Robert Aldrich (1968)
In her introduction Emma Smart described the fight with the censors to get The Killing of Sister George into cinemas in the late 1960s – fair enough, as the film was being screened as part of BFI’s ‘Uncut’ season. Smart also noted that Sister George would have been a suitable feature in the regular ‘Out at the Pictures’ slot and went on to describe the movie as – and to explain its shockingness on the grounds that it was – a ‘celebration’ of lesbian love. If that’s what Sister George is, I dread to think what a condemnation of lesbianism would be like. There is a school of thought – reflected in some of the desperate programming for ‘Out at the Pictures’ – that any film of the 1960s that described homosexual love was a piece of daring enlightenment. There was a time when it was of course understandable for any semi-serious representation of gay life on screen to be seen as an advance but it’s dismaying that proponents of what Emma Smart called ‘LGBT cinema’ can’t, more than forty years later, see a piece like Sister George as benighted.
Smart warned the NFT2 audience that Robert Aldrich’s version of Frank Marcus’s stage play would seem tame compared with ‘a Sarah Waters adaptation on BBC’. In fact, the climactic coupling in the movie is shocking – not because two women are in bed together but because the older woman’s seduction of the younger one is presented as malignly corrupting and virtually vampiric. The ironically-named Mercy Croft, an executive at the BBC, destroys the mannish lush June ‘George’ Buckridge in her professional and private lives, both of which have survived for years. She plays Sister George, the district nurse, in a television soap called ‘Applehurst’ (it’s a radio show – The Archers-cum-Mrs Dale’s Diary – in the Marcus play). June shares her real life with the waiflike Alice ‘Childie’ McNaught. Sister George is axed from ‘Applehurst’, supposedly through a combination of declining audience popularity and her own publicly bad behaviour. Then Mercy Croft takes Alice under her wing and into the bed she shared with George. Mrs Croft is the villain in terms of both the plotting and the sexual politics, such as they are, of Sister George. She has a husband for appearance’s sake; is living a lie by concealing her true sexuality. Robert Aldrich, Lukas Heller (a regular writer for Aldrich during the sixties) and, indeed, Frank Marcus seem to have no sympathy for the situation of a career woman of the time and the pressures on her to conform.
The Killing of Sister George – the screen version anyway – seems pretty reactionary to me (and I somehow doubt the stage play is much different). I don’t understand how the likes of Emma Smart can see it differently. The relentless tensions between George and Childie appear to be the wages of sin rather than the result of social stigma attached to a happy gay partnership. Their relationship is presented as inherently dysfunctional. The very few good things in the film show the more natural aspects of their life together – a quiet, affectionate conversation between them early one morning, some of the bits in a gay club (even though the idea of Mercy Croft arriving there to break the news of Sister George’s demise is preposterous). It’s interesting to compare Sister George with Sunday Bloody Sunday, released in cinemas less than three years later. The tensions in John Schlesinger’s movie result from the fact that the younger man played by Murray Head is dividing himself between two older lovers, not from the fact that one of those lovers is male. The relationship with the older man played by Peter Finch is much more natural than the Head character’s affair with the woman played by Glenda Jackson.
Beryl Reid’s comic resource supplies most of what makes The Killing of Sister George worth seeing: some (though not all) of her playing of Sister George; her refusal to die on the set of ‘Applehurst’; her delivery – in response to Childie’s reminder that ‘Not every girl is a raving lesbian’ – of the line ‘That is a misfortune I am only too acutely aware of’. Reid won awards for her performance in the stage play: her closing, repeated cries of ‘Moo!’ (June Buckridge has been offered the role of a friendly cow on children’s television) send you out with a sense of what power her playing may have had in the theatre. But Beryl Reid is badly directed by Robert Aldrich. Her speech rhythms are very deliberate (even if the consequent insistency gets over what a pain George is to be with). Much of what’s on her face is scaled for the upper circle: you can see Reid producing her expressions in a way that’s uncomfortable to watch on screen.
Yet she’s by miles the best thing in the cast. Susannah York is so odd and incoherent as Childie that she occasionally suggests – I guess inadvertently – a fragmented personality; but her self-conscious feyness makes you too aware of York’s acting. Mercy Croft is laboriously played by Coral Browne: if Beryl Reid’s effects are too evidently produced Browne’s are too evidently produced in slow motion – especially the sinister raised eyebrow. Most of the playing in the smaller parts is very crude: an exception is Hugh Paddick as the sympathetic director of the TV soap. The actress in the part of an Australian member of the production team on ‘Applehurst’ (Elaine Church?) is amazingly wooden. Who knows whether it’s supposed to mean anything that she also looks butcher than anyone else.
Lukas Heller’s adaptation is full of clumsy attempts to open out the material (including a truly terrible sequence near the beginning when George, after a drinking session, scandalises two novice nuns in a black cab). There’s a lot of staginess to counterbalance the opening out, however, not only in the delivery of what are thus revealed as exit lines but in the blocking of the actors. George and Childie’s Laurel and Hardy routine may well work on stage but not on screen in the confines of the women’s flat. The score by Gerald Fried is all over the place – as George walks from a pub to her flat under the opening credits the music moves from pastiche West Side Story rumble to generic tender love story and back again. The film is long (surely as long as the play must be in the theatre) but some awkward transitions suggest either omissions or botched work in the cutting room.
27 November 2012