William Wyler (1961)
Lillian Hellman’s play was first filmed by William Wyler in 1936 (as These Three). He made this second attempt presumably because the first one had been bowdlerised to such an extent that the alleged love affair between the protagonists was heterosexual. The Children’s Hour made Hellman’s name but, if this version is anything close to the original, it’s not a very good play. There are seven sizeable parts: Martha and Karen, thirtyish spinsters who run the small private school for girls where the action takes place; Joe, a hospital doctor and Karen’s longstanding fiancé; Lily, Martha’s aunt, a terminally resting stage actress, who in theory helps out with the teaching; Mary, a poisonous pupil whose whisper sets the real action of the plot in motion (the 1961 film was released in Britain as The Loudest Whisper); her grandmother Amelia (who is also – as a pretext for setting up a scene between them – a relative of Joe); and Rosalie, a kleptomaniac schoolgirl and Mary’s blackmail victim. Only two of these characters (Martha and Rosalie) are coherent and reasonably convincing. The others either keep changing in order to generate the next melodramatic twist in the story (Karen and Amelia) or are so crudely conceived they’re incredible (Lily and Mary) or are severely underwritten (Joe).
In this film, the shortcomings in the writing are compounded by some acting so bad that it’s baffling that a director of Wyler’s stature let it happen. You can only suppose he was focused on not repeating the thematic travesty of These Three and wasn’t sufficiently attentive to other things going wrong. Miriam Hopkins played one of the young teachers in These Three; 25 years on, her garish, busy portrait of Lily is painful – the obsolescent form of stage acting that we assume has brought a deserved end to the character‘s career was probably something like Hopkins’ playing here. (Physically, Hopkins looks a cross between Bette Davies and Joan Crawford – a weird anticipation of those two in the following year’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) The opening credits ‘introduce’ Karen Balkin, who plays Mary. It’s not a surprise to learn from IMDB that she’s made few screen appearances since. Like Hopkins’ bad acting, Balkin’s look-at-me performance fuses uncomfortably with what’s supposed to be wrong with the person she’s playing. This is the kind of over-acting which amuses some people (there were several of them at this BFI screening) because it’s a child in the role – as if remembering lines and pulling faces is prodigious in itself, and the effect of the party turn on the film as a whole a minor consideration. Balkin’s caricature little monster, as well as being gruesome to watch and hear, dilutes the startling malice which Hellman imputes to Mary.
Some of the other girls playing the pupils aren’t much less histrionically over-eager than the pudding-faced Balkin – they’re less hard to take only because their roles are much smaller. It’s ironic that the opening scene is of a comically clumsy piano recital in the school, enjoyed by some of the parents watching but which causes one father to fall asleep and Karen and Martha to exchange discreetly amused smiles. Except for Veronica Cartwright, who has an unforced emotional rawness as the hapless Rosalie, the junior acting in this film invites you to react less discreetly. It’s a relief once the scandal that engulfs Karen and Martha has broken, the outraged parents have removed their children from the school, and the three main adult actors are left virtually alone.
Lillian Hellman is credited with the ‘adaptation’ and John Michael Hayes with the screenplay. The BFI handout comprised an extract from a biography of Wyler, which explained that he and Hayes had invented a scene between Lily and Amelia to give a bit of credibility to the latter’s believing the story Mary has whispered to her during a car journey. Credibility certainly is in short supply at this point. The crucial exchange between Mary and her grandmother is bungled: Mary mentions the word ‘unnatural’ (as used by Aunt Lily about Martha’s feelings for Karen) as if she fully understands not just what it means but exactly what effect her quoting it will have. But although the scene goes wrong partly because of Karen Balkin’s hideous knowingness and Wyler’s failure to control it, the botch and the filmmakers’ emergency surgery on the script also reveal the crudeness of Hellman’s dramatic technique and her callous portrait of Mary: she makes this child the mechanical but strongly ill-intentioned villain of the piece. The story would be more powerful, as well as less unsubtle, if what Mary told her grandmother was careless chatter – if the development of rumours into cast-iron accusations were a more accidental, gradated progress.
Because Miriam Hopkins is ridiculous as Aunt Lily, the invented scene between her and Amelia (Fay Bainter) doesn’t help in the way Wyler and Hayes intended. If talking to Aunt Lily confirms her suspicions, this makes Amelia seem even more gullible than when she swallows what Mary tells her in the car. Fay Bainter, in what turned out to be her last film role, gets the rawest deal of anyone in terms of Hellman’s manipulation of the characters for the sake of dramatic expedience. Early on, Amelia seems alert, self-possessed and rather shrewd; she’s impatient with Mary when the girl complains how unkindly she’s being treated by Karen and Martha. But as soon as Amelia hears the word ‘unnatural’ and what Mary then whispers in her ear (which we don’t hear), she’s incredibly transformed. She’s stonily intransigent when Joe, Karen and Martha argue with her. Once Mary’s lies are revealed, Amelia’s collapse is as abject as her campaign against Karen and Martha has been implacable. There’s nothing in the writing to suggest, let alone explain, Amelia’s credulous, volatile absolutism.
Fay Bainter is inevitably defeated by these contortions but she gives a sympathetic performance; there’s a thread of weariness running through Amelia’s character changes that holds your interest in her. Audrey Hepburn as Karen comes off second worst after Bainter. When Karen forces Joe to ask the question she knows he wants to ask, she answers that she and Martha never were lovers; he says he believes her; she says they must separate because she’ll never believe that he does. This is a strong, well-acted exchange; and the psychological trickiness of what Karen does here sets you wondering whether she wants Joe to leave her because she’s increasingly unsure about her feelings for Martha. But once Joe has gone and Martha admits that she’s sexually attracted to her, Karen reacts as a simple innocent, assuring Martha that the latter is imagining an impure aspect to their friendship.
At the time this picture was made, Shirley MacLaine must have been the best young American actress around. As Martha, she really inhabits her dowdy clothes – especially a cardigan, which seems to double up as a comforter and a hair shirt. MacLaine is very good at suggesting a woman who keeps subduing her feelings by firmly turning her mind to practical matters, to the next thing on her list of things to do. We see her thoughts being transformed into physical movements: sublimation in action. This is a simple, effective way of convincing us that, until personal crisis and public scandal have exploded into their lives, Martha really hasn’t recognised the sexual aspect of her love for Karen – it’s the fact that we see Martha suppressing other (associated) emotions that makes this credible. Audrey Hepburn is a very different kind of star from MacLaine; she’s a good actress but within a narrower range. Hepburn’s star personality is very definite and we can admire the wit and shadings of her characterisations without ever feeling she’s much different from what we expect her to be. Although she’s dressed (for her) unglamorously here, Hepburn looks almost lovelier as a result and because the part is insecurely written, she’s effective only in bits. But they’re good bits: in Karen’s big scene with Joe and in her two extended walks in the closing stages of the film. When, after Martha has expressed her true feelings for Karen, Hepburn comes towards the camera, down from the house towards the entrance to the school, the rhythm of her movement reflects Karen’s shifting thoughts. At Martha’s funeral, when she walks across the screen and away from the other mourners watching her, Hepburn is very expressive: we see that Karen has internalised the legacy of the experience in a way that will cut her off from other people long after the funeral is over. James Garner gives a scrupulous performance as Joe but it’s not surprising that he seems uncomfortable: Joe isn’t really an independent character – he’s a necessary plot component and a useful device for illustrating the play’s themes.
It’s not clear – in spite of the play’s reputation – what exactly it’s saying. Fred Zinnemann’s film Julia implies that The Children’s Hour was inspired by Lillian Hellman’s girlhood friendship with the eponymous Julia, and by other friends suspecting this relationship had a sexual element. There’s a scene in Julia when a young man says to Lillian, ‘Everyone knows about you and Julia’. Lillian launches a right hook which knocks him off his chair. The Children’s Hour, on the evidence of this picture, seems more preoccupied with the general injustice of being accused of something you haven’t done than with the particular injustice of finding your private and professional lives laid waste by homophobic prejudice and intolerance. To an extent, this may simply reflect when the play was written – and help to explain how it became what seems, from this distance in time, a surprising Broadway hit in the mid-1930s. (Some people clearly find autres temps autres moeurs a hard concept to grasp: one member of the BFI audience gave a sarcastic yelp of horror when mention of Karen and Martha being lovers was first made.) In any case, it’s the ambiguity – even evasiveness – in Lillian Hellman’s writing that makes the piece still of interest today. Does Martha commit suicide because her world has been destroyed or because she can’t live with the realisation that she’s a lesbian? If the answer is both, that still fudges the issue of what Hellman felt about homosexuality, as distinct from victimisation.
The stage origins of the piece are awkwardly evident in a number of exits and entrances (and there’s a little inconsistency about what characters can or can’t hear ‘offstage’). Yet The Children’s Hour is visually interesting in a way that screen adaptations of theatre rarely are – shot in black-and-white by Franz Planer, and with well thought out costumes by Dorothy Jeakins. Alex North’s score is less effective: it’s a bit too richly ‘atmospheric’ for the subject and the look of the film.
10 May 2009
