The Children's Hour

[Calvin]

June 18th

Based on Lillian Hellman's ground-breaking 1934 play and nominated for 5 Academy Awards. The Children's Hour is set at an exclusive girl's school managed by best friends Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. When a badly behaved student starts rumours that her teachers are in a lesbian relationship, there are serious and tragic repercussions for everyone involved.

Directed by William Wyler (Ben Hur, Roman Holiday) and co-starring James Garner as Hepburn's boyfriend, The Children's Hour still stands as a powerful indictment of the malice of lies and rumours in society. This is the first time the film is available on Blu-ray in the UK.

Special features:

Presented in High Definition and Standard Definition
Extras TBC
Fully illustrated booklet featuring new writing on the film and full film credits

[Randall Maysin]

And These Three isn't an extra. That's the film I want to see, and from what I've heard about these two film's respective levels of being a good film or not, The Children's Hour should probably be an extra for These Three.

[kompromiss]

Well, I've received blu-ray from Kino Lorber only two days ago. What a lamentable coincidence!

[Lost Highway]

And These Three isn't an extra. That's the film I want to see, and from what I've heard about these two film's respective levels of being a good film or not, The Children's Hour should probably be an extra for These Three.

The changes required by the Hays Code to adapt the play, means that paradoxically These Three has aged far better than the later film. The Children's Hour was one of many films of an era when homosexuality could first be mentioned on film, which proposed that

Spoiler

only a dead homosexual is a good homosexual.

Despite my admiration for its two stars, The Children's Hour so overwrought, I find it impossible to watch now.

[domino harvey]

These Three was released in 1936 at the height of Code enforcement in the early years when Hollywood tripped over itself to comply. The Childrens Hour goes way farther, regardless of what one thinks of the ending (which david hare spoiled unprompted and un-spoiler-tagged in an unrelated thread years before I even saw it-- not that I'm still bitter about that or anything...), and at worst it's an intriguing curio of changing Hollywood approaches to taboo topics. Also still has one of the greatest taglines ever.

[domino harvey]

From Twitter. What a comparatively obscure reference for what I gather to be an emergent meme format that nevertheless has a few hundred likes