60 years of The Children's Hour
On December 19, 1961, William Wyler's film "The Children's Hour" with a brilliant duet starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine was released on the screens of US cinemas.
The film is based on the play of the same name by Lillian Hellman, written in 1934. For the young writer, born in 1905, the play "The Children's Hour" was a kind of "trial balloon" on which she tested her abilities for drama. Before that, she had already written plays, but in collaboration with others and without much success. The advice to create independently and the idea of the play itself was given to her by her lover Dashiell Hammett, who, in turn, drew this idea from the story "Bad Companions", published in a collection of criminal stories written by a certain William Roughead. This story described a real story that took place in a Scottish school for girls in 1810.
The play "The Children's Hour", although it was Lillian Hellman's debut in drama as an independent author, was staged on Broadway in November 1934, withstood almost 700 performances and interested American cinematographers. In 1936, a film was made based on this play, and this, the first, adaptation of the play was carried out by William Wyler as well. In 1936, due to the strict censorship restrictions formulated in the so-called "Hayes Code", many of the accents of the play had to be softened or completely deleted. Basically, it concerned the topic of same-sex love. Among other amendments to the content of the play, the title was also changed to "These Three".
In the early 60s, as soon as the relaxation of censorship requirements in American cinema became apparent, William Wyler again turned to the Hellman play and made a film adaptation as close as possible to the literary source. Moreover, and this is important, in the 1961 film adaptation, Wyler did not do the traditional for American cinema happy ending. In my opinion, the absence of a happy ending is one of the most important advantages of the picture.
Shortly after the film's release, it obtained three Golden Globe nominations, including in the most important category - Best Director. But it did not win in any nomination. Stanley Kramer was recognized as the Best Director for the film "Judgment at Nuremberg". A little later, William Wyler's film "The Children's Hour" received five Oscar nominations, but all in technical categories. And it didn't win any of them. The film "Children's Hour" did not participate in film forums outside the United States.
Most professional film critics, contemporaries of the picture, preferred to ignore Wyler's film in silence. And only Bosley Crowther did not fail to release a bunch of arrows of anger and bile to the film in his review published in The New York Times on March 15, 1962. Literally in the first lines of this review , he characterizes the second film version of the play by Lillian Hellman as "fidgeting and fuming, like some dotty old doll in bombazine with her mouth sagging open in shocked amazement at the batedly whispered hint that a couple of female schoolteachers could be attached to each other by an "unnatural" love." But it was not even the slippery nature of the topic of same-sex love that most outraged the columnist of the mouthpiece of the US Democratic Party. Most of all, he was outraged by the disbelief of the main characters in the American court, the most humane, most just court in the world: "most provokingly, it asks us to imagine that an American court of law would not protect the innocent victims of such a slander when all the evidence it had to go upon was the word of two children and the failure of a key witness to appear." As a result , Crowther concludes his review with the words: "Mr. Wyler should hang his head in shame.Indeed, there is nothing about this picture of which he can be very proud."
It is clear that with such reviews and such festival "successes", William Wyler's film "The Children's Hour" failed at the box office, even though the main roles in it were played by two world-famous movie stars who have already been awarded Oscar, Golden Globe and others. With a budget of $ 3.6 million, the box office of the picture was only $ 3 million.
In the Soviet Union, the film "The Children's Hour" was not shown, even though Lillian Hellman is among the most respected American playwrights in the USSR. And there was something to respect her for, because during the Spanish Civil War in the mid-30s, she covered the struggle of the Republicans against the Francoists, and later wrote an anti-fascist play "Watch on the Rhine". This and her other plays were staged in almost all Soviet theaters in the 1940s and 60s. In addition, the Soviet authorities' benevolent attitude towards Hellman was reinforced by the fact that during the years of McCarthyism she was included in the "black list" of American cinema figures "sympathetic to communism."
Modern moviegoers all over the world, several decades after the release of the picture on the screen, did not believe the exhortations of The New York Times film reviewer and reacted to the film "The Children's Hour" with much more enthusiasm than the audience of the early 60s. 70% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated this film from 8 to 10, thereby confirming, firstly, that real cinema, like real wine, does not spoil from age, and secondly, that financial indicators, as well as critics' ratings, are by no means criteria for the quality of film production.
With that said, the rating of William Wyler's film "The Children's Hour" according to FilmGourmand was 7,925, which allowed it to take 829th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
