The Children’s Hour (1961) - film review

Karen Wright and Martha Dobie are two former college friends who run a private school for young girls in New England.   Through hard work and self-sacrifice, they have made the school a success and have just begun to turn a profit.  With her efforts focused on the school, Karen has had to put off marrying her boyfriend, Joe Cardin, a reputable paediatrician.  One of the girls at the school, Mary, is the granddaughter of Joe’s aunt, the wealthy Amelia Tilford.  When Karen punishes Mary for lying, the girl takes her revenge by telling her grandmother that her two teachers have been pursuing a lesbian love affair.  Outraged, Mrs Tilford swallows the lie and immediately withdraws Mary from the school.  She passes this news onto all of the other parents, who react in the same way.  In no time, Martha and Karen have lost all of their patrons and face financial ruin.  Only Joe seems to doubt the rumours but Karen knows the damage has been done, that she will lose him as well as the school.  Once a reputation is destroyed, it cannot be redeemed...

With its theme of lesbianism and suggestion of paedophilia, The Children’s Hour was a daring film for the era in which it was made and attracted a certain notoriety in some quarters.  Today, attitudes are somewhat different, homosexuality is no longer the great taboo that it once was and most reasonable people have no difficulty distinguishing it from paedophilia.  Modern audiences will be surprised by the lengths the film goes to avoid direct references to the sexual act between two women.  The L word isn’t mentioned once and the scenes in which the dreaded deed is alluded to are played without audible dialogue.    

Just as old films that tried to tackle racial discrimination are now hard to stomach (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner being a case in point), so The Children’s Hour is a difficult film to engage with, for the simple reason that the world it portrays has long ceased to exist.  The main value of this film is that it provides a record of contemporary attitudes to lesbianism, which, even as late as the early 1960s, was regarded as unnatural and socially unacceptable as having webbed fingers by the majority of the population.  It is interesting to compare this with Basil Dearden’s film Victim, which was released the same year but deals with homosexuality and the stigma associated with it much more openly.

The Children’s Hour started out as a stage play written in 1934 by Lilliam Hellman.  After the play proved to be a hit on Broadway, it was made into a film by William Wyler, entitled The Three (1936).  The Hollywood production code at the time strictly prohibited any mention of homosexuality and so the plot was changed so that the scandal revolved around an illicit heterosexual affair.  A quarter of a century later, the same William Wyler was able to remake the film with the references to lesbianism reinstated, albeit obliquely to avoid a public and critical backlash.

Although its portrayal of attitudes towards homosexuality dates it badly, The Children’s Hour still works as a potent morality tale, showing how easily and irreversibly reputations can be destroyed by thoughtless malice.  The performances, particularly from the three leads, are exceptional, with Shirley MacLaine turning in one of the best dramatic turns of her career, in a part that could not be further from her more familiar comedic roles.  There is a subtle ambiguity to Audrey Hepburn’s portrayal which implies, possibly, that her character may not be as straight as she protests she is, making the film’s ending all the more poignant.  Franz Planer’s sombre black-and-white photography endows the film with a solemn bleakness which exteriorises the anguish of the protagonists as their world falls apart, whilst reminding us that, at the time the film was made, same sex relationships were something which belonged in the shadows of human experience, something sordid and ugly.  Today, many will find the film sordid and ugly, but for very different reasons.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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