The Children's Hour

Sometimes, happily, a movie exceeds my expectations. In watching the major films of 1961, I turn to The Children's Hour, based on the play by Lillian Hellman and directed by William Wyler. I expected a soggy spectacle like Peyton Place, but instead it was surprisingly tough and moving.

Set in a girl's boarding school, the film covers two themes: gossip and Lesbianism. Hellman's play, written in 1934, was certainly ahead of its time, but when made into a film in 1936 all elements of the love that dare not speak its name were removed, instead changed to a heterosexual scandal, and retitled These Three.

But this confronts homosexuality head on, and not in namby-pamby way. So many films about McCarthyism and the blacklist, for example, deal with people who are wrongly accused of being a communist. Why not make one about an actual communist--after all, there's nothing illegal about that, just as there's nothing wrong with being a Lesbian.

The setting is a boarding school just started by two enterprising young women, Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. Friends from school, they own and operate the school, with MacLaine's dotty actress aunt (Miriam Hopkins, who incidentally starred in These Three) as a teacher. Hepburn is engaged to marry a doctor, James Garner, which makes MacLaine jealous. Immediately my gaydar was activated, but I was waiting to see whether the film would actually state that MacLaine was a Lesbian.

A troublesome girl, Karen Balkin, decides to get back at her teachers by exaggerating things she heard and saw and tells her patrician grandmother (Fay Bainter, who was Oscar-nominated) her suspicions. Soon the entire school has lost all its pupils. When Hepburn and MacLaine find out the rumor and its source, they and Garner confront Bainter, but Balkin blackmails a schoolmate (Veronica Cartwright, who would later be eaten in Alien) into backing up her story.

Hepburn and MacLaine become outcasts, losing a slander suit (which was entirely off-screen) when Hopkins, who could have cleared things up, refused to respond to a summons, citing a "moral obligation to the theater."

I found almost all of this gripping, and at times difficult to bear, as gossip and innuendo ruin these women's lives. But the film kept challenging the audience, with a key scene late in the film in which MacLaine admits that she loves Hepburn in the manner of which she has been accused. One can see in MacLaine's brilliant performance the horror that closeted homosexuals, or those who can't come to grips with their sexuality, go through.

All of the acting is superb. I've never seen Garner so good. Usually he's playing some casual role that he made famous with Maverick and Rockford, but this role requires depth of feeling and he nails it, particularly a scene in which Hepburn lets him confront his doubts about whether she's telling the truth. And then, my god, Hepburn's face during the climactic moment of the film--absolute genius of expression.

Wyler's direction is also superb. I spent several moments appreciating how he used closeup and deep focus to frame two or more people in a shot. Watching this film was like taking a master class in composition.

Thankfully in fifty years we've progressed, but not nearly enough, not when a serious contender for the Republican nomination for president is an unrepentant homophobe. We've still got a long way to go.