BEFORE: Damn, it's way too early for back-to-school stuff, so it's not really a good time for this one to come to the top of my queue. But everything can't line up all the time, and I need the linking here to help get me back to modern times. Audrey Hepburn carries over from "Paris When It Sizzles", and I didn't have too many options here. I tried to work out a link to William Holden in "Picnic", which would be more summer-themed, I think - but that turned into a dead end. I could have gone: "Born Yesterday", "Picnic", then via Susan Strasberg to "The Other Side of the Wind" and the documentary about that film, "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead", but then I couldn't go any further - I've tapped out the Orson Welles connections.
Actually, I do see the connection there - I could have followed the Peter Bogdanovich link to "They All Laughed", which I don't have a copy of, and that film has Audrey Hepburn in it, which would have led me back here, to "The Children's Hour", and the chain would have proceeded from here anyway. But that would have meant adding FIVE films to the chain, and I just don't have the space, not this year, I've only got 95 slots left, and Halloween and Christmas are going to be here before you know it, I'm watching the number of days left in 2019 get smaller and smaller.
Speaking of October, I knew that there was a reason I didn't fill up the month completely, I left a couple week's time open, because I'll be working at New York Comic Con on the first weekend (after skipping the event last year) and then going on vacation in the third week. We just booked tickets to Las Vegas - we haven't been there in over a decade, so it's probably all new and improved - so instead of a BBQ crawl this year we're going to do a Casino Crawl, or maybe a Buffet Crawl. We're in the process of checking out what we want to do in each part of town so we can move from place to place more efficiently, treating each section of town like its own city. It'll be just like the BBQ Crawls we did, only less driving, which means more eating. But that's still almost 90 days, or 83 movies, away.
THE PLOT: A troublemaking student at a girls' school accuses two teachers of being lesbians.
AFTER: This is another film that has to be placed in a historical context, since it was made in 1961 and there were entirely different attitudes about gay people - for example, they could even SAY the word "lesbian" in this film. And almost any mention of what these two teachers were accused of is either whispered between two people, or said in another room, or outside, down a path, while the camera remains inside and shoots from the door - either way, the definition never makes it on screen until nearly the very end. So it's possible that some people back then watched this movie, had no idea what it meant for two women to be in love, so they might have been scratching their heads, thinking "I didn't understand why all the parents were taking their kids out of that private school for girls..."
Decades later, people struggled with a similar issue when it came to light that maybe some men who were running Boy Scout troops might have been homosexual, forcing that organization to take some poorly thought-out moral stand, and then of course there was the whole "gays in the military" kerfuffle. Conservative Americans would apparently prefer that their children get raised without ever being instructed by, or even encountering any gay people. Umm, good luck with that. Or they would prefer that everyone keep their sexual preferences under wraps, completely compartmentalized and separate from their workplace identities. Well, that's not so easy for some people, and it of course holds one section of the populace to a darn near impossible standard. Anyway, years later we all learned that the real sexual predators weren't even scout leaders or military recruits, but studio executives, news anchors, pop stars and beloved comedians. Go figure. Oh, and casino owners/billionaires/reality TV stars, don't leave that one out.
People fear what they don't understand, and so hear they misguidedly think that a lesbian woman can't possibly teach their children - why, are they afraid that the children are going to catch "gay" from them? Meanwhile, the little girls are reading some kind of dirty book (again, the details of the book's events aren't mentioned in the film, but they elicit a "double wow" from one of the girls, what could that possibly have been?). But most of the little girls don't really understand the nature of the lesbian relationship that they imagine is taking place, when pressed for details, they say things like, "I saw them kissing, and, you know, STUFF." Right, that sounds like a reliable witness, so case closed.
The real takeaway here is that kids are horrible creatures. There's one girl who's a kleptomaniac, stealing anything shiny from her own mother and the other girl students. But even worse is the girl who takes a bouquet flowers out of the trash and presents them to her teacher as new, and then when she gets in trouble she claims that the teachers have it in for her. She also throws tantrums and fakes illnesses, like the patented Fred Sanford "heart attack". She'll say just about anything to put another person down, which lifts herself up in the process. But of course her grandmother can't see her as a terrible person, because she's just a kid. But kids are even more likely to be terrible people than adults, they haven't yet learned to take things in stride, or how to properly follow the rules, or that not everything is rigged against them. When has any kid ever had any success telling an adult that "It's not FAIR!" without the adult rolling their eyes and saying, "No kidding, duh, but life isn't fair..."
Plus, again, this was 1961, and the Swinging Sixties hadn't even gotten rolling yet - so after the scandal breaks, one teacher's boyfriend/fiancé of course dismisses the rumors at first, but eventually even he gets to the point where he reasons that if there's even a hint of truth here, then he'd probably be better off breaking off their engagement. But if had been 10 or 15 years later, during the carefree pre-AIDS 1970's, perhaps his attitude might have been, "Hey, that's OK, we can still be together, and maybe your co-worker could even join us, once in a while, and we'd both be happier in the long run." But it appears that in 1961, even if there was little recognition for lesbians in proper society, there was even less understanding about bi-sexuality. Women either had to be one thing or another, there was simply no fluidity allowed, which is ridiculous. But throughout the intervening years, we've gained more understanding and acceptance, though some parts of even the gay community refuse to accept bisexuality, even on the other side of the argument some people still think women have to be either one thing or another.
Even though the rumors here are untrue (OK, maybe half untrue...OK, maybe true but if they are true, it's the rumor that brought the truth about, which is a bit like putting the cart before the horse...) I feel like I've been in a version of this situation myself. My first wife came out as bisexual, first to me and then to everyone else, and as you may imagine, I didn't take it well. Rather than celebrating her sexual freedom, I only saw the ways that it would negatively impact me and my situation, so I only saw the downside, not the upside. (Wait, there was an upside?). I had only my Catholic upbringing to fall back on, and the fact that I wasn't as free-thinking as I thought I was, so perhaps it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it did lead to the break-up of the marriage. Breaking off her relationship with her intended partner, as I requested, only had the negative effect of containing this aspect of her that yearned to break free - and I had to realize that trying to contain these feelings was the wrong way to go. When she finally chose to identify as gay rather than straight or bi, I had to ask her to move out, so that we both could move on. There might have been other paths, but I didn't see them at the time.
Even if society has worked out some of these issues, we're sort of going through them again now with transexual issues. Again, I find myself struggling with problems that I don't fully understand - I've had an ex-coworker go through a transition and change pronouns, and then worked with two people after that in various stages of changing identity, and I still have a ways to go in trying to express acceptance in the proper way, when the tendency is to want to ask questions that I have no right to ask, and wouldn't affect me anyway if I knew the answers. I'm just trying to live and let live now, since I don't have a dog in that fight, so to speak. And since I don't have kids, I don't have to worry about who's teaching them or running their scout troop or who's serving next to them in the military. I've tapped out of this issue, politically and morally I'm just going to hang back and sort of see where the dust settles, for the most part. I mean, I'll stand against oppression and bigotry if I have to, I'm just hoping that it doesn't come down to that. What's the term for being sympathetic to a cause without getting directly involved?
Also starring Shirley MacLaine (last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), James Garner (last seen in "How Sweet It Is!"), Miriam Hopkins (last seen in "The Chase"), Fay Bainter (last seen in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"), Karen Balkin, Veronica Cartwright (last seen in "Just Married"), Mimi Gibson (last seen in "Houseboat"), William Mims (also last seen in "The Chase"), Sally Brophy, Hope Summers (last seen in "Rosemary's Baby").
RATING: 5 out of 10 elocution classes
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