“The Children’s Hour” and Its Miserable Queer Messaging

Both films were adapted from Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play “The Children’s Hour.” But there’s one distinct difference: the 1936 film completely erases the play’s core drama, while the 1961 film leans into it for shock value. Both films kind of suck, and are fascinating, and don’t make any sense. But only one of them is honest.

But These Three doesn’t work, because it’s only half a movie. Lillian Hellman’s original play was based on a real-life 1810 libel case brought by two teachers against a student, Jane Cummings, after Cummings alleged that her instructors were engaged in a lesbian relationship.

Lesbianism was the original subject of the story. But in 1936, two years after the establishment of the Hays Code, the only way to adapt the play for film was to erase the lesbian element altogether. That’s precisely what happened, and the result—a stiff, fairly depressing little movie about lonely people doing their best—is moving without really being about anything. It’s not really substantial as a love story, and even with the makeshift love triangle plot, you get the sense that Miriam Hopkins’ Martha has allowed some of the play’s original subtext to inform her performance. She casts tortured, wet-eyed looks at Merle Oberon and projects a kind of loneliness onscreen even when she’s surrounded by others. It’s a sapphic performance, even if the words aren’t there.

Because the thing about stories like this is that you can’t just erase the gayness out of them. It doesn’t make any sense. Even if we don’t know precisely what Martha’s yearning for, it feels like a queer kind of yearning. It’s something she can’t and won’t talk about, and something her whole body is struggling to hide whenever she’s onscreen. This, for Hopkins—who few would describe as an understated actress—is impressive. It’s a quiet performance that works, even if it’s not allowed to make real sense in this context.

Wyler’s 1961 remake is another matter. Pulling more scenes from the original play and leaning into more of its coded language, that film, coming out in a post-code golden era of “evil/pathetic homosexual” films¹, makes a lot more sense, even if it’s a much harder watch. In the remake, Miriam Hopkins joins the cast once more, this time taking the role of Martha (Shirley MacLaine’s) older aunt: a self-important, bloviating actress who constitutes Martha’s only real family. It’s Hopkins, this time, who gets to make the speech about “unnatural” friendships between women, and it’s she who helps to set the ball rolling, after Mary Tilford’s school friends overhear an argument between Martha and her aunt about the level of devotion Martha has for Karen (Audrey Hepburn this time.) The word “unnatural” is what the play hinges on. It’s this code word that gets Mary Tipton’s rich grandmother reeling after she’s told the story. The look on her face is fearful more than shocked when she hears Martha’s aunt talk about how strange it is that Martha has never had a boyfriend. Sure, she explains, lots of guys have tried, but Martha’s not interested in any of them. All she cares about is running the school with Karen.

Karen, however, is getting married to Dr. Cardin (a stiff, lifeless James Garner) and in this film, we get to see exactly what effect it’s having on Martha. She’s pissed, snapping at Cardin every time he comes over, screaming at him after he tells her that he and Karen have finally set a date for their engagement. She’s upset about the impending marriage and makes no bones about it. And when word gets out and all the parents take their kids out of school, Martha is the one who wants to file a libel suit. She’s also the one who knows that the rumor is true. That Mary Tilford told “the lie with the kernel of truth in it.”

She’s the one who has to kill herself at the end. We don’t get the happy ending of These Three, because the play was never meant to have a happy ending. It’s about gay people, after all.

When Lillian Hellmann was tasked with adapting her play—banned in Boston during its original opening—to film for Samuel Goldwyn, the matter of the lesbians had to be cleared up. “Hellmann’s assignment then,” writes Brett Elizabeth Westbrook for Bright Lights film journal, “was to dry-clean it, removing any and all “objectionable” material so that the Board of Review could bestow its approval.”

Suddenly they had a movie that could be shown: but did anyone want to see it? Not really. Audiences might not have sensed that there was a gay story hiding behind the insipid love triangle plot of These Three, but they could tell there was something missing. In 1961, they got it back. But at what cost? The one queer character, rather than come out at the end, hangs herself. Neither of these films are what you’d call “good” adaptations. They leave their queer characters stranded, alone, and in one case, dead. They favor melodrama over complexity, and lean into the horrified realizations of the straight characters rather than try and provoke empathy for the queer ones.

But what did anyone expect from these movies, anyway? They weren’t for or really about gay people. Today, they don’t feel like they’re for or about anyone. They’re just these weird, dangling curiosities that exist to show you what the world assumed you would do if God forbid you happened to be gay before 1970: sacrifice yourself to spare others the embarrassment of your presence.

I’ve talked before about how representation comes in waves. First, there’s erasure. Then comes bad visibility, then exploitation, and then, after that, (hopefully) good representation. I think a lot about what it might have been like to be gay during that moment. You could go to the movies and find yourself again, but where would you find yourself? In a jail cell, or an insane asylum, or at the end of a rope.

It wasn’t good enough for us, and it still isn’t.