The Children’s Hour Review (1961)
Director: William Wyler
Writers: John Michael Hayes, Lillian Hellman (play)
Starring: Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, James Garner, Miriam Hopkins, Fay Bainter, Karen Balkin
Release Date: 1961
The Children’s Hour is part of my ongoing Audrey Hepburn rewatch series, and it sits at number five on my Top 5 Audrey Hepburn Films list. Going in I knew it had a reputation as one of her more serious dramatic performances. What I didn’t fully appreciate until I sat down with it again is just how much of a gut punch the whole thing is from start to finish.
William Wyler directed, and this was actually his second time adapting Lillian Hellman’s play. The first version, These Three (1936), had to completely change the central scandal because the Hays Code wouldn’t allow the original subject matter anywhere near a Hollywood production. By 1961 things had loosened up enough to tell the story Hellman actually wrote, and Wyler clearly felt he had unfinished business with it.
The setup is straightforward enough. Karen Wright (Hepburn) and Martha Dobie (MacLaine) are the headmistresses of a small private school for girls that they built together from the ground up. Their biggest disciplinary problem is Mary Tilford (Karen Balkin), a manipulative, calculating twelve-year-old who is the granddaughter of the most influential woman in town. When Mary gets disciplined for lying, she goes home to her grandmother and tells a much bigger lie — she claims she witnessed something unnatural between her two teachers. The grandmother pulls Mary out of the school immediately and gets every other parent to do the same. Karen and Martha bring a slander suit and lose. And then it gets worse from there.
What makes the film work as well as it does is that Wyler keeps the focus on what the lie costs these two women rather than on the lie itself. The school they spent years building disappears practically overnight. Karen’s engagement to Dr. Joe Cardin (James Garner) starts to crack under the weight of suspicion even though he clearly doesn’t want it to. And Martha starts to unravel in a way that goes deeper than just the professional destruction, which MacLaine handles with a quiet devastation that is genuinely difficult to watch.
Hepburn and MacLaine are both excellent here, and the interesting thing is how differently they play it. Hepburn’s Karen is steady, dignified, and holds herself together through sheer force of will even as everything falls apart around her. MacLaine’s Martha is the one carrying something heavier underneath the surface, and the film slowly peels that back over the course of the second half. They work beautifully together and you completely believe in the friendship at the center of it, which is essential because without that the whole film collapses.
Garner deserves mention too. He tends to get overlooked in discussions of this movie because Hepburn and MacLaine are so dominant, but he does strong work as a man who is trying to do the right thing and keeps finding that the situation won’t let him. There’s a scene where he confronts his aunt — the one witness who could have helped Karen and Martha in court and didn’t — that he handles with a controlled fury that really lands.
The film is very much a product of its time, and that’s worth acknowledging. Watching it today the social machinery that makes the lie so catastrophic feels more distant than it would have to a 1961 audience, and that changes the texture of it somewhat. What doesn’t change is how well constructed the drama is and how committed the performances are. The ending is earned and it is bleak, and Wyler doesn’t try to soften it or give you anything to feel better on the way out.
That’s the right call. Some stories don’t have a happy ending, and this is one of them.
If you’ve never seen, you can watch it for free with ads on YouTube right now. But really, it deserves a spot on the shelf of your DVD/Bluray collection.
The Children’s Hour gets a four out of five: COMMENDABLE.
If you enjoyed this one, you might also like to check out my review of The Glass House (2001) from the Leelee Sobieski rewatch series, or Lars and the Real Girl (2007), starring Ryan Gosling. Or click here to check out more movie reviews.
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