The Children’s Hour is an old-school Audrey Hepburn film with Shirley MacLaine, based on a classic Lillian Hellman play. I was naturally inclined to attend a midday screening of it, because the story takes place at an all-girls New England boarding school in the 1950s and takes the central theme of The Crucible (vicious gossip) to a lesbian level.

Hepburn and MacLaine play the headmistresses who develop an unhealthily, codepent, platonic love for each other. A naughty young pupil tells her grandmother that the teachers are engaging in (debaucherous) lesbian acts. The rumor spreads, the girls are removed from the school, and the two women become social pariahs trapped alone in their drafty farmhouse-boarding-school.

MacLaine realizes that she is actually a lesbian, and the film ends with her suicide. Meanwhile, the dashing local doctor pines away after Hepburn, and watches her from behind a tree as she visits her best friend’s grave. The film’s message is both progressive and 1950s in nature: homosexuals are shamed to seclusion by the ignorance of society; homosexuals die of shame, at the end of their ropes (to put it gauchely).

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