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The influence on Penn's The Miracle Worker is at once seen, the toddler pays no mind to the squeaking toy and the crashing tray behind her back, "one of those interesting cases." Deafness is the condition of the eponymous six-year-old (Mandy Miller), her parents (Phyllis Calvert, Terence Morgan) must decide between London mansion and Manchester school. Alexander Mackendrick has a judiciously subjective camera on the grave moppet, the world at large is watched through a grilled fence, she ventures out only to flinch from the wrath of the truck driver who nearly runs her over. Mum moves into the school, the disgruntled integrity of the headmaster (Jack Hawkins) is mistaken for extramarital attention. "If you have any pity to spare then give it to the child. Don't waste it on yourself." A frank delicacy suffuses the portrait, virtually a Rossetti poem for the screen. To connect sign and meaning is arduous work, the breakthrough comes when a frustrated scream is seized for its vibrations, sound bounces off a balloon and a light dawns on the girl's face. "Do you know, it's like seeing the door of a cage beginning to open." The scrupulous timbre is close to Lewton's The Curse of the Cat People, Reed's The Fallen Idol is felt in the private realms of the young opposite adulthood's uncomprehending entanglements. The stagnant order comically skewered in The Man in the White Suit is summarized in a turned-away image out of Dalí or Magritte, the tentative new beginning rests with the tiny figure walking in the distance as the camera tracks through an open gateway. Mackendrick furthers the theme in Sammy Going South and A High Wind in Jamaica. With Godfrey Tearle, Marjorie Fielding, Nancy Price, Edward Chapman, Patricia Plunkett, and Eleanor Summerfield. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |