Tea and Sympathy (1956) - film review

A school reunion provides Tom Lee with the pretext for revisiting the New England prep school which had had such a marked effect on his life.  In his old room, he casts his mind back ten years to when, a nervous and solitary 17-year-old, he had his first experience of love.  The object of his interest was Laura, the wife of his housemaster, Bill Reynolds.  Mrs Reynolds saw it was one of her duties to provide the boys in her house with tea and sympathy, and Tom seemed to be more in need of sympathy than most.  She detests the way in which Tom is teased by the other boys, just because he is different.  He has no interest in rough sports; he would rather listen to music or write poetry.  He doesn’t even object to playing a female part in the school play.  Whereas Tom’s peers regard him as a sissy, Laura finds him sensitive and kind-hearted, a pleasant contrast to her boorish self-absorbed husband.   Tom’s father is offended by the way that the other boys treat Tom and naturally blames his son.  Determined that Tom should make more of an effort to assert his  masculinity, Mr Lee forbids him to appear in the school play and insists that he gets himself a crew-cut.   On the advice of his roommate, Tom decides to visit a local prostitute.  This certainly changes his reputation, but not quite in the way he had envisaged...

This version of Robert Anderson’s play (which the playwright himself adapted for the screen) has often been criticised for its mealy-mouthed treatment of its central theme, a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality.  At the time, the Hollywood Code precluded any direct references to homosexuality, but Anderson does a good pretty job of putting up unmarked signposts whose meaning is, to an intelligent spectator at least, blatantly obvious.  Although the original play was much more daring, offering the explosive combination of a sexually frustrated married woman and an obviously gay teenager, the film is still pretty risqué for its era and ought to be considered something of a landmark in gay cinema.  Let us not forget that Vincente Minnelli himself had homosexual leanings, and this is perhaps reflected in the sensitivity with which he handles a delicate subject.

What could so easily have been a limp melodrama is given considerable emotional power through the performances of its three leading actors - Deborah Kerr, John Kerr (no relation) and Leif Erickson - who had made the original play a great success on Broadway.   John Kerr would rarely be as good as he is in this film, although the other Kerr, Deborah, almost steals the show (as usual) through her combination of grace, charisma and ability to convey the deepest of emotions with the subtlest of gestures.  Erickson is just as well cast as the macho housemaster who is so certain of his masculinity that (a) he will not let his wife come anywhere near him and (b) he’d rather spend his leisure time in the company of bare-chested young men than sit on the beach with his pretty wife.  (Is it me or does virtually every male character in this film fail to ring true as a red-bloodied heterosexual?)

Mindful of Hollwood’s pretty rigorous self-censorship, screenwriter Robert Anderson underplays the gay subtext and ingeniously creates the illusion that this is merely a film about one’s right to assert one’s individuality.  Of course, today’s sophisticated audience will see through the subterfuge in a split-second, and it is doubtful whether the audience who saw the film in the mid-50s were taken in for much longer than that. 

Today, the most moving aspect of the film is not that the leading male character is (obviously) a homosexual, but that the leading female character (Deborah Kerr) cannot help herself from falling in love with him, thereby destroying her marriage, disgracing her husband, and making the object of her affection so confused that he ends up getting married and starts reproducing at an alarming rate.  The film appears to be saying something quite bizarre: a frustrated middle-aged housewife poses a much greater threat to society than a confused homosexual (or three).  

The clinching proof that Deborah Kerr’s character is the villain of the piece and a true menace to the civilised world comes at the end of the film, when she subjects us to the most sanctimoniously self-pitying lament you can imagine.  It is a sign of how much things have changed in half a century that parts of this film are now laugh-out-loud hilarious when they were presumbaly intended to be little more than mildly ironic when first seen (e.g. Mr Lee’s reaction when he learns that his son will be wearing a frilly dress in the school play).  

Whilst Tea and Sympathy now evokes a very different reaction to the one it originally aroused, it still manages to get across a valid moral point in a cogent and wryly amusing fashion.   The film has, by the very nature of its subject, dated considerably, but it remains an engaging and entertaining piece of social commentary, although it is much, much funnier today, thankfully because society has grown up a bit.

© Derek Adamson 2010

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