Arthur Penn (1962)

William Gibson’s biographical drama about Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller began life in the Playhouse 90 television slot in 1957, became a Tony award-winning Broadway play in 1959 and was adapted for cinema three years later.   All four chief contributors to the stage play – Gibson, Arthur Penn, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke – worked on the big-screen version too.  Its earlier incarnations can be detected in the surfeit of speeches but The Miracle Worker as a film is unusual and tough to watch.  Its treatment of disability must have been startling in a Hollywood picture of 1962.  Watching it again at this long distance in time – I’d seen it once before, maybe forty years ago – I think it compares favourably with plenty of later high-profile movies whose heroes rise above physical or mental handicap.  Its sometimes brutal rawness anticipates the excellent My Left Foot  (1989).

Penn’s distinctive approach is apparent from the start though not seen to advantage in the opening scene.  In early 1882, Helen Keller, nineteen months old, has just come through a serious illness.  The relief of her parents instantly turns to horror when Helen’s mother Kate realises her daughter can no longer see.  Kate’s distraught reaction is, in terms of screen time, unexpectedly and strikingly prolonged but, as played by Inga Swenson, it’s decidedly histrionic too:  we’re watching an actress giving everything she’s got more than a woman in shocked distress.  Swenson and Victor Jory, as Helen’s dogmatic, ex-military father, are the most problematic members of the cast throughout The Miracle Worker.   Their performances are strongly felt but she overdoes the ardent mother love, he’s excessively shouty (and Captain Keller has more than his fair share of the speeches.)  Yet the no-holds-barred emotionality that feels false in the prologue takes on new and more authentic meaning in the film’s central relationship.

Blind and deaf as a result of her illness in infancy (which was probably either scarlet fever or meningitis), Helen Keller lived her early years, as she later wrote, ‘at sea in a dense fog’.  Frustration at her inability to communicate resulted in furiously aggressive behaviour in the family home in Tuscumbia, Alabama.  In 1886, her desperate parents made contact with the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Massachusetts.  A few months before Helen’s seventh birthday, twenty-year-old Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired and a former Perkins student, was sent to the Kellers to work with Helen.  It was the start of a partnership that extended nearly half a century, until Sullivan’s death.  She taught Helen a system of spelling the letters of words into the palm of her hand.  The child learned to imitate her teacher’s gestures but a much greater breakthrough occurred when Helen realised these gestures signified the things or people she could touch and smell.  In May 1888, she enrolled at Perkins.  Six years later, she and Anne, now her companion, moved to New York so that Helen could attend schools for the deaf there.  In 1904, she graduated from Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa, the first deaf and blind recipient of a university degree.

The film concentrates on the early, turbulent months between Helen and her tutor.  It climaxes in the moment when, at the pump in the grounds of the family home, the girl understands the significance of the motions Anne makes on the palm of one hand while running water over the other – that w-a-t-e-r is water.  Soon after Anne joins the household, Kate Keller tells her that Helen, shortly before her ruinous illness took hold, was starting to get the hang of words:  she knew, says Kate, what water was and could nearly pronounce the word.  In her epiphany at the pump and with enormous effort, Helen now says ‘water’ again[1].  It’s a genuinely powerful scene, even if Arthur Penn somewhat dilutes its effect by extending the triumphant ending for a few minutes more.

In many other respects, the direction is admirable.  The film may have inherited too much dialogue but Penn exploits to great effect another legacy of the stage play:  the claustrophobic nature of the characters’ situation and of Helen’s locked world.  This is especially so in the relentless ‘battle’ scenes between the two principals, as Anne tries both to subdue and to teach the child – episodes that also show the film at its most remarkably dynamic.   Laurence Rosenthal’s score is full on (and eager to move the audience to tears) but Penn knows when to use it and when not to use it:  there’s no music during the big confrontations between Anne and Helen.  The black-and-white cinematography (by Ernesto Caparrós) reinforces the narrative’s stark urgency.  Anne’s flashback memories of her childhood years in a Massachusetts almshouse are imaginatively shot to suggest the serious eye disease from which she suffered in childhood.

Penn’s outstanding achievement is the performance he gets from Patty Duke as Helen.  In the talky context of the piece, she’s bound to stand out but her physicality is extraordinary – not just because she’s so young but because she’s young and had already played Helen throughout the nearly two years of the Broadway run yet there’s nothing practiced about her acting.  Duke was fifteen when the film was in production, twice the age that Helen Keller was when Anne Sullivan entered her life, but it scarcely matters – for two reasons.  Helen’s parents, unable to control or get through to her, treat her like a baby; since she’s made no progress – emotional, social or educational – she exists virtually outside time.  And casting a significantly older and stronger child makes good dramatic sense:  it helps express the exceptional, animal ferocity of this pinafore-wearing little girl, makes her physically harder for Anne to handle.  Helen reconnects with language at the pump but in this moment of illumination she remains the dervish she’s been throughout.  And there’s nothing falsely spiritual about the way Patty Duke struggles to enounce ‘water’.  The two syllables come from deep inside her, issue as if she’s retching, sound monstrously distorted.

Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke both received the Academy Award for The Miracle Worker – Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress respectively – in what was a competitive year in both categories.  Did they deserve the prize?  In later years, Duke (who died in 2016) told a television interviewer that it was the role rather than the performance that won her the Oscar.  There’s clearly something in that:  in retrospect, it seems surprising that she was at the time a surprise winner.  The favourite was Angela Lansbury for her brilliant work in The Manchurian Candidate (in which she played a seriously frightening character – rarely an advantage for a nominated actor).  All in all, though, I think Duke merited her Oscar more than Bancroft.  The latter’s combination of athleticism, empathy and timing is impressive but I wish she’d not bothered with the Oirish accent (particularly since Anne Sullivan’s parents emigrated to America after the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s and Anne was born in Massachusetts, in 1866).  Holding onto the accent causes Bancroft occasionally to lose the sense of her lines.  A more persistent difficulty is that the brogue  gives too many of those lines the same lilting yearning.  In the Academy Awards for 1962, Anne Bancroft was up against Bette Davis (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?), Katharine Hepburn (Long Day’s Journey into Night), Geraldine Page (Sweet Bird of Youth) and Lee Remick (Days of Wine and Roses).  Over the course of the next two decades, Hepburn would receive three Best Actress Oscars, each of them undeserved (for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter and On Golden Pond).  But 1962 was the year she really should have won.

18 April 2019

[1] In her autobiography, Keller described the moment:  ‘I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of [Anne’s] fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me’.