three more years before Hepburn would grace the screen again (during which time there was talk of her starring in Out of Africa in the role that eventually went to Meryl Streep), when her name was announced for the lead in the screen adaptation of Sidney Sheldon’s 1977 bestseller Bloodline, this time out I was genuinely (if injudiciously) stoked. At last, Hepburn was to star in a film more worthy of her stature and reputation: a glamorous, big-budget, international romantic suspense thriller!

And while saner minds might have considered Sidney Sheldon’s name attached to the project to be a red flag of no small significance, I allowed myself to be distracted by the possibilities posed by the film’s sizable, international cast of (mostly) genuine movie stars; Hepburn being reunited with director Terence Young (who guided Hepburn to her 5th Academy Award nomination with Wait Until Dark); and the opportunity for her to sport chic frocks by her favorite designer, Hubert de Givenchy (Robin & Marian’s 16thcentury nun’s habit didn’t cut it for me).
Bolstered by the popularity of the bestseller, the draw of Hepburn’s 2nd screen comeback (ahem,…return), and an inordinate amount of publicity centered around the age discrepancy between the novel’s heroine (23) and Hepburn herself (50 playing 35), Bloodline was set to be a major release from Paramount for the summer of ’79.

Alas, despite its tony pedigree, Bloodline proved to be rather anemic at the boxoffice. Audiences, as they say, stayed away in droves, a result perhaps of finding the film’s rather distasteful (and nonsensical) porno snuff film subplot to be as cruel a misuse and mistreatment of Audrey Hepburn as anything Alan Arkin had dished out.

For those not around in the late-70s (or who were, but not as immersed in smut as yours truly), Bloodline's distinctive, ribboned throated female with the overemphasized red lips, poster graphic (figuring significantly in the film's bafflingly superfluous porno subplot) referenced...inadvertently perhaps..a then-popular line of porn mags and videos known as Swedish Erotica. That company's trademark was to feature "models" with deeply scarlet lips, wearing only a smile and a colorful scarf tied around the neck. The lovely platinum blonde with the hard countenance above is Seka, one of the company's most popular performers.
I know this because one of my earliest jobs when I moved to LA was working at Adam & Eve's Adult Books (Nudist Magazines! Art Films!), located right next to where I lived at the time: The Villa Elaine Apartments on Vine Street. I sold a lot those Swedish Erotica porno loops. Film is film, yes? Vive le cinéma! (screencap is from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls)



SIDNEY SHELDON'S BLOODLINE
Audrey Hepburn as Elizabeth Roffe
Ben Gazzara as Rhys Williams
James Mason as Sir Alec Nichols
Romy Schneider as Helene Roffe-Martin
Omar Sharif as Ivo Palazzi
Irene Papas as Simonetta  Palazzi
Maurice Ronet as Charles Martin
Michelle Phillips as Vivian Nichols
Gert Frobe as Inspector Max Hornung

Beautiful Elizabeth Roffe (the cardinal rule for trash novels is that all heroines must be beautiful) is the doting only child born to disappointed-she-wasn’t-a-boy pharmaceutical magnate Sam Roffe. When Mr. Roffe dies suddenly under mysterious circumstances, inexperienced but quick-to-learn Elizabeth instantly inherits a global, multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical dynasty. A financially beleaguered company suffering a recent streak (read: suspicious) of bad luck.
Although pressured by her stock-holding relatives to sell the company and go public, headstrong Elizabeth (thanks to the help of her father’s faithful secretary and a monumentally boring flashback to her great grandfather’s humble beginnings in Krakow, Poland) decides, in spite of her inexperience, to run the business herself. A decision which doesn’t set well with her relatives, a virtual “It’s a Small World” sampling of sinister multinationality, each grappling with various degrees of financial hardship.
Putting the Bored in Boardroom
Even The Muppet Movie didn't have this many scenes set behind desks 

As though to make it easier for ‘merican audiences to follow along, the extended Roffe family conveniently plays to familiar national stereotypes: Italian Ivo (Sharif) is a philandering bumbler being blackmailed by his heavy-accented, hot-tempered, black-bra-wearing mistress (Claudia Mori). Paris-based Helene (Schneider) is patronizing and rude, while her browbeaten husband (Ronet) sinks money into a failing vineyard. British MP Alec (Mason), in a state of near financial ruin due to his much-younger wife’s gambling addiction, nevertheless maintains a stiff-upper-lip formality and cool head. And good ol' American Rhys Williams (Gazzara) is a direct, straight-shootin’ sorta guy who’s only flaw seems to be having a weakness for the ladies.

With so many family members standing to financially gain from the company’s dissolution, it’s only a matter of time before Elizabeth discovers that not only wasn’t her father’s death accidental, but her resistance to selling the company has placed her own life in danger. As factory mishaps multiply, close calls escalate, and some bald dude keeps strangling anonymous women while being filmed by a shadowy male figure, the questions mount. Who can be trusted? Are bloodlines thicker than mountain climbing rope, brake lines, or elevator cables? And just who is that Boris Badenov lookalike orchestrating those repugnant snuff films?
More importantly, how the hell did MY Audrey Hepburn get mixed up in this mess?

Apt Metaphor
Audrey Hepburn trapped in a runaway vehicle that's careening out of control

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Whether it be Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins, or Jackie Collins; I love a good, glossy trash movie. But Bloodline really puts my blind adoration to the test. It’s a film comprised of all the standard ingredients, but everything just feels a little off.
There’s the large cast of recognizable names. Excellent actors all, but just a wee bit past their prime. I don't like to think I'm an ageist, but a curious side effect of this cast all falling within the 49 – 60-year-old range is that it often appears as though everybody had a “must sit down” clause in their contracts. There’s a hell of a lot of sitting going on in this movie. It’s hard to get worked up over discovering the identity of the murderer when no one in the cast looks like they have the energy to get up out of their chairs and search.  
Beatrice Straight as loyal secretary Kate Erling

Then there’s the promise of exotic, far-off locations. Bloodline spent a sizable chunk of its $12-million-budget flying cast and crew to New York, London, Paris, Rome, Munich, Sardinia, and Copenhagen; so why does most of it look as though much of it was shot on a studio backlot? There’s a scene filmed in a European red-light district that has all the authenticity and grit of those fake-looking San Francisco backstreets Patty Duke stumbled around in Valley of the Dolls
Lastly, there’s the opportunity for a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the thrilling world of international corporations and industry. Arthur Hailey's Airport was overflowing with details about the airline industry; Harold Robbins’ The Betsy was set in the world of automotives; Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine was about the behind the scenes machinations of the TV industry; and Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline takes place in the cutthroat world of global pharmaceuticals. The sleeping pill jokes practically write themselves. The dull setting clearly posed a challenge to screenwriter Laird Koenig, for his idea of creating dramatic tension is to have characters declare “Let’s call a meeting!” with the frequency (and similar false-urgency purpose) of teens yelling “Surf’s up!” in a Beach Party movie. 
What little momentum Bloodline has, comes to a screeching halt as Gazzara takes Hepburn
on a 3-hour-tour of a Roffe pharmaceutical plant (or does it only feel that way?). The scene is
accompanied by composer Ennio Morricone's carbonated nod to disco and Giorgio Moroder, which had me
wishing I had a few Roffe aspirins at my disposal

I’ve not read enough Sidney Sheldon to know if this is average or substandard for his usual brand of schlock. I've only read Bloodline and The Other Side of Midnight, but of the two, Bloodline is the one that feels sorely lacking. Something about the familiar, soap-opera-and-glamour format of Bloodline makes me feel it would have been better served if adapted as a TV movie or miniseries starring a low-wattage personality like Jacklyn Smith or Pamela Sue Martin (for a time Cabaret and Barry Lyndon star Marisa Berenson was in line to play the Audrey Hepburn role). Potboilers like Bloodline always stand to benefit from the built-in lowered expectations of television. As it is, with Audrey Hepburn and so many esteemed actors attached to the project, the film not only acquires a gravitas it can’t possibly live up to (not with THAT source material), but it also takes on a kind of self-serious air that’s poison to escapist trash like this. 
Hepburn's Givenchy wardrobe was more exciting than the film

PERFORMANCES
Sad to say, but Bloodline is something of an embarrassment for everyone involved (except Omar Sharif, who gleefully sinks to the level of the material and in doing so, somehow salvages himself).
But my dear Audrey Hepburn is particularly ill-served. I’ve read that she was very unhappy during the filming (her marriage was falling apart), was feeling rusty and insecure about her talent, and even sought to bail on the movie once she learned of the nudity/porn/snuff-film angle (perhaps she was too busy counting the zeroes on her $1 million paycheck to have been bothered with reading the novel or script beforehand). All this goes a long way toward explaining why she really doesn’t seem to be present in this film.
I’m usually delighted watching Hepburn in anything, but it’s no fun watching someone who seems to be having so little.
On the personal side, one good thing to come out of Bloodline was an affair between Gazzara (recently divorced from Janice Rule) & Hepburn (still married to Andrea Dotti) which lasted through to their next film together, Peter Bogdanovich's They All Laughed (1981).
True to movie tradition, the couple's real-life sparks fail to show up on the screen in Bloodline, sealing the film's fate as a romantic suspense thriller with no romantic chemistry, minimal suspense, and negligible thrills. I've never really understood Ben Gazzara's appeal. As Audrey Hepburn co-stars go, he's as bland and colorless as Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in Wait Until Dark. Terence Young can sure pick 'em.

Hepburn was a legendarily lovely woman, but even her iconic beauty was no match for this unflattering, matronly "Church Lady" curly perm that appeared to be all the rage during the late '70s-early '80s. Here it is doing absolutely no favors for (clockwise ) Hepburn, Mary Tyler Moore (Ordinary People -1980), Maureen Stapleton (Interiors - 1978), Dustin Hoffman...who actually looks pretty good (Tootsie - 1982), Ali MacGraw (Just Tell Me What You Want  - 1980), and Marsha Mason (Chapter Two - 1979).
*Special thanks to the readers who jogged my memory


THE STUFF OF DREAMS NIGHTMARES
Spoiler Alert: Read no further. Crucial plot points are revealed for the purpose of discussion. 
The most consistent complaint leveled at Bloodline is that the very focus of its print and poster ads, the thing that earned it its R-rating, the single narrative thread to stand alone as the most distasteful element of the film----in the end makes absolutely no sense and has no bearing on the central plot or mystery. 
From the time of Bloodline’s release, the subplot involving a serial killer strangling prostitutes, filming their deaths, and then discarding their bodies in the river (each with a red ribbon around their neck), has been a bad taste deal-breaker. Whatever narrow chances Bloodline might have had as a sophisticated thriller or even a camp classic were forever jeopardized by the ugliness of these scenes. Scenes made all the more odious due to the fact that they appear to have nothing whatsoever to do with anything else happening in the film.
Family Feud
Elizabeth- "According to my father, one of them is deliberately trying to ruin the company."

Well, that’s not entirely true. Bloodline is a movie that has all the earmarks of having been hacked to pieces in the editing process. A fact evident in characters and relationships never being fleshed out or explained, storylines and plot points left dangling, and a general air of abrupt abbreviation. The theatrical release runs nearly two hours, but when it was broadcast on television, there was 40 minutes of unseen footage available to use. Forty minutes!
A serious casualty of all this cutting (I can only assume) is that it’s never made clear what the hell the serial killer angle has to do with someone out to sabotage Roffe Pharmaceuticals.

What’s missing from the film is expounded upon in the novel (albeit cursorily), so for those who have no wish to subject themselves to Sidney Sheldon in print for the sake of making sense of a nonsensical movie adaptation, here goes: (Remember folks, spoilers ahead). 
Now, Voyeur
The man behind these filmed murders is seen reflected in the dresser mirror

Sir Alec (Mason) is sexually impotent, and as a result, his vain, much-younger wife (Phillips) is blatantly (and serially) unfaithful to him. Her incessant gambling and wanton spending brings the mob down on their heads (with one thug threatening to nail her knees to the floor), prompting Alec to resort to sabotage and murder to secure money from his share of Roffe industries.
On a connected but still random note, said Sir Alec, unwilling to divorce his wife yet hating her for her infidelities, is only able to achieve sexual gratification when vicariously “punishing” women whom he makes up to look like her (the red ribbon bit. The first time they made love, she was wearing a red ribbon around her neck). So Sir Alec pays a maniac to act out his revenge fantasy on anonymous women while he watches from the sidelines and a cameraman films their strangulation deaths. Are you sick yet?  
What's obvious from even this brief explanation is that the whole serial killer subplot is still superfluous to the story at large, and could have been jettisoned without affecting the plot in any way.  It was retained for its exploitation value. Ironically, it was also likely the very thing that kept the film from attracting the older crowd who remembered Hepburn so fondly.

STUFF OF FANTASY
For all its flaws, Bloodline has a place in this cinema diary of mine because I was so absolutely caught up with the hype at the time. It was one of those films you get so worked up over seeing that when it proves to be a bit of a disappointment, you don't really admit it to yourself. I recall sitting through it twice on opening night, and then returning the following week. Was it because I liked it that much? Not really. Was I THAT excited to see Audrey Hepburn on the screen again? Well, of course!
One clunker in a career of gems doesn't stop her from being MY Audrey Hepburn.



BONUS MATERIAL
On April 13, 1979 Grauman's Chinese Theater added two ugly, boxy cineplexes to the original theater built in 1926. Bloodline was one of a package of Paramount releases premiering at the new theaters that summer. I saw Bloodline on opening night Friday, June 29th, which also happened to be the opening day of both the latest Bond film Moonraker and the Bill Murray summer camp comedy
Meatballs; two films targeted for a young audience. I watched Bloodline with an audience comprised mostly of older couples and a few folks turned away from sold-out Bond screenings.
Premiere features were: Hurricane, Old Boyfriends, and in the main theater, Superman 

Here's the trailer for Bloodline's 1986 television broadcast. Even in this 30-second clip are scenes not in the theatrical release. Accounting for supporting player Michelle Phillips being so prominently in the ads is the fact that she was appearing on the ABC TV series Hotel at the time.  HERE

Bloodline marked the 5th screen pairing of Romy Schneider and Maurice Ronet. Prior to Bloodline, they appeared in the mystery/thriller Qui? (1970)



Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 -2016

Thursday, November 19, 2015

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR 1961

*Spoiler alert. This essay gives away key plot points

Much in the manner in which Warner Bros. cartoon character Elmer Fudd is compelled to use words teeming with the very Ls and Rs he's unable to pronounce (his Owivia DeHaviwand being a particular favorite); Hollywood during the Production Code era (1934-1968) just couldn’t keep away from “adult”-themed projects it had no reasonable hope of adequately interpreting.

Dramatist and screenwriter Lillian Hellman had her first major theatrical success in 1934 with the banned-in-Boston stage hit The Children’s Hour: a shocking-for-its-time play in which the two headmistresses of a tony girls’ boarding school have their careers and lives ruined by the spread of the malicious rumor that the pair are in fact illicit lovers in a lesbian relationship. 

When William Wyler first adapted Hellman's play for the screen in 1936, the show's scandalous reputation was such that not only was a title change mandated (The Children’s Hour became These Three), but "the lie with the ounce of truth" was changed from the whisper of lesbianism to the more socially palatable rumor of heteronormative adultery. Instead of an accusation of being in love with each other, the two women were now accused of (yawn) being in love with the same man. And lest one think this a Hollywood cop-out of the highest order, know that it was Lillian Hellman herself who approved and adapted the screenplay of the 1936 version for the screen.

Hellman's almost word-for-word-faithful adaptation of her play for Wyler confirmed her oft-repeated claim that The Children’s Hour was not really about lesbianism so much as the pernicious power of a lie. "The bigger the lie, the better," Hellman affirmed. A point of view she would gain a great deal of first-hand experience with when, in 1952 she was blacklisted in Hollywood for refusing to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee; and later in 1979, charged with falsifying the details of her memoir, Pentimento. (Author Mary McCarthy [The Group] on Hellman: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'!")

Mademoiselle de Maupin by Theophile Gautier
A salacious seed is planted in the minds of the  girls when they read the scandalous 1834 French novel in which a woman disguises herself as a man and has affairs with both sexes

In 1960, in an effort to rectify the compromises he felt imposed upon him by MGM and the Hays Code in 1936, William Wyler returned to The Children's Hour vowing to make a more faithful version of the play. Taking advantage of the permissive atmosphere of the times, Wyler even went so far as to say he’d be willing to release his film without the MPAA seal of approval if need be. (Many newspapers at the time refused to carry ads for films lacking the Production Code seal. Similarly, many theaters wouldn’t exhibit non-approved films.)
Whether it was due to Wyler’s pronouncement that his remake was to be “A clean film with a highly moral story!”, or the casting of ladylike Audrey Hepburn as the fem half of the whispered-about duo (Wyler:“We don’t want bosoms in this!”), the studio heads ultimately relented and The Children’s Hour was green-lit for production. Provided, of course, that the word “lesbian” never be uttered, and that there be no demonstrative sexual contact of any sort. Yep, certainly sounds like those 1936 compromises were put to rest by 1961. 
Audrey Hepburn as Karen Wright
Shirley MacLaine as Martha Dobie
James Garner as Joe Cardin
Fay Bainter as Amelia Tilford
Miriam Hopkins as Lily Mortar
Coy as it seems today, The Children’s Hour was written at a time when it was illegal to even make mention of homosexuality in a Broadway play. The show’s ultimate success somehow surmounted public moral outrage, allowing for it to become one of the first Broadway plays to feature a LGBTQ character. Similar honors went to Wyler’s 1961 film adaptation, with Shirley MacLaine being one of the first major stars to play a gay character in a motion picture; albeit just barely. Change was obviously in the air in the early '60s, as several other gay-themed films arrived in theaters within months of The Children’s Hour’s release: Dirk Bogarde’s Victim, Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent, and Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey with Brit fave Murray Melvin making his film debut as a sympathetically portrayed gay teenager.  
The Hateful Eight...er, 12-year-old
Making her film debut, Karen Balkin as Mary Tilford

Karen Wright (Hepburn) and Martha Dobie (MacLaine) are two college chums now partnered in the ownership and operation of a girls’ boarding school. After years of struggle, the school, catering to the adolescent daughters of well-to-do families, appears at last to be up on its feet. So much so that Karen, engaged for the last two years to local doctor Joe Cardin (Garner), at last feels free to marry. A decision which doesn’t set well with Martha, who outwardly expresses her displeasure as simply the fear that marriage and motherhood will lead to Karen’s abandonment of the school.

The pair’s heated discussions and platonic entreaties of love and loyalty on the topic are overheard and misinterpreted by Mary Tilford (Bakin), a troublemaking student whose compulsive lying and disobedience has made her the frequent object of discipline. In spiteful retaliation for one such upbraiding, Mary tells her grandmother (Bainter) that Miss Wright and Miss Dobie are lovers, and that she has seen them kissing and engaging in all manner of nocturnal hanky panky.
Before long, the lie concocted merely to avoid the consequences of a rule infraction mushrooms into a scandal which closes the school and makes a shamble of the lives of three innocent people.
These Three
Given the director, it comes as no surprise that The Children’s Hour is a handsome, well-crafted, and finely-acted film of almost irresistible watchability (like All About Eve, The Children’s Hour is one of those movies impossible to channel surf past, no matter how far along into the story I catch it). I don't know if there is such a thing as a "William Wyler movie," as he has always struck me as one of those industry professionals devoid of an identifiable style, but he is noted for producing consistent quality work.
Auteur or not, I do know that William Wyler movies occupy a lot of space on my DVD shelves: Roman Holiday, The Heiress, The Little Foxes, Funny Girl, The Letter, and of course, The Children’s Hour; a film whose every frame supports his reputation for vivid storytelling and extracting superior performances from his cast. The Children's Hour was the no-win recipient of five Academy Award nominations (supporting actress, cinematography, costume, art direction, sound).
Children Will Listen

For all its technical distinction (the lighting, editing, and shot compositions are really something to be applauded) and the high-drama content of its plot (as stated, the film is compellingly watchable), it's still difficult for me not to feel as though The Children's Hour suffers a bit from Wyler's very obvious efforts to deliver a “clean” and “highly moral” film about a subject that is a great deal more than mere sensation. In his well-intentioned desire to grant the story the solemnity and respect, I'm sure he felt was its due; Wyler falls prey to adopting a tone of such unyielding good taste and decorum that it feels at times almost airless. The result is that The Children’s Hour vacillates between stagy soap opera and overheated melodrama precisely at moments calling for the raw intimacy of emotional honesty. 
It's during these moments when The Children’s Hour calls to mind for me the character Mary Tyler Moore played in Ordinary People - it becomes a film determined not to draw attention to itself by making a scene.
Veronica Cartwright as Rosalie Wells
One of the best criers in the business

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
It is incredible that educated people living in an urban American community today would react as violently and cruelly to a questionable innuendo as they are made to do in this film.”  - Bosley Crowther's New York Times review of The Children’s Hour March, 1962

Obviously, movie critic Bosley Crowther needed to get out more. In the face of homophobia and bigotry, incredulity like Crowther’s seems sophisticated and liberal in that it superficially gives people credit for being more civilized and intelligent than a film like this suggests. But in reality, to ignore and deny that gay lives are ruined every day in America by the very same rootless bigotry and baseless homophobia The Children’s Hour dramatizes, is head-in-the-sand blindness. A subtle and privileged means of refuting and denying the suffering that is the day-to-day reality for many LGBTQ individuals even today.

Indeed, one of the contributing factors to my not having even seen The Children’s Hour until recently is due to almost everything I’d read previously about the film corroborating Mr. Crowther’s position. I avoided The Children’s Hour because I assumed it was going to be another dated Hollywood exercise in homosexual self-loathing masked as liberal discourse.
When I finally did see the film, I was happily surprised that, regardless of how dated the surface trappings were, the message of the film felt timeless. Remove the old-fashioned acting, starchy language, and that '60s censorship straitjacket (Ă  la Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) necessitating characters verbally dance all around an issue without ever saying it plainly, and you’ve got a story that plays out in all corners of our country today. Set Hellman's story in the present, trade a girls' boarding school for a Boy Scout troop...would anything play any differently? America harbors such strange delusions about itself. I don't know how anyone could look at this film and say with a straight face "This could never happen today!" No, the themes Lillian Hellman sought to address (how truth and facts are often no match for willful ignorance) remain contemporary and unchanged.
Careless Whisper
In this, her last film, Fay Bainter garnered The Children's Hour's sole acting Oscar nomination, and deservedly so. She's a forceful and dynamic presence in every scene. In the role that won Bonita Granville an Oscar nomination in 1936's These Three,  Karen Balkin (who sometimes bears an unfortunate resemblance to Charles Laughton) gives an outsized performance that wouldn't be out of place in a comedy like The Trouble With Angels. Still,  I wouldn't say she's exactly ineffective in the role, as by the third act you're apt to find the character she plays loathsome in the extreme. She makes The Bad Seed's Rhoda Penmark look like Shirley Temple

If The Children’s Hour has a credibility problem at all, it lies not in its depiction of the swiftness with which the community condemns the women on baseless innuendo (these days, inciting the public to overreact to unsubstantiated hate-mongering has practically become an official GOP political platform); but in anybody not being able to see through little Mary’s broad-as-a-barn-door lying and bullying tactics. Barring this, I think The Children’s Hour presents one of the screen’s more accurate and cutting indictments of hysterical bigotry.
The ever-likable James Garner is solid as always,
but isn't called upon to do much more than stand around looking all hetero and stuff

PERFORMANCES
I have no idea how 1961 audiences responded to Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine appearing in this “daring” film, but these days when a straight actor takes on a gay role, the public practically awards them a medal of bravery. Everyone, gay and straight alike, carries on as though the actor had just crawled through the foxholes of war-torn Iwo Jima with an orphan on their back.
Nevertheless, back in 1961, it was no doubt a big deal for two such high-profile stars to appear in a film with a lesbian theme. But (not to diminish the risk-taking of either actress), Hepburn had just played a prostitute--or Hollywood’s idea of a prostitute--in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and was eager to shed her ingĂ©nue image, while MacLaine had a bohemian “kook” reputation (yes, even as far back as that) which lent itself to character roles (aka, women outside the mainstream). And politically speaking, it certainly didn’t hurt that both women were at the time married with children. One source I read speculated on the unlikely chance an unmarried actress would have taken on either role. 
Audrey Hepburn, who got her start and an Academy Award in Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953), is an enduring favorite of mine and her performance here, while not particularly showy, is one of the strongest of her early career. Clearly cast (at least in part) for her lack of an overtly sexual screen persona and for having an image that adhered to traditional notions of femininity; one can only imagine how provocative The Children's Hour would have been (something Wyler wasn't interested in, it seems) had she been cast in MacLaine’s role.
Miriam Hopkins, who actually did play the MacLaine role in These Three opposite Merle Oberon and Joel McCrea, is a hammy delight as Martha's affected, self-dramatizing aunt.

Playing an overly-theatrical B-level stage actress, Miriam Hopkins is seen here clutching the mementos of her career. In this instance a glamour portrait that is actually a publicity pic of Hopkins from the 1936 film, Becky Sharp.   

As someone once commented on this site in relation to an earlier post about the movie Hot Spell, Shirley MacLaine can come off a little shrill in scenes requiring displays of anxiety or excitability. But like many gifted comic actors, she can really deliver the dramatic goods when playing hostility and pique. In a film that codifies lesbianism as simply an absence of glamour, MacLaine is really very good (this is where the film in its own small way is rather progressive) and grants her sympathetic character a depth and humanity refreshingly devoid of caricature. She resorts to no gimmicks or tricks to signify Martha's latent homosexuality, playing the role honestly and without artifice. In recent interviews about The Children’s Hour, MacLaine likes to relate how Wyler got cold feet during the making of the film, resulting in several non-explicit scenes of Martha showing her affection for Karen (brushing Hepburn’s hair, ironing her clothes, and cooking) ending up on the cutting room floor.
I’m not altogether sure how the inclusion of those sequences would have helped a film whose big dramatic payoff is an 11th-hour “self-realization” scene (which for my money MacLaine pulls off very well in spite of it being a tad overwritten). Besides, such demonstrativeness to me would appear redundant given how well she already successfully conveys her deep love for Hepburn’s character through a dozen subtle looks and gestures.


THE STUFF OF DREAMS
The Children’s Hour has always been controversial for the part it played in kickstarting the tired movie trope of the doomed/suicidal homosexual: an overworked clichĂ© born of a warped morality, homophobic societal norms, and the Hollywood Production Code. 
For the most part, gay characters in films tended to be used for comic relief, easy sensationalism, or a glib, short-cut bid to signify sophistication or wanton liberalness. From the start, studios and censors gleaned that the death of a the gay character in the final reel not only satisfied the movie mandate requiring “sinners” pay for their transgressions, but presented, at fadeout, a symbolic “return to normalcy” for viewers, calculated to reassure and secure their faith in the enduring indomitability of heterosexuality and triumph of the status quo. 
Problematic as the ending of The Children’s Hour is for many (MacLaine’s character hangs herself), anecdotally I’ve always felt it presented a situation more complex for Martha than mere homophobic self-loathing. In the scene precipitating her suicide, Martha comes out to Karen at precisely the same moment she comes out to herself. She falls apart in a stream of consciousness monologue in which she tries to sort out her feelings about herself amidst paralyzing confusion and guilt over the role her lack of self-awareness may or may not have played in the destruction of so many lives. Including her own.

It's arguable and certainly up for debate whether Martha's self-disgust ("Oh I feel so damn sick and dirty I can't stand it anymore!") is wholly related to her discovery of her true sexual identity, and not, at least in part, also attributable to genuine guilt-based self-recrimination. 
Martha's vocal and frequent emotional outbursts--ill-temper with Joe, her impatience with her silly Aunt--all brought on by her repressed feelings for Karen, are what the children overhear. What arouses their suspicions. For me, it makes both psychological and emotional sense for Martha to be just as wracked with guilt over bringing harm to the woman she loves as she is plagued by internalized homophobia and self-loathing. 
It's not an either-or situation, it's a combination of complex, combatting emotions brought about by abrupt self-confrontation and self-realization. I think it trivializes the story and the character to reduce the cause of Martha's suicide to "Because she realized she's gay." 
So, while there's no denying Martha's suicide is an extreme response to her suffering from a particularly acute case of "gaynst" (gay-angst); it can also be perceived to be the final, selfless act of love her character intends it to be. This is to say that within the confines of the narrative (the last we see of Martha alive, she's not brooding intently upon herself, she's looking lovingly at Karen from a window) Martha's love is such that she commits an act of martyrdom by killing herself, thereby freeing Karen.

Of course, Martha might have achieved the very same thing by merely hopping on a train (which Martha actually does at the end of These Three), but as I said earlier, this is Hollywood, and it would be several more years before the movies would grant any gay character a happy ending.
..and if you found a pun in that sentence, shame on you!


BONUS MATERIAL
A production still of the libel suit courtroom sequence that was deleted from the final film. 

The theatrical trailer for William Wyler's These Three (1936)

In this clip from the 1996 LGBTQ documentary, The Celluloid Closet, Shirley MacLaine talks about making The Children's Hour.

The Children's Hour had its title changed in the UK

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015