William Wyler’s “The Children’s Hour” (1961)

One was Weird Woman (1944), a neglected camp classic that was part of Universal’s low-budget Inner Sanctum series - about a scorned librarian (scream queen Evelyn Ankers) who seeks revenge on her ex- (Lon Chaney Jr.) by spreading gossip about his new wife (Anne Gwynne), an all-American voodoo princess he met on a South Seas expedition (don’t ask).

After several people inadvertently die as a result of Ankers’s aspersions, Chaney and gang steal a move straight out of the Democratic playbook - they devise an elaborate, fear-mongering ruse to guilt her into submission (and make her confess).  Here’s a clip of Ankers being browbeaten – with prophecies of gloom and doom – by little-known B-actress Elizabeth Russell:

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Justice is served, but only after Chaney’s deception turns into an eerie, Twilight Zone reality.  Moral of the story: like black magic, lies can be a powerful, tricky weapon to demolish your enemies.

The other movie was The Children’s Hour, William Wyler’s 1961 remake of his own These Three (1936).  Both Wyler films were adaptations of the controversial play that put Lillian Hellman on the map, about two lady school teachers whose lives are ruined when a spiteful student accuses them of being gay.  (What these movies were doing on local TV at 4:30 in the afternoon is beyond me, but they never failed to keep me glued.)

Lying was something Hellman knew quite a bit about. The Children’s Hour was banned in London, Chicago, Boston and other cities, before opening in New York in 1934 to rave reviews – turning Hellman overnight into the darling of Manhattan progressives. The lone sour note was critic John Mason Brown’s pesky observation that Hellman had plagiarized her plot from William Roughhead’s Bad Companions – a novel Hellman’s lover, Dashiell Hammett, had introduced her to – which was based on a 1910 Scottish case concerning a mixed-race girl who charged two schoolmarms with being lesbians, wrecking their lives.

Lucky for Hellman, Brown’s inconvenient fact fell on a society of deaf conformists.  But then, Hellman already knew how to play the game: she simply never acknowledged Bad Companions, and bided her time until the truth blew over.  The understanding that it just takes a little time for myth to become reality is pure Leftist doctrine.

Lillian Hellman

Decades later, in her memoir Pentimento, Hellman pilfered again, fabricating the self-aggrandizing story of “Julia,” an imaginary childhood friend who allegedly enlisted Jewess Hellman’s help in smuggling funds through Nazi Germany to aid the anti-fascists.  The episode was quickly made into an award-winning feature film, starring liberal sex goddesses Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, that solidified Hellman’s sainthood.

The trouble was no “Julia” ever existed – at least not in Hellman’s life.  The lie briefly stirred up some controversy, but once more, Hellman sat tight until the clouds of doubt dissipated – and what Paul Johnson hailed the ”Lillian Hellman myth industry” kept spewing smoke into peoples’ eyes.

“Just as south Italian peasants continue to make offerings and present petitions to their favourite saints long after their very existence has been exposed as an invention,” Johnson noted, ”so the lovers of progress too cling to their idols, feet of clay notwithstanding.”

The little girl’s lie in The Children’s Hour is that the two targeted women are lovers.  But in order for These Three to pass the Hays Code, William Wyler had to water it down to a heterosexual menage a trois (both women sharing the same man).  Dissatisfied with this compromise, the director revisited the story twenty-five years later, restoring the drama’s original content.

Which brings us to the next point: lies are also useful in rewriting history.

Thanks to Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet, a groundbreaking, somewhat skewed chronicle of the treatment of gays and lesbians on screen, The Children’s Hour is often held up as a prime example of old Hollywood’s homophobia – the ultimate in negative gay stereotyping – because the character of Martha Dobie (played by Shirley MacLaine) struggles with her lesbianism and commits suicide.

William Wyler and Hellman

In fact, The Children’s Hour offers one of the most three-dimensional gay characters in film history. Closeted Martha is tormented by the unexpressed love she feels for her bff, Karen Wright (Audrey Hepburn) – and by the harsh ostracism they both endure after the accusation. But at no point in the script is Martha ever presented as anything but completely sympathetic.

Even after the histrionic “coming out” scene, heterosexual Karen still asks Martha to come away with her so they can start a new life together. Wyler clearly lays blame for Martha’s final, heartbreaking decision on the cruelty of the local bigots – not on Martha’s being a “freak of nature.” If anything, the film succeeds in showing the pain that can come from living in the closet (and from human malice).

But don’t tell that to Shirley MacLaine. In 1976, the staunch Democrat and New Age priestess was one of the first to accuse white male patriarch Wyler of trying to erase Martha’s lesbianism from the film.

“Lillian Hellman hadn’t just fallen out of a tree when she wrote The Children’s Hour in the early Thirties,” MacLaine declared.  “She had experienced a lot of it herself [tell that to William Roughhead]. In the play, scenes were developed so that you could see Martha falling in love with Karen and realizing why she was jealous of Karen’s boyfriend… but when Wyler put it on the screen, he cut those scenes out. He thought they would be too much for middle America to take. I thought he was wrong and I told him so, and Audrey Hepburn was right behind me [see next paragraph]…. Even so, I conceived my part as if those scenes were still there…. But Willie Wyler didn’t want that, and that’s why the story didn’t work on film.”

Note: In the 1995 film version of The Celluloid Closet, MacLaine takes her version of the truth a step further, claiming that no one on set had any idea that the movie was about a woman who realizes she’s in love with another woman. She even contradicts her earlier interview, stating on camera that “Audrey and I never talked about this – isn’t that amazing?”

Here’s MacLaine’s big scene:

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Moral of the post-script: lies are a terrific way to hijack reality after the fact, taint the legacy of dead white males – and take credit for their work while you’re at it. 

If MacLaine were correct, then why did Wyler, one of Hollywood’s great “women’s directors,” bother to remake the film at all after his first, heterosexual version?  Sorry, Shirly, but the moments of Martha with romantic stars in her eyes, and hurt by Karen’s affection for Joe (James Garner), are all there to be seen in glorious black-and-white.

Thanks to Wyler’s direction and, yes, MacLaine’s commitment, no amount of politically correct, post-modern revisionism - blaming a nonexistent whitewash on an evil Anglo – can dull the movie’s emotional impact. And tough/tender Martha remains my favorite MacLaine performance after her sweet-and-sour turn in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment.

The Children’ s Hour was remarkable for 1961 – as was its frequent showing on local TV at an hour that probably should have been reserved for after-school specials. Meanwhile, on the big screen, vigilante films were all the rage in the 1970s - Death Wish, Dirty Harry, Lipstick – stories of ordinary people who were victimized, outraged, and fought back by taking the law into their own hands.  There were no lies in these violent films, except the debunked one - that leaving justice up to a bureaucracy works.

These visceral, cathartic films allowed viewers to live vicariously through the avenging characters, and begged the question: How would “I” respond if a random party – that has no respect for me, doesn’t take into account my life experience, my feelings, my personal struggle - decided to force its will on me? Would I, like Charles Bronson, flip that tricky mental switch and turn on the rage full force – or would I cower?

We could still entertain such fantasies then.  Speech codes hadn’t tongue-tied us yet. Oprah, Chopra, and Obama weren’t around to tell us we were guilty and deserved to be punished. The thought police hadn’t fully ascended yet to push their good intentions on us, against our will.

Yet despite our national softness, bigotry remains eternal, part of the imperfect human condition. Nowadays, being proud of your flag, your military, your freedom, is the latest love that dare not speak its name. ”Conservative” is indeed the new “gay.”  (In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find a liberal in New York, San Francisco or L.A. capable of showing the same compassion to a conservative that straight Audrey Hepburn shows to MacLaine in The Children’s Hour – enlightened Bush-basher MacLaine probably included.)

This creeping cultural revolution is nothing new; it’s been in the works for decades. “There was no doubt that there was a vast organization which was making fools of all the liberals in Hollywood and taking their money,” said director Elia Kazan, “that there was a police state among the Left element in Hollywood and Broadway.”

At the forefront of this morphing social tyranny: blacklist survivor Lillian Hellman. Again, she knew just how to make it work – for her. According to author Paul Johnson, after the release of the movie Julia, based on Hellman’s fake memoir, the aged playwright enjoyed a renaissance as “the queen of radical chic and the most important single power-broker among the progressive intelligentsia and the society people who seethed around them…. She compiled her own blacklists and had them enforced by scores of servile intellectual flunkies.”

Similarly, Karl Marx – the man – extolled the virtues of the working class, agitating for violent revolution, yet “so far as we know,” wrote Johnson, ”never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life. What is even more striking is Marx’s hostility to fellow revolutionaries who had such experience – that is, working men who had become politically conscious…. Marx made sure that working-class socialists were eliminated from any positions of influence.”

Today, in America, we have a President who, rather than level with the trusting, hard-working voters who put him in office, plays mind games with them - asking them to believe that increasing the national debt is decreasing it, that less choice in health care is more choice, that standing up to violent savages makes us the savages, that reverse racism is post-racial. He seems to suck the meaning right out of words as he speaks them, always sure to distract with a mechanical smile.

But maybe he’s just stupid.

Meanwhile, this sort of mendacious pacifying has a malignant side effect. In the gay ghetto, for instance, the cult of “equality” encourages resentment towards straight white males, Christians, and other fellow Americans – sending the pampered, short-sighted LGBT community rushing to bolster another two-faced foe, that disguises itself as a kindred, downtrodden victim of Judeo-Christian oppression. And, to riff off Hillary Clinton, you know who I mean.

Word of advice to gays and lesbians: enjoy your comfort zone while you can.

Leftists claim to be die-hard humanitarians, yet they are the continual robbers and stiflers of free expression – always for the greater good - a compulsion that has nothing whatsoever to do with altruism, spirituality, or even with thought. The reality is they loathe people one on one, and prefer the safety of Utopian ideas.

Six months ago, to crib from Martha Dobie, I started to feel so damn sick and dirty I couldn’t stand it anymore. So I declared myself an apostate right here - because, as the New Age slogan goes, you’re only as sick as your secrets. If conservative really is the new gay, then the time for all closet cases to come out, loud and proud, is now.

My phone’s been ringing a lot less since then - a generous tactic better known as the silent treatment. Silence is supposed to be golden. When it’s a personal choice, it can be sacred. But petty tyrants walk among us – at the supermarket, in the gym, at the office, the stoplight – and some of them are your friends.

Once you’re out, some of them may choose to remember you the way you were before you woke up. And I suppose there’s something touching, maybe even flattering, about a loved one who clings to a fond memory of the past.

But make no mistake: there’s nothing considerate, or peace-loving, about silence when it’s used as a muzzle. And for the Left, past and present, the ultimate goal is to keep the lies current, no matter how much denial, fear-mongering - or voodoo – it takes.

This is one of my favorite genres, especially when it comes to the smaller, lesser known – or better yet – less respected members of this family. Sure, there’s “Star Trek II,” “Once Upon a Time in the West,” “The Sting,” “Man on Fire,” and both “Kill Bill” films – love ‘em all, and so do you, but here are five you may have missed that are even more satisfying than their better known cousins.

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1. Death Wish II (1982) – Michael Winner’s first “Death Wish” (1974) is often mistaken as a revenge film when it’s really a vigilante film. For we purists that distinction matters. The original may show up on all kinds of Top 10 Revenge Film lists but at no time does Bronson’s Paul Kersey look for the thugs who murdered his wife and raped his daughter. What he does do is take it to the streets as an avenging angel to overcome his own sense of helplessness. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great because punks get blown away and liberal critics howl, but a revenger it is not.

Winner’s follow-up, however, is an epic of revenge, one of the most exploitive, manipulative and satisfying movies ever made. Bronson was 60 at the time and at the height of human achievement in pure badassery. Watching The Mighty One, dressed in black from top to bottom, stalk the seedy streets of Los Angeles hunting the punks who raped and murdered his daughter as Jimmy Page’s howling score skews the tone into something surreal is as good as it gets.

The cherry on top? Well, that would be the subtextual viewing pleasure of knowing how much critics hate it.

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2. Act of Violence (1948) – In “The Searchers,” John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards describes his own determination with this famous quote:

Seems like he never learns there’s such a thing as a critter that’ll just keep comin’ on. So we’ll find ‘em in the end, I promise you. We’ll find ‘em. Just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth.

Post-war Los Angeles — when California was still known as “Sunny California,” — and war hero Van Heflin’s done quite well for himself: Nice home, thriving business, cute little son, and best of all, his wife looks exactly like Janet Leigh. Unfortunately, there’s this…

Scrape … scrape … scrape … scrape…

That sound has relentlessly haunted Heflin over an ocean and across America, and now it’s knocking on the front door in the form of Robert Ryan who will have his revenge on Heflin … just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth.

Fred Zinneman directs this splendidly shot, tightly plotted piece of noir that’s deserving of a revival and finally available on DVD. I won’t spoil a drop of story, but the performances are as good as it gets, especially Oscar-winner Mary Astor in a late-career supporting role, and the wrap-up is hugely satisfying on every level. Well worth a Netflix, to say the least.

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3. Coffy (1973) – A masterpiece of blaxploitation thanks to Pam Grier’s ridiculously sexy and determined presence as a nurse out to get The Man who fed her sister contaminated heroin. Every scene reaches for “cool” and delivers. Sure, the acting’s stiff and the action’s over-rehearsed, but with dialogue like this…

Vitroni: Crawl, ni**er!
Coffy: [pulls gun] You want me to crawl, white motherf**ker?
Vitroni: What’re you doing? Put that down.
Coffy: You want to spit on me and make me crawl? I’m gonna piss on your grave tomorrow.

… if you catch me on the right day I’ll tell you “Coffy” is the greatest movie ever made. There’s just something distinctive and sublime about a genre film that aims for a target and hits the bullseye.

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4. Chato’s Land (1972) – Two years before kicking off the “Death Wish” franchise, director Michael Winner and Charles Bronson teamed up for the first time to give the revenge genre a test-drive with this  satisfying and violent Western about a half-breed Apache (Bronson) hunted by a posse after he kills a sheriff in self-defense.

You don’t need me to tell you that some tables find themselves turned and thanks to a splendid supporting cast consisting of Jack Palance, James Whitmore, Ralph Waite, Richard Jordan and  Victor French, there is all kinds of pleasure to be had in that table turn as the posse degenerates into lawlessness and in-fighting.

Imposing over every frame is the stoic and fearsome Bronson whose transformation from a quiet, peaceable man wanting to get home to his family, into a relentless revenging angel with a righteous cause is something few actors could pull off believably.

Acting’s in the eyes, not the affectations … and Bronson made you believe.

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5. Hannie Caulder (1971) – Raquel Welch starred in three outstanding Westerns between 1968 and 1971 — this, “Bandolero!” (1968) and “100 Rifles” (1969). Beyond her stunning physical appearance, Welch is progressively better in each of them and with “Hannie Caulder” impressively carries the film mostly on her own. There to help her is Robert Culp (one of my favorite unheralded actors in one of his best film roles) as a slightly offbeat bounty hunter, but Raquel adds some real brawn to her beauty as a woman determined to learn the way of the gun in order to have her revenge on the three men who raped her and killed her husband.

Burt Kennedy directs and adapted the screenplay, so it’s sure to be a lean, satisfying 85 minutes. Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin, Jack Elam and Christopher Lee fill out an excellent supporting cast and a surprisingly (for director Kennedy, anyway) odd sense of humor pervades everything.

An unconventional  film, but more than worthy.

6:45am PST – Big Heat, The (1953) – A police detective whose wife was killed by the mob teams with a scarred gangster’s moll to bring down a powerful gangster. Cast: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando, Alexander Scourby Dir: Fritz Lang BW-90 mins, TV-14

There’s nothing quite like a Glenn Ford slow burn. Watching Ford’s nice guy characters take it and take it some more until they give it back with compound interest is one of the delights of Ford’s under-appreciated work. My favorite of these is “The Violent Men,” a 1955 Western that pits mild-mannered, square-shouldered Ford against land grabbers Edward G. Robinson and Barbara Stanwyck.  It’s “Death Wish” on a horse.

Today’s pick is another engrossing Ford slow-burner, this one a noir classic directed by The Mighty Fritz Lang and co-starring the delicious Gloria Grahame as a horribly scarred, boozy moll. The film’s real delight, however, is Lee Marvin in his breakthrough role as a complicated enforcer dealing with something he didn’t quite expect from Ford’s crusading cop.

Look for references to Ford’s “Gilda,” Carolyn Jones in a small roll, a scene that might have influenced a similar one in “The Godfather,” hardboiled dialogue, a blistering pace and a revenge theme (Lang’s specialty) fully realized to a satisfying and memorable finish.

The film was highly successful with audiences, making Bronson a big star and inspiring several sequels. Critics hated it.

Both reactions were caused by the same thing: the film’s uncompromising truthfulness. Death Wish marked the death of liberal illusions about crime and punishment: the idea that crime is caused by disadvantageous social environments and that the solution is to pour even more taxpayer money into bad neighborhoods in an attempt to buy submission from the poorer elements of society.

Death Wish showed that process to be an absurd sham. The film, based on a novel by Brian Garfield, clearly showed that giving in to such political extortion was making social conditions worse and exacerbating the nation’s already terrible crime problem.

Death Wish and its sequels refused to sugarcoat the villainy of the criminals the architect Paul Kersey pursues, nor did it state that he was justified in what he was doing. It simply showed the characters doing what they were inclined to do, making their choices and following the consequences. Such truth was impossible for Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, and other elitist critics of the time to stomach.

As direct and truthful as Death Wish is, it is not simplistic or political, despite the ravings of critics at the time. It is a story that was all too plausible, and the characterizations and situations were accurately and insightfully portrayed.

In the years since its release, Death Wish and its sequels have received some of the positive reconsideration they deserve—long after I wrote a lengthy article defending Death Wish, Dirty Harry, and other vigilante films in Chronicles magazine in the mid-1980s.

AMC will show the film several times in the coming days; click here for a synopsis and schedule, and click here to have AMC send you a reminder to watch it.

Death Wish: Highly recommended.