William Wyler‘s The Children’s Hour (’61) is a thoroughly suffocating drama and, for my money, a stone drag to sit through. Eeeeeekk!…lesbians! The alarmed expressions in the trailer alone are borderline comical.
It began life as a 1934 Hellman play about the hounding of two schoolteachers over rumors of a suspected gay relationship.
In 1936 Wyler sheepishly adapted a watered-down screen version of Hellman’s play (Hellman herself wrote the screenplay), having scrubbed it of lesbian allusions and re-titled it as These Three.
Even Wyler’s 1961 version, which finally allowed allusions to a lesbian relationship between the schoolteachers (Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine), unfolds in overly timid terms. Hellman “adapted” it, although screenplay credit went to John Michael Hayes.
James Garner and Joel MacCrea played the same role in the ’61 and ’34 versions, an alarmed doctor named Joe Cardin who basically wants to mate with Audrey Hepburn and Merle Oberon, respectively.
Yes, Virginia — even in 1961 the notion of a possibly gay relationship between two women was quite an alarming thing, strange as this may sound today. Wyler’s Kennedy-era film was derided as being overly skittish and chicken-hearted.
This was the same year, mind, as Basil Dearden‘s much braver Victim, a low-budget British drama about a blackmailer making life miserable for a seemingly straight-and-married barrister (Dirk Bogarde) over allegations of a male homosexual relationship from the barrister’s past.
Victim‘s Wiki page says it was filmed in only 10 days.
