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 (à 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 ingénue 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 cliché 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

HOT SPELL 1958

What would Hollywood do without the South as the all-purpose, go-to metaphor for all things hot, steamy, and neurotic during the sexually and emotionally repressed America of the 1950s?Hollywood, pandering to post-war propaganda intended to reassure the nation of a return to prosperity and stability, consistently promoted the image of the Midwest and middle-class suburbs as exemplars of familial “normalcy.” To this end, metropolitan cities were represented as cold and impersonal sin-bins, rife with crime and corruption; while the South – where mossy oak trees and people’s accents drooped in languid surrender to the oppressive heat – was a veritable pressure cooker of stifled passions. No wonder the Southern Gothic (a film genre dear to my heart) came to embody the existential frustration, spiritual discontent, and sexual dissatisfaction of an entire nation.

Between 1958 and 1959, Hollywood released no fewer than six southern-fried movie melodramas: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Long Hot Summer, God’s Little Acre, Suddenly Last Summer, The Sound and the Fury, and the focus of this essay, author Lonnie Coleman’s (Beulah Land) little-known but no-less overheated domestic drama, Hot Spell. 

Hot Spell is based on Coleman’s unproduced 1951 play Next of Kin (which was subsequently turned into a novel when the film was released). It's directed by Daniel Mann (Come Back, Little Sheba) from a screenplay by James Poe (Summer & Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). Considering its cast and pedigree, I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard of this film, let alone seen it, until relatively recently. 

Hot Spell’s theatrical roots are manifest in the size of its cast (it’s basically a four-character story), the talkiness of its script, and the simplicity of its plot. In the sweltering heat of the eternal summer that is the mainstay of all good Southern Gothics (where a glass of sweet tea is never far from reach), long-suppressed tensions threaten to rupture the gossamer-thin fabric of delusion holding a small New Orleans family together. As frustrations rise to the surface, carefully constructed illusions begin to crack and blister like paint in the scorching sun.

Shirley Booth as Alma Duval

Anthony Quinn as John Henry "Jack" Duval

Shirley MacLaine as Virginia Duval

Earl Holliman as John Henry "Buddy" Duval, Jr.

Clint Kimbrough as Billy Duval

When the film opens, matronly housewife Alma Duval (Booth) is all aflutter over the 45^th birthday party she’s planning for husband Jack (Quinn); a seductively "wild" Cajun whose restless nature she's found – after 25 years of marriage – impossible to fully domesticate. As we observe her nervous attempts to orchestrate (manipulate?) every conceivable variable to assure a favorable outcome for her efforts, Alma’s fervent preparations betray an air of desperation more than celebration.

Armed with the birthday presents she herself purchased for her adult children to give to their father, Alma visits each at their workplace, dispensing behavioral directives and cheery dialogue prompts with every pre-wrapped gift. Perhaps too metaphorically (not for a fan of heavy-handed '50s Freudianism like myself), each child embodies contrasting, narratively-pertinent character traits, and have jobs reflective of their personalities.

Eldest son Buddy (Holliman), all self-seriousness and ambition, works at the family employment agency. Recently out of the army, Buddy is headstrong and restless to make a way for himself in the world. Daddy’s-girl and middle-child Virginia (MacLaine), works at the local 5¢ &10¢ and spends her time lost in fanciful daydreams about her new summer suitor, a pragmatic pre-med student (Warren Stevens). Surrounded all day by valentines, flowers, and perfumes, Virginia is a dreamy romantic. Youngest son, Billy (Kimbrough), is a bookish, sensitive type (coded: gay) who works in a library, and too-keenly feels the tension behind all that remains unspoken in the Duval household. His survival tactic is to escape; first into books, then by going so far as to enlist in the Air Force.

Alma, who refuses to see her offspring as anything but children, charges into these workplace sanctuaries, as heedless of their discomfort as their in-vain efforts to dissuade her from making a big deal out of an event they all know their vain father hardly looks upon as cause for celebration (no one, least of all Jack himself, even remembers the birthday).  It’s Alma’s wish (passive-aggressive insistence, actually) that everyone live the same lie she clings to: to ignore the open-secret of Jack’s mid-life crisis affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter, and just carry on as  if they are still (if indeed they ever were) one big, happy family.

An absorbing drama that benefits significantly from the top-notch performances of its cast, Hot Spell, with its over-familiar central conflict, falls prey to a fate similar to that which befell The Stripper (1963), the screen adaptation of William Inge’s A Loss of Roses; which is to say Hot Spell, in lacking a certain psychological profundity and depth of characterization, feels more like a Playhouse 90 television production than a feature film. But in spite of much of it feeling as though it were culled from earlier, similar sources (most in the Shirley Booth oeuvre) Hot Spell does provide a fairly moving examination of the what the inexorable passing of time portends to a family fighting hard to evade the inevitabilities of growing up, growing older, and growing apart.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The fact that I come from a large Catholic family that never spoke about our emotions (until the 70s when my mother went through EST, after which we spoke of little else) is perhaps the main reasons I love movies like Hot Spell. Call it fantasy projection, but domestic dramas wherein suppressed hostilities and resentments erupt into biliously confrontational exchanges that ultimately prove to be liberatingly cathartic are a favorite of mine. Double if it takes place in the South of the '50s and '60s.

While no one in Hot Spell adopts a Southern accent, and it doesn’t take place in Kansas, the film nevertheless has the stamp of Tennessee Williams and William Inge all over it. 

The Two Shirleys
MacLaine and Booth appeared in The Matchmaker this same year

As is the custom of the genre, Hot Spell is centered around a social event. An event or occasion necessitating the close-knit interaction of characters (usually under circumstances forcing a display of false emotion or sentiment). Hot Spell’s pivotal birthday party, the catalyst for the film’s domestic upheaval, is largely ironic in function, being that a celebration of growing older is particularly ill-suited for Jack and Alma Duval; a couple deeply invested in living in the past.

In a deluded effort to reclaim his lost, wild youth, Jack imbues a thoroughly common extramarital physical attraction with all the romantic gravitas of true love reborn. Alma, no less delusional, lives in an aspic world frozen in time. Feeling acutely the impending loss of her family, Alma pins all her hopes on a longed-for return to the town of New Paris – a state of mind as much as geographical location – idealized in her memory as the place where everyone was happiest.

Come Back, Little New Paris

Caught in the middle: the children (their main offense being their failure to remain so), nurtured as infants to fill a void, weaned in adulthood to be the guardians of their parent’s illusions. There’s more than enough culpability, regret, and incriminations to go around as the Duvals of New Orleans endeavor to weather their personal hot spell of discontent.

Running at a brisk 86 minutes, Hot Spell may be Southern Gothic-lite, but it’s like a Greatest Hits collection of all I hold near about that obsolete film genre.  

Running Wild
Anthony Quinn was already a two-time Oscar winner when he appeared in Hot Spell.
Here with actress Valerie Allen as Ruby, Quinn's restless character longs for a new life in
Florida, "Land of Eternal Youth"

PERFORMANCES

For those keeping score, this was Booth’s second onscreen swipe at playing a dowdy, once-beautiful housewife delusionally fixated on the past. Perhaps it was an intentional move on Booth’s part to revisit a character almost identical to the one she played in 1952s Come Back, Little Sheba (and won an Oscar for), but the effect created is déjà vu to distraction.

Shirley Booth is a remarkable actress and her performance here ranks among her best. She IS the entire film, as far as I’m concerned, and the nuances of vulnerability she brings to the role (along with a hint of the subtle manipulative strength unique to the very weak) is a tour de force. She single-handedly keeps the film from sinking into a mire of clichés. But I’d be lying if I said that much of it feels like I’d seen it all before. It’s like later career Maggie Smith; she’ always excellent, but she’s always the same. 

Oscar-winner Eileen Heckart (The Bad Seed) steals every scene as Alma's best friend, Fan. The hilarious sequence where she gives Alma lessons in being a Modern Woman is a worth-the-price-of-admission classic.

Fan: "Well what's he gonna say the first time you fish out a cigarette and light up?"
Alma; "He's gonna say, 'Alma, have you gone crazy?'"
Fan: "Yeah, well when he does you just take a drag on the cigarette, blow the smoke in his face and say, 'What's it to ya, lover?'"

1958 was a banner year for Shirley MacLaine, appearing in Hot Spell, Some Came Running (for which she won an Oscar nomination), and the delightful The Matchmaker. As the lovesick daughter, MacLaine isn’t called upon to do anything here that Elinor Donahue didn’t do on TV every week in Father Knows Best, but her easygoing, natural appeal is a major asset to a film as dramatically stagy as Hot Spell. 

Things heat up between Virginia and Wyatt (Warren Stevens) 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that the same breast-fixated/blonde bombshell era that produced Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, also found room to appreciate the matronly charms of actresses like Shirley Booth and Geraldine Page. These actresses may not have been the pin-up type, but they played middle-aged women who were still afforded passions, sex drives, and depth. While most of Hollywood was falling over itself looking for the next fetishized male fantasy sex symbol, gay writers like Inge, Williams, and Coleman were creating dimensional roles for real women. 

The often unglamorous women Shirley Booth portrayed were nevertheless
granted a sexuality and impassioned emotional life

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Wasn’t it Margo Channing who said, “I detest cheap sentiment”? Well, normally I do, too, but something about Hot Spell always gets the waterworks going come fade-out. That something is Shirley Booth and the breadth of emotions she brings to her almost stock character. It’s a memorable (albeit familiar) performance in a movie that’s far more enjoyable than it should be. A credit to the cast, to be sure.

I don’t know if Hot Spell is available on DVD yet, but it crops up on TCM from time to time and is definitely worth a watch. It’s not likely to make anyone forget Come Back Little Sheba or invite comparisons to O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but it is a fine example of a once-popular dramatic genre, that (based on recent posts for The Stripper, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) I can’t seem to get enough of. 

"I guess the hot spell's over."

BONUS MATERIAL

 Hot Spell: Margaret Whiting sings this promotional song for the film. Written by Burt Bacharach /Mack David.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

THE POSSESSION OF JOEL DELANEY 1972

An urban classist xenophobist socioeconomic commentary supernatural occult suspense thriller 

One big reason I adore the films of the 1970s so much is that at no other time in the history of motion pictures can one find so many mainstream films that are just so off-the-chart, batshit crazy. For reasons both cultural and industry-related, it was a freer, more risk-taking time, resulting in a slew of exhilaratingly oddball feature films wholly deserving of the attribution, “Only in the '70s!”

Shirley MacLaine as Norah Benson

Perry King as Joel Delaney

Miriam Colon as Veronica

Lovelady Powell as Erika Lorenz

Edmundo Rivera Alvarez as Don Pedro

Barbara Trentham as Sherry Talbot

When I was a teen, San Francisco’s Market Street was the weekend movie-going destination for me and my friends. The bustling commercial boulevard was lined with one movie house after another offering a staggering selection to choose from, virtually all double or triple features, at kid-friendly matinee prices ($.75 cents). Memorable for the elaborate, hyperbole-laden promotional displays and cutouts featured in the glass cases that flanked the ticket booths of their recessed outer lobbies, most were second-run movie theaters like The Embassy (with its Ten-O-Win wheel cash giveaways) and The Strand. Others, like The Warfield and The Crest, were full-on grindhouses showcasing the best in exploitation movies: kung-fu action films, westerns, blaxploitation, and those inexplicably popular Doberman movies.

I first became aware of the occult thriller The Possession of Joel Delaney, while walking on Market Street one Saturday in 1972 and being stopped in my tracks by the sight of this arresting poster staring out at me from out of a theater’s “Coming Soon” display case:

I still have this poster, which I purchased back in 1974

Gadzooks! What a cool poster!
Not only was I seized by the eye-catching graphic and provocative tagline, but here was a genre film (I was very much into scary movies at the time) headlined by an Oscar-nominated, A-list actress, whose name was commonly associated with light comedies, musicals, and the occasional serious drama. I was stoked!

Always peripherally aware of Shirley MacLaine growing up, I was never what you’d call a fan. I remember she always seemed to be impersonating Asians in her movies (My Geisha -1962 / Gambit -1966), and while I thought she was funny enough in froth like Ask Any Girl (1959) and All in a Night’s Work (1961), her being so consistently cast as the object of sexual desire confused me. Was she supposed to be sexy? Sexy and funny was a rare combination back in the Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Totie Fields era, when in order to be considered funny, women were encouraged to be the opposite of sexually appealing). So, while MacLaine always exuded a kind of pert and personable screen personality, my inability to pigeonhole her into an easily recognizable "type" meant that her rare kind of versatility was lost on me and didn't register very strongly

That indifference changed in 1969 when I fell in love with MacLaine in Sweet Charity, after which she became a lasting favorite. So much so that I subsequently made it my business to catch up with many of her earlier films on The Late Show, and even willingly subjected myself to her short-lived, fairly awful, 1971 TV series Shirley’s World.

Worlds Apart
African tribal masks, divested of their spiritual and cultural significance, are mere
decorative objects d'art in this swank Manhattan Penthouse

So, when did I see The Possession of Joel Delaney? I didn’t.

That is to say, I didn’t get to see it when I really wanted to: when I was 14 years old, impressionable, and easily scared. When this darkly intense, exceptionally creepy little thriller could have really done a number on my head. No, I saw The Possession of Joel Delaney it was in the early 1980s at a revival theater. And happily, all that time hadn't prevented this unusual, atmospheric film from still packing quite a wallop.

What played into my not seeing this film in my teens was my still-existent habit of repeat-watching movies I enjoy. 1972 saw the release of Cabaret, The Godfather, What’s Up, Doc?, Lady Sings the Blues, The Poseidon Adventure, The Getaway, and Sleuth. All faves I saw numerous times, always telling myself I’d get around to seeing Shirley MacLaine’s film “next weekend....” Well, when a film performs as poorly at the boxoffice as did The Possession of Joel Delaney, “next weekend” is over before you know it. I snoozed and I lost.
But the wait was worth it.

Wealthy divorcee Norah Benson (MacLaine) lives an insular, privileged life in the Upper East Side Manhattan apartment she shares with her two pre-teen children, Peter and Carrie (David Elliot & Lisa Kohane). When not lording despotically over Puerto Rican domestic, Veronica (Mariam Colon), Norah dotes obsessively and possessively over her aimless younger brother, Joel (King). Much to Norah’s chagrin, Joel, whose social principles are very much at odds with those of his sister, has denounced the advantages of their family’s wealth.

Instead, he has chosen to live in a shabby apartment in the East Village given to him by his friend, Tonio Perez. Tonio is a young man unknown to the somewhat snobbish Norah, and the fact that Norah would likely disapprove seems to factor a bit in Joel's attachment to him -“He’s just about the only close friend I ever had. He stands for everything Norah hates.”

After Joel suffers a violent episode that lands him in Bellevue (a physical assault he has no recollection of committing), Norah, suspecting drug use, insists he move in with her (It’ll be just like old times, Joel. We’ll have such fun together!”) and see family friend and psychiatrist, Ericka Lorenz (Lovelady Powell).

"Joel, why do you live down there with those people?"
Norah's children, Carrie (Lisa Kohane) and Peter (David Elliot) listen in as Norah
 racistly obsesses over Joel's whereabouts 

While Norah’s almost incestuous preoccupation with her brother is appeased by their new living arrangement, Joel’s own behavior grows increasingly uncharacteristic and erratic. Dangerously so. He erupts in outbursts of Spanish profanities, afterward claiming he doesn't even speak the language. He grows possessive and sexually violent with his girlfriend, Sherry (Trentham), behaves inappropriately with his sister and nephews, and overall appears to be unduly influenced by his inexplicably close friendship with Perez. Not helping matters in the least is the fact that Perez is suspected by police to be involved in a rash of beheadings in Central Park.

Tonio Perez (Jose Fernandez) shares Joel's contempt for the upper classes.
They also share a deep-rooted resentment of women they perceive to be dominating

Without divulging more of the plot than the film’s own title affirms, suffice it to say that on the topic of living arrangements, Joel’s body can be said to have become an involuntary sublet to a particularly twisted homicidal maniac.

On the way to its tense, almost unwatchably disturbing climax, The Possession of Joel Delaney reveals itself to be a fairly riveting mix of suspense and social commentary.

Both a worthy offspring of Rosemary’s Baby’s religion-as-cult urban horror and a fittingly grisly (albeit comparatively subdued) exorcism precursor to 1973s game-changer, The Exorcist.

Urban Jungle

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

In an earlier essay on the classic film Rosemary’s Baby, I observed how so many of my favorite horror films are those which derive from or reflect upon the anxieties and tensions of the time. These films, serving as shrouded emotional outlets, allow for the safe venting of fears hidden deep within the collective psyche. Fears usually rendered inaccessible by virtue of their immediacy. Taking the position that all horror films are in some way socially revealing, The Possession of Joel Delaney then provides an ideal time-capsule glimpse into urban race/class tensions of the 1970s.  

From a humanist perspective, New York City during this time was a real-life horror story and something of a socio-economic nightmare. The city—destitute, decaying, dangerous under the weight of political, economic, and racial tensions too labyrinthine to go into here—was on the brink of collapse. 

Hispanic Panic
Norah's excursion to Spanish Harlem results in a full-throttle attack of xenophobia

While white flight, labor unions, and classism contributed to the wealth divide pitting the haves against the have-nots; the close confines of the city, coupled with the great disparity in the quality of life experienced by its ethnic populations, fed urban fear amongst New York's privileged whites. Specifically in regard to the city’s Puerto Rican population, which increased following “The Great Migration” of the '50s.
The squalor of '70s-era New York has played a role, both significant and superficial, in American movies as diverse as: Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), The Out-of-Towners (1970),  Little Murders (1970), The Panic in Needle Park (1971),  Klute (1971), and MacLaine's own 1971 drama, Desperate Characters, which plays something like a prequel to this film. But The Possession of Joel Delaney (so gritty Travis Bickle could have been the cinematographer) is the first film to put classist race-fear and the city’s socioeconomic divide in service of the horror genre.

In this film about spirit possession, Christian beliefs are replaced by the voodoo-like rituals of Puerto Rican Santeria. Norah finds her skepticism challenged in this harrowing exorcism scene

PERFORMANCES
As probably everybody knows by now, author William Peter Blatty wrote the character of Chris MacNeil in his novel The Exorcist for and about his neighbor, Shirley MacLaine. Reagan was sketchily based on MacLaine's daughter, Sachi (although, contrary to what her mother claims, Sachi denies the blurry photo of a girl on the cover of the hardback is her). MacLaine was offered the opportunity to play herself in the film version, but being as she was then under contract to Sir Lew Grade—producer of this film, her TV series, and Desperate Characters—she had to decline the role which ultimately went to Ellen Burstyn and won her an Oscar nomination.

More's the pity, for if her performance in The Possession of Joel Delaney is any indication of what she would have delivered as Linda Blair's mom, she'd really have given the devil his due.
MacLaine is the emotional lynchpin in The Possession of Joel Delaney, and her performance is one of my favorites. There's an art to playing an unsympathetic lead character, and MacLaine finds that narrow line between off-putting and compelling and walks it like a tightrope. She really is outstanding, and the film belongs to her. I especially like the ease with which she inhabits all sides of her character; the good, the bad, and the slightly icky.

Simpatico Siblings
In his first major feature film role, Perry King, who at times resembles, alternately, Jodie Foster and Bridget Fonda, is fine when called upon to mercurially shift from nice guy to nut case.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

No matter how clever or provocative the framework upon which the premise of a horror film is draped, the proof of any good thriller is if it works. And this one does. The Possession of Joel Delaney is, to paraphrase Clifford Odets, a cookie full of arsenic and a vitriol valentine to urban class conflict. All balanced precariously between being the realization of a racist’s worst nightmare and an ethnic-culture revenge fantasy.

Alas, it's a balance the film, for all its effectiveness as a spellbindingly claustrophobic chiller, is not completely successful in maintaining.

Warhol star Pat Ast has a brief bit as a Bellevue patient appreciative of Norah's fur coat

A movie fashioned as an indictment of classism and race-fear runs the same risk as a film designed to condemn sexism or violence against women: if not handled delicately, said film can wind up actually BEING the very thing it attempts to excoriate. For example, on initial release, Bryan Forbes’ brilliant The Stepford Wives (1973) was misinterpreted as being sexist, in spite of the entire thrust of the narrative being a sendup of the absurdity of sexism. 

In spite of frequent attempts to present Norah's regressive, racist attitudes in the most negative light possible, The Possession of Joel Delaney is considered by many to be unappetizingly racist in its depiction of Puerto Ricans as mysterious and inherently dangerous “others.”

A valid point, but one I attribute more to flaws in direction than in the film itself. For the most part, the events of The Possession of Joel Delaney are seen from the perspective of Norah Benson, a character we know to be the worst kind of upper-class effete (To Joel: “Look, I’m not naïve. I know there’s poverty around, but one doesn’t have to seek it out. I don’t have to and you don’t have to either”).

The Possession of Joel Delaney would have benefitted from more scenes like this one, where Norah seeks assistance from her maid, Veronica. The deferential domestic is revealed to be a self-assured woman, wise to the realities of class disparity.

Had the film remained true to this initial setup and presented events as unfolding exclusively from Norah’s narrow-minded point of view, The Possession of Joel Delaney, in my judgment, could have achieved what I think it set out to do: to show that Norah’s fear and mistrust of Puerto Ricans is a barrier between her fully comprehending (or taking seriously) what is happening to her brother.

Unfortunately, The Possession of Joel Delaney occasionally drops the subjective perspective and shifts to the omniscient eye of the observer. We're shown things Norah would never be privy to (Joel's psychiatric sessions, his aggressive treatment of his girlfriend, his staking out his psychiatrist's apartment). Since the depiction of Puerto Ricans as threatening, impenetrably mysterious "others" doesn't change, the point of view of the entire film morphs into that of a character we have been shown to be, at best, a casual racist.
It's obvious to me this isn't what the filmmakers were going for at all (in fact, quite the opposite) but a failure to understand narrative perspective plays havoc with The Possession of Joel Delaney's socially conscious intentions.

Ramona Stewart's 1970 novel was adapted for the screen by the late African-American writer/

producer/actor, Matthew Robinson (in collaboration with Irene Kamp). Robinson was one of the original developers and producers of Sesame Street, appearing onscreen as the character Gordon and giving voice to the puppet Roosevelt Franklin. Robinson later went on to write the Moms Mabley film Amazing Grace (1974) and was a writer and producer on The Cosby Show for seven years. He's the father of actress Holly Robinson-Pete.

Rounding out this "R"-rated film's curious, Sesame Street connection, The Possession of Joel Delaney has a score written by Academy Award-nominee, Joe (It's Not Easy Being Green) Raposo. Composer for The Great Muppet Caper,  TV's Sesame Street, and The Electric Company.

If anyone has a problem with this movie, it usually has to do with its concluding fifteen minutes.
Even as much as I like this movie, I'm not always up to rewatching it to the end.
Excessive to some, unnecessarily cruel to others, it's a fine example of how disturbing a film can be without having to resort to gore.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The failure of The Possession of Joel Delaney to add much depth or dimension to its ethnic characters prevents its social-commentary subtext from registering with the same impact as its authentically conveyed race-fear. But the film’s inability to land its target doesn’t stop me from admiring that it took the shot in the first place. 

Where The Possession of Joel Delaney hits the jackpot is in being a totally out-there, risk-takingly offbeat occult thriller, with the soul of a '70s art film.

Flirting with everything from incest to insanity; white guilt to wealth privilege; the socioeconomic roots of violence and the willful impressionability of culture—The Possession of Joel Delaney is worth checking out for anyone interested in seeing what horror with something on its mind looks like.

BONUS MATERIAL

Clip from "The Possession of Joel Delaney"  1972

THE AUTOGRAPH FILE

Perry King - 1981
From when I worked at Crown Books on Sunset Blvd.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015