THE CHILDREN'S HOUR

by Kevin Koehler

Karen Wright (Audrey Hepburn) and Martha Dobie (Shirley MacLaine) run a boarding school for girls called, with some logic, the Wright-Dobie School for Girls.  Their new business is just now getting on its feet: numerous wealthy families have chosen them to instruct their young daughters in etiquette, piano, the French language, and other demonstrations of good breeding.  Things are progressing so well that Karen finally agrees to marry her physician boyfriend Joe, so unquestionably masculine (so virile) he smokes on the job and is played by James Garner.  She envisions marriage as reading books, side by side in their own bedroom.  He has other ideas; it is 1961, after all, when people still waited, so we can forgive him for his sudden impatience.

Along comes Mary: vindictive, pathological Mary.  She also happens to be a child, a pudgy-faced student at Wright-Dobie (albeit one who reads dirty books and blackmails her classmates).  Caught by her headmistress in a deception regarding some second-hand flowers, Mary has her recreation time taken away.  Mary likes her recreation time, likes it quite a bit, and really would have preferred it left as it was.  Thusly, a lie is born.

We never really hear the lie, at least not how Mary chooses to phrase it to her decorous battle-axe of a grandmother (Miriam Hopkins), but suffice to say it involves Karen and Martha, nocturnal visits to each others' rooms, strange noises, and probably some mouth/hand to genital contact.  In other words, the love that dare not speak its name (quite literally as the word "lesbian" is never uttered in the film).  Parents arrive to spirit away their children from homosexuality's unnatural, corrupting influence.  In mere minutes of screen time, Karen and Martha find themselves without so much as a single pupil.

Of course, you try to critique the film they made, not the one you would have preferred.  This being said, you rather wish they'd picked a different lie.  Child abuse spring immediately to mind (the intended issues are not that much different than the McMartin case), but I'm sure there are others that would have done nicely.  Third act revelations aside, The Children's Hour is not about lesbianism or society's treatment of such; it's about the abuse of power, the gulf between perception and reality.  Very likely, it's also a Red Scare parable - the original playwright herself, Lillian Hellman, was brought before HUAC and ultimately blacklisted (along with her lover, Dashiell Hammett) a short nine years before the picture's release.  The reactions of everyone in the film to the sapphic rumors, including/especially the two women targeted, is a combination of fear and horror.  Panic.  Men come by in pick-up trucks to gawk and stare at the strange creatures who prefer a woman's touch to their own.  It was an anachronism even at the film's 1961 release and the passing decades have only dated it further.

The film leaves no doubt that this terrible gossip is false.  Indeed, if it were true, there wouldn't be a film - the ostracization of homosexuals is unobjectionable so there wouldn't be anything to criticize.  When Joe asks his fiance whether the accusation are true, he's immediately overtaken by self-loathing - how could he ever think his delicate flower was capable of doing something so completely abhorrent as that.  She comforts him.  "No, Martha and I never touched each other," she says.  "It's all right darling, you had to ask."  Ah, but the seeds of doubt and existential crisis have be sown.  How can she ever be sure he believes her?  He did make him wait to marry her, of course.  "It doesn't really matter if you do believe me, I'd always be frightened that you didn't."

Frightened.

Interesting footnote: Director William Wyler loved Hellman's play so much he had to film it twice.  The first time around came in 1936 with These Three.  The tyranny of the Hays Code prohibited even the insinuation of homosexuality, so the lesbianism element was replaced with one teacher having an affair with a fellow teacher's fiance.  Miriam Hopkins actually appears in both films: Martha Dobie in These Three and, twenty-five years later, Mrs. Mortar in The Children's Hour.

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