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Arthur Penn's art, flesh and blood and signs and senses. Out of Boston and into the Alabama manor, Anne Sullivan (Anne Bancroft) peers through tinted specs, "not lost, just out of place." Her charge is the young Helen Keller (Patty Duke), who lashes from inside her husk of blindness and deafness like a dervish. "One child teaching another" describes the apprenticeship, the gradual steering of mind and soul toward the discovery of language, one letter at a time. The opposing forces are pugnaciously matched: The Irish governess is an asylum alumnus who's made herself strong and at home with madness, the plantation girl is a feral protector of her own inner world and no stranger to violent mischief. The first clash unfolds around a breakfast table, grueling slapstick that leaves a demolished chamber and a famous punchline ("The room's a wreck but her napkin's folded"). A central work for Penn, his inarticulate outlaws and bemused parents reside within two women thrashing in the dark. His direction is a purposely unsettled transmutation of theater into film, or rather a proscenium continually splintered into flares of combative stimuli. (Fingers running over spilled ink or digging into food, a sudden slap, a memory bubbling up through a grainy filter, a grimace that changes into a grin and back.) The clenched fist that's also the beginning of the alphabet, Baudelaire's monstrous child, "the wonders of modern medicine" versus the eternal sightless night. The breakthrough at the water pump is the cracking of the chrysalis, and as ecstatic a system of vision and meaning as cinema itself. Truffaut in L'Enfant Sauvage has his own view of the entrance into civilization, Herzog in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is proudly on the side of chaos. Cinematography by Ernesto Caparros. With Victor Jory, Inga Swenson, Andrew Prine, and Kathleen Comegys. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |