The Children’s Hour

#9 in my ranking of William Wyler’s filmography.

It doesn’t happen often, but I find it interesting when a filmmaker remakes a film they made earlier. It must come from a place where they felt like they could have done something if circumstances had been different, circumstances change, and now they see an opportunity to reapproach the material from a new point of view. They are some of the most interesting remakes. Here, in William Wyler’s remake of These Three he returns to the source play’s original plot machinations around accusations of lesbianism instead of infidelity. I love both versions, though I think, on balance, I prefer the original modifications to make the film more Code friendly in These Three, mostly around one little misstep I think the newer film takes near the end.

It’s been a couple of years since Karen (Audrey Hepburn) and Martha (Shirley MacLaine) have opened their school for girls in a small, suburban community. The school is thriving, getting beyond its initial growing pains and finally turning a small profit for them, and Karen thinks it may be finally the time to marry her doctor fiancé Joe (James Garner). Martha has some reticence around the arrangement, speaking of feelings of abandonment from the school they built together. All is not perfect, though. Their troubles are centered around an entitled little liar of a student, Mary Tilford (Karen Balkin), and there’s also Martha’s aunt Lily (Miriam Hopkins), a lazy, entitled older woman and former actress who contributes little to the school but is happy to leach off of her niece and friend.

Everything explodes when Mary decides to take her anger out on her teachers by crafting a lie built on half-truths and telling it to her powerful, rich grandmother Amelia (Fay Bainter), also Joe’s aunt. Using overheard words from a fight between Lily and Martha about Lily’s affection for Karen while combining it with a loud bang she heard in the middle of the night, she builds a story about how Karen and Martha are lovers. One thing this film does a bit better than These Three is the building of Amelia’s belief in her awful granddaughter. Instead of just believing her (which isn’t the worst thing for a writer to do since it’s perfectly believable that grandmothers have blind spots regarding their granddaughters), Amelia goes to the school and listens to Lily rant about her niece’s failings, giving her the kind of confirmation that’s just enough to sell it to her and start the gossip train that leads to every parent taking every student out of the school.

So, I was gazing through some snippets of reviews of The Children’s Hour, and I came across a paragraph of the review written by Bosley Crowther in The New York Times. In it, he describes two specific criticisms that he said hobbled the film greatly. The first was that we never heard what Mary whispered to Amelia to shock the older woman (it’s not true, Mary repeats it later to Martha and Karen’s faces). The other is that Wyler and his screenwriter John Michael Hayes skip over the courtroom scene, as though courtroom scenes in films are generally good. Generally, they’re terrible, contrived, and artificial. I love that The Children’s Hour completely skips the trial, skipping ahead by weeks until Lily comes back from her whirlwind tour of single night engagements on the stage. What matters is that Martha feels betrayed, and that could have come out in a trial scene; but it’s better that it comes out when Lily returns. It’s just raw emotion from MacLaine as she picks Hopkins apart, wilting under the pressure despite her self-satisfied excuses for having a moral obligation to the stage (this moment recalls Heston’s assertion that Wyler never really liked actors).

The ending is very different from These Three, and it starts with the misstep that I hold against the film before it barrels forward to something great. The misstep is in regards to the relationship between Karen and Joe. Karen extracts Joe’s hidden doubt out of him, and she decides to end the relationship completely. Combined with the later moment where Martha herself expresses doubt that their denials are true (revealing that she is discovering, perhaps, a latent lesbianism within herself through this ordeal), and it feels…off. Karen rejects her relationship with Joe because he had doubt, but she redoubles her relationship with Martha specifically because of that? It’s odd, and I think it’s unfair to Joe who has stood with the woman he loved and her best friend through all the negative effects to the point of losing his own job simply by his association with her.

Still, the movie doesn’t stop there, and it heads straight for the kind of raw emotional conclusion that one might expect from a Wyler film based on a play centered around women. Where These Three ended with a happy note, The Children’s Hour definitely does not, marching straight ahead towards tragedy as the unsubstantiated gossip takes its final toll.

After Wyler’s pacifism trilogy, especially the “I don’t care what anyone else says about me, that doesn’t affect me at all,” mentality of the central character in The Big Country, it’s interesting to watch destruction in another form, simply by gossip. Returning to his more set-bound approach to filmmaking, Wyler is able to spend more time on performance and framing again, and the effects are still great to watch (not that I felt any suffering in the two when it came to the larger productions of The Big Country or Ben-Hur). Performances are entrancing all around with special note of Hepburn who gives the best performance in the film.

If I had to choose between the two, I think I’d go with These Three mostly because of how Garner’s character gets the shaft in The Children’s Hour. It’s a small difference, though. The Children’s Hour is great, using its added wrinkles of accusations of lesbianism to the full hilt to give greater depth to what’s going on. These Three is simpler. The Children’s Hour is more complex.

Rating: 4/4