I’ve never considered Shirley MacLaine a great actress—decent, yes, but calling her great would be a stretch. Even in my favourite of her films, The Apartment, the real tour de force is Jack Lemmon. To be frank, if it weren’t for that tomboyish, girl-next-door charm, I might not have noticed her at all.
Audrey Hepburn, on the other hand, occasionally approached greatness, so I always looked forward to her films. You can imagine my excitement, then, at the prospect of seeing them together—especially in a picture highly rated on IMDb (7.8 out of 10, while The Apartment sits at 8.3).
What a disappointment The Children’s Hour turned out to be. It had all the ingredients for a powerful film: a controversial theme (for the time), a talented cast, a prized source play by Lillian Hellman, and a skilled director in William Wyler. Yet the result feels strangely inert.
The script tiptoes around its subject matter, and in striving to be tasteful and ‘serious’, it ends up emotionally muffled. Even Hepburn, with her quiet dignity, couldn’t save it. As for MacLaine—her bleached appearance and school-play emotionalism were the final straw. The film has neither aesthetic weight nor psychological depth, and I genuinely can’t understand what it’s praised for.
Someone once called it a ‘prestige picture’—a film that feels important rather than actually being important, the kind that gets praised for tackling difficult subjects while failing to do so with any real conviction or insight—and I couldn’t agree more.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
hidden pilcrow 