OVP: The Children's Hour (1961)

Film: The Children's Hour (1961)

Stars: Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, James Garner, Miriam Hopkins, Fay Bainter, Karen Balkin, Veronica Cartwright

Director: William Wyler

Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Supporting Actress-Fay Bainter, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Shirley MacLaine-click here to learn more about Ms. MacLaine (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I once saw an interview with Shirley MacLaine (a recent one, so late in her career) where she basically had never experienced what it was like not to be the "headliner" on a set.  While MacLaine has taken on supporting roles, this is kind of right-she's always been a name on the billboards, even after The Trouble with Harry wasn't a huge success.  This was certainly accurate between 1955 & 1961, where we pick up our conversation with MacLaine as she accelerated her fame playing in a number of popular films.  She had leads in Around the World in 80 Days, Some Came Running, and The Apartment, all of which were moneymakers that gained significant Oscar glory (including two nods for MacLaine), and she basically became the sole female member of the Rat Pack (give or take Angie Dickinson) starring in Ocean's Eleven.  I, as I mentioned previously, am a Shirley MacLaine super-fan, though, so I've seen all of these movies & we can't use movies for this series I haven't already seen.  Instead, we're going to go to another major movie, one that was less financially successful but has grown in stature in the years since due to its groundbreaking subject matter, made at the tale end of the Studio System, The Children's Hour.

(Spoilers Ahead) Longtime friends Martha (MacLaine) and Karen (Hepburn) run an all-girls boarding school together.  Martha is excited that the school is finally starting to see a profit, but Karen is considering giving up the school to marry her longtime beau Joe (Garner).  When a spoiled young girl named Mary (Balkin), is punished, she decides to twist an offhand comment by Martha's aunt Lily (Hopkins) about both teachers being lesbians (Mary not entirely understanding what that means), to get out of the school when she tells her oblivious grandmother Amelia Tilford (Bainter) what happened.  Mrs. Tilford tells everyone about this alleged homosexuality, and soon every parent has taken their daughter out of the school, leaving the women destitute, and initially unaware as to why.  When they confront Mrs. Tilford, she repeats what Mary said, and the women (knowing that it's false), sue for libel.  But Mary blackmails a fellow classmate Rosalie (Cartwright) into vouching for her, and they lose the case, becoming national pariahs.  Afterward, confronted by Joe's doubts about their relationship, Karen leaves him, wanting him to have a different life than with her.  Rosalie eventually confesses to the lie, and Mrs. Tilford tries to apologize, but it's too late.  At this point, Martha has confessed her secret shame that she is, in fact, a lesbian & in love with Karen.  Knowing that there's no way for them to be together, and that her life (in her mind) will never be put back together, Martha hangs herself, leaving Karen to try & live in a world without her.

The movie is powerful, and it's quite shocking how they are able to keep much of the homosexual references in the film.  While there are some things that are said off-hand or off-screen (Mary's accusation is whispered so the audience can't hear it, the whole court case is just mentioned but not viewed), you do understand not only what the underlying issue is (that these women are accused of being lovers), but it's said out loud.  In 1961, this was pretty groundbreaking (consider that Basil Dearden's Victim, which was the first English-language film to use the word "homosexual" hadn't even been released yet in the United States when this movie came out), and the film feels shockingly progressive in the way the women treat not only each other but how the actresses handle playing women whose sexuality is either queer or strong ally.

This is in part driven by a great cast.  Bainter is the Oscar nominee of the bunch, and she acts her character perfectly.  She plays her character not as someone who aspires to be a villain, but as someone who could never think of herself as one, and that isn't her intention.  She plays her early scenes politely, and has correct doubt about the veracity of Mary's claims before finally succumbing to the tawdry gossip.  This makes her character more interesting, and more frustrating-she's not someone who intended to destroy two people's lives (like Mary is, and oh is Balkin good at making you hate her), but instead someone who did it without considering that's what she was doing.

But the rest of the cast deserved to be in the Oscar conversation.  Garner gets a tough role, this paragon of handsome masculinity, who is thrown asunder that there might be this woman (whom he loves) who prefers another woman to him.  I didn't love his eventual confession that he had doubts (mostly because it felt like an easy ploy to get rid of him in the script), but he does play those doubts well.  Hopkins is superb as a careless, cruel side character who sees the world only from her point-of-view-this is the definition of a strong supporting performance, someone who otherwise would've faded into the background but here she mesmerizes because she lets us see the ugliness to apathy, how she could've saved her niece but through prejudice & self-preservation simply couldn't bring herself to do so.

And our leads are grand.  I think I prefer MacLaine slightly here, if only for her final moments where she has to confess a love she's hidden her whole life, but both are good.  There's an authentic understanding to their friendship (you get the feeling that Martha's confession is not news to Karen, even if she has a modicum of surprise to it), one that occasionally happens when a straight person knows that the gay person in their life might be in (romantic) love with them, but where they love the person too much to ever acknowledge it for risk of the friendship.  I thought both women nailed the parts, and am shocked that Oscar didn't choose to cite at least one of them for these roles (Hepburn was Holly Golightly that year, so that wasn't going to be bested, but MacLaine should've been in the running for a nomination in 1961).

The remaining Oscar nominations are not quite as deserving as Bainter's, though they aren't without mention.  The sound is fine, moody & clear, but not all that memorable.  The cinematography is much more striking; the use of closeups is worth mentioning (think of the startled look on Mary's face when the jig is up), and I thought it set a somber tone, particularly in the outdoors sequences.  The same could be said for the art direction-the movie does a good job of making the school feel increasingly claustrophobic (also a trick of the cinematographer).  We initially think of the school as large, but as the movie continues & it becomes the only home of the teachers, we begin to understand how tiny it is, seeing how little privacy these women are afforded, first from the students & now from the world.  The only nomination I feel like was a bit of a miss was costume-these are fine, but there's nothing out-of-the-ordinary that's being done here, and this feels a bit like one of those "tail end" of the Black & White categories (several Oscar categories, including costume, were separated between Color and Black & White until the mid-1960's), where they were trying to find prestige black-and-white films in a world dominated by color ones.