The Children’s Hour

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched the first half of The Children’s Hour directed by William Wyler from Lillian Hellman’s play. The story: two women run a small private school for girls. One of the girls is a troublemaker who, to get out of school, tells her grandmother a lie, that the two women are lesbians. The rumor gets around and all the girls are taken out of school, and the two women (and the doctor who’s engaged to one of the women) must fight back somehow.

You know, I find it uncomfortable to watch stories like this – where a lie is told, and there seems no way to fight back, no way to defend yourself. I imagine on retrospect that the drama must climax in the little girl’s confession, the realization by the grandmother that a great wrong has been done – that SHE has done a great wrong – and yet that there is no repairing it; reputations once lost are never regained; ‘you can’t unring a bell’ as they say in law.

But I couldn’t finish.

William Wyler had adapted the play back in the 1930s, as These Three for Samuel Goldwyn (with Merle Oberon, Miriam Hopkins, and Joel Macrae). At that time censorship was so strong that goldwyn couldn’t even use the title of the play, and everything was watered down, because you couldn’t even HINT at lesbianism back then. I guess Wyler was stung by this, he still liked the play, and a generation later, he remade it in a form more true to the play.

He shot, in sixty-three, in black and white. I don’t know why, except that black and white was thought generally to be better suited to drama, to serious subject matter.

Wyler was famous for a series of films using greg toland as his cameraman, with bette davis for star, that emphasized deep focus so you could see everything sharp, and he would then use master shots and long takes, something more like theater, so you could see both actors, or all three, and make up your own mind.

Here he doesn’t get the deep focus. A couple of shots he wanted the little girl in extreme closeup, with the teachers in full longshot, and he had to cheat, with a split lens. The film stock was a lot faster, but for some reason the dp couldn’t get the full range of focus for him – maybe it was a problem with the lights, I don’t know; or maybe the dp or Wyler liked the effect of the split lens. I don’t think it works as well, because I see through it, and then I’m looking for the dividing line in the frame, where one lens ends and the other begins. But for most viewers, probably they don’t see that, instead the picture just looks kind of weird to them, with the girl and the teachers seeming to be in very different worlds.

The acting is not great, either. Audrey hepburn is good, but unchallenged. Shirley maclaine (as the teacher who might have some sort of unacknowledged longing for Audrey) just is not up to her role; james Garner as Audrey’s fiance is jagged, rough, not good. Miriam hopkins plays Shirley’s aunt, rather poorly, but it’s nice to see her here, since she played one of the teacher roles in the thirties version, back when she was young and beautiful. The kid actors are pretty good, though not great.

I can’t really judge the whole effect of the film based on the first half, though, and I don’t even know how it ends.

Hellman had set herself a tough task: she wanted to show how rumors can wreck lives; but then she needed to offer some slight basis of truth in the rumor, you know? The grandmother really would seem crazy if she just took her granddaughter’s word for it. So we are presented with some circumstantial evidence beyond the lies of the little girl (and they are lies, and she knows it) so that Shirley might want to be Audrey’s girlfriend, though I saw nothing in the first hour, which has all the exposition, to indicate that Audrey felt anything like that.

It’s even possible that the climax has Shirley realizing, and confessing, to her feelings for Audrey. But I think that would undermine the notion of the play that all this springs from a malicious little lie, you know? Because if it starts with a lie, but then the lie turns out to be true, what are we supposed to conclude, and how are we to feel about the whole thing? It totally complicates our emotional response to Shirley and Audrey, and we start to lose sight of the little girl completely.

It also feels very dated now, after the sexual and social convulsions the world has gone through since those days 80 years ago. it’s hard to imagine the reactions of audience members at the play way back then, at the word ‘lesbian’ for example. Just how much revulsion would they have felt?

It would also weirdly attach to the actresses involved. Just as we admire Sean Connery for playing James Bond, the hero, or Harrison Ford, so we despise the poor actors who play the villains. I wonder if even in ’63 Wyler, a famous director who had won a few Academy Awards, might have had trouble casting it.

But in other ways the story is very contemporary; there is still a great deal of hatred of gays, and especially the notion of gays or lesbians teaching children, perhaps influencing them, and lesbians living in the same house as their young pupils, sleeping on the same floor…!

I think the problem was, the original play was not good. it’s a ‘problem play’ about how bad rumors and gossip can be. it’s not a portrait of a woman who is lesbian but can’t admit it.

Second, the acting is not great, the directing not great either. The cinematography is not awesome. there’s just not enough to engage me here. I rather suspect that if Audrey had played the closet (maybe) part, and Shirley the girl-with-fiancé, it would have been more interesting. I don’t know though. I watched the first hour and the problem had only just been engaged. that’s like an hour for act 1. and the exposition was not handled in a clever, ‘awesome’ way, so there was nothing to really counterbalance my feeling of discomfort for the poor women. James Garner was embarrassingly bad as the boyfriend too, and I like him generally.

(written around 2 March 2009)