The Children’s Hour (1961)

THE CHILDREN’S HOUR / 1961

A film by William Wyler

Director: William Wyler / Screenplay: Lillian Hellman, John Michael Hayes, based on the play by Lillian Hellman / Cinematography: Franz F. Planer / Music: Alex North / Editing: Robert Swink / Production Design: Edward G. Boyle / Cast: Audrey Hepburn (Karen Wright), Shirley MacLaine (Martha Dobie), James Garner (Dr. Joe Cardin), Miriam Hopkins (Mrs. Lily Mortar)

Production: MGM / Producer: William Wyler / Studios: United Artists / Duration: 108 minutes / World Premiere: December 19, 1961

The Children’s Hour was William Wyler’s second attempt at adapting Lillian Hellman’s play for the big screen. The first attempt, in 1936, came under a different title, These Three, with a substantial change in content. Moving away from the original material, the first adaptation, under the constraints of the Hollywood Production Code, avoided addressing the theme of homosexuality, transforming the film’s central conflict into a heterosexual love triangle.

In the 1961 adaptation, the original theme of the play returns, though not without the limitations imposed by the Hays Code. The portrayal of homosexuality in the film is almost silent, and it is precisely for this reason that the physicality of the actors plays such an important role. It is through what is not said, but rather seen—in the eyes of Hepburn and MacLaine—that the true depth of the story is revealed. In these glances, we find the emotions that all other aspects of the film attempt to conceal.

The plot unfolds around an everyday situation. At the school run by the two central characters, a student, Mary Tilford, exhibits systematically deviant behavior and is constantly reprimanded by her teachers. In a childish impulse to escape punishment, she decides to start a rumor that will allow her to stop attending the school: she insinuates a romantic relationship between the two women who run the institution. However, while the student’s lie sets the central plot in motion, it is in the truth that she unknowingly contains that the audience finds what makes the film an enduring reverberation of a forbidden feeling. Without Mary’s knowledge, Martha Dobie does, in fact, harbor romantic feelings for Karen Wright. As the rumor spreads and the characters strive to deny it, Martha’s shame about her secret and her fear of revealing her emotions grow.

A pivotal scene in the film arises from the very origin of the rumor, containing the most striking elements of the film’s non-verbal approach to what will deeply alter the teachers’ lives. In a car with her grandmother, Mary desperately searches for a reason to avoid returning to school. The scene unfolds in a tight shot, showing only Mary, her grandmother, and a small window through which only the leaves of roadside trees are visible—offering little to no connection to the outside world. This framing reinforces the unspeakability of what is about to be alleged. Remembering a conversation she had with her classmates, Mary weaves her accusation. The words “lesbian” or “homosexual” are never mentioned, just as they continue to be absent from the rest of the film—and from the original play itself. However, the way Mary decides to tell her grandmother also reflects the censorship imposed on the film. Mary says she has something to reveal but, in an attempt to insinuate something wrong in her teachers’ relationship, she avoids using clear words—even admitting that she doesn’t know why she shouldn’t say them: “I can’t tell you,” she says. When her grandmother asks why, Mary responds, “I don’t even know why, I just can’t say it.”

There is, however, one word that makes the grandmother’s expression change, revealing to the audience that she already understands—or at least suspects—what her granddaughter is implying: “unnatural.” What Miss Dobie feels for Miss Wright is not natural. “Stop repeating that word,” the grandmother demands, precisely because within it lies what must not be spoken, what can only be conveyed through glances. And it is through the evolution of the grandmother’s gaze—while Mary whispers her lie into her ear—that we grasp the implicit gravity of what is being said.

The film’s verbal approach to homosexuality is constrained and, at times, biased, leaving the subject to find its true expression in the body language of the characters. The words used are harsh and cold—“unnatural,” “freak,” “monster”—leaving no doubt that it is a behavior demanding the utmost condemnation. However, it is in the subtlety of the characters’ movements that the audience discovers the deeper nuances of a subject that, at the time—and in some contexts, even today—remains a true taboo. Something that cannot be spoken, yet cannot be forbidden as a feeling, even under the threat of humiliation and ostracization.

The black-and-white cinematography materializes what is absent in the film: desire, something typically associated with passion. Desire, like color, is suspended. Martha’s love—considered dirty and deviant—cannot be linked to desire or to any feeling that detaches it from tragedy. At the time of the film’s production, the representation of homosexuality could only exist as a cautionary tale, demonstrating the moral deviation of such behavior and, consequently, its irreversible consequences—culminating in the final sequence: the confession, followed by suicide.

Nothing in the film’s formal narrative structure seems to challenge this moral imposition. However, Hepburn’s performance in MacLaine’s confession scene carries a humanity and empathy for the so-feared “deviation.” It is in the restraint of her tears as she says “You’re guilty of nothing,” and in her desperate run when she realizes what her friend might have done to herself, that the audience—especially the attentive one—finds a hint of color, of affection. The very thing that the film’s central narrative seems intent on avoiding. It is in glances and gestures that this affection lands—like a leaf carried by the wind.

November 2024