JohnHowardReid Copyright 1956 by Loew's Inc. An M-G-M Picture. New York opening at the Radio City Music Hall: 27 September 1956. U.S. release: 28 September 1956. U.K. release: 20 October 1957 (sic). Australian release: 8 April 1957. 10,977 feet. 122 minutes.SYNOPSIS: A re-make of John Van Druten's "Young Woodley" (1925), in which a mature schoolboy has a romance with his housemaster's wife, transferred to an American setting and brought up to date.NOTES: BIP released a film version of "Young Woodley" in 1930. Van Druten himself collaborated on the screenplay with Victor Kendall, whilst Thomas Bentley directed. Madeleine Carroll, Frank Lawton and Sam Livesey played the roles now enacted by Deborah Kerr, John Kerr and Leif Erickson.Robert Anderson's Broadway play opened at the Barrymore on 30 September 1953 and ran a highly successful 712 performances (though Joan Fontaine and Anthony Perkins took over from the original leads in the course of the run). It's fair to say that the stage play resembles "Young Woodley" far less than the film version. Deborah Kerr (in her Broadway debut), John Kerr and Leif Erickson played the roles they repeated for the film. Elia Kazan directed.Aided by the play's reputation and an all-out publicity campaign, "Tea and Sympathy" was most successful at the box-office, though not rating with the top ten money-makers of the year. Considering the film's comparatively small budget (it took only six weeks to shoot), M-G-M would have made a tidy profit. CinemaScope, I feel, didn't help the box-office by so much a single admission. Certainly Minnelli fails to use the process 95% of the time, being content to frame all his action center-camera.Number 9 in the Film Daily's annual poll of American film critics.VIEWER'S GUIDE: As an indication of just how far the play has been diluted, I would be inclined to rate the movie version as suitable for all but the most impressionable children.COMMENT: Although regarded by many critics (not this one) as a landmark film in its day, there can surely be no doubt it has dated badly. True, the central situation still has some elements of truth and close-to-the-bone realism, but the characters are so uncompromisingly one-dimensional they seem to have strayed on to the stage from a one-act farce not a three-deck morality play. Worse, they are unsympathetically and theatrically over-played. It's hard to say who is the worst offender, though the two Kerrs certainly run each other close. You can't say they do their best with the characters as written. They do their worst. Every false bit of business, every artificial gesture, every phony catch in the voice — all these techniques are ruthlessly, systematically and insensitively employed. The rest of the players are likewise hammy caricatures.Minnelli's direction does not help. He has an eye and ear for urban social chatter, but he overdoes these effects. The acting of the extras is just as overblown as that of the principals and featured players."Tea and Sympathy" does have something to say about non-conformity which is still relevant. But the approach both of the play and even more particularly the film is crassly pedestrian.A fair amount of effort has been made to open out the play. All the same, by M-G-M's "A" standards, production values are meager.

rgcustomer The story can be interpreted in multiple ways, and that is exactly the nature of the closet. Knowing that, the best interpretation becomes clear.Understanding this film today is a bit easier, because we have so many examples all around us of the effects of homophobia/transphobia, and the false protection of the closet.From Larry Craig to Ted Haggard to Roy Ashburn to Jim McGreevy, the papers are full of a parade of "opposite-married" homosexuals, who thought that love or at least marriage or having children would suppress their natural desires, and the public's knowledge of them. Most of these men are also publicly anti-gay until being exposed as hypocrites.And similarly from Jaheem Herrera to Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover to Eric Mohat to Tyler Clementi to Seth Walsh to Asher Brown, and on and on, the obituaries are filled with younger kids now bullied to suicide for being, or for appearing to be, gay or trans. The openness around homosexuality has also made it easier to become a target.My interpretation of the film is that a neglected wife (married to a closet case herself) feels a predatory "cougar" attraction to a vulnerable young gay man not liked by many other people. Like everyone else in the film, she probably believes she can change him, and have a fling for herself at the same time. She loves him, but she also uses him. After they kiss, everything else is just glossed over, and we are left to fill in the details with our imaginations, and some narration.Although the scandal with Laura helped him (better to be "the other man" than gay, right?) and although Tom marries (a woman) to end the suspicion around him, he doesn't live a happy life. We never really see him with any woman after that. Like Bill, he remains alone, because he's never permitted to embrace his true desires.Interestingly, his name is Tom Robinson Lee. Tom Robinson is also the name of the bisexual singer of "Glad to be Gay".

writers_reign Time has been less than kind to this movie which must appear as something of a cross between satire and parody to an audience today. In 1953 on Broadway Robert Anderson's play - featuring the three principals from the film, Deborah Kerr, John Kerr and Leif Ericson - was a sensitive treatment of a still sensitive subject and even in 1956 Anderson was forced to sanitize his screen adaptation; in the play Tom albeit naively has been swimming in the nude with a Music teacher who subsequently lost his job, a much sounder - though still slightly suspect - basis for marking him queer, and his nickname was 'Grace', based on nothing more sinister than his favourable comments about a Grace Moore movie. Here, Anderson substitutes the slightly bizarre 'Sister Boy' for Grace. Perhaps the worst sin of all is the framing device whereby Tom attends a Class Reunion as a grown man and then thinks back to his time as a tormented schoolboy, but worse is to come; in the play Anderson came up with one of the all-time Great curtain lines: In a mixture of compassion, admiration and a need to make Tom realise that he is NOT gay she offers herself to him with the lines 'years from now, when you talk about this ... and you will, be kind'. Minnelli includes both scene and line - albeit switching the location from indoors to outdoors - but then instead of FADE OUT he returns to the present with Tom calling in to see Kerr's house-master husband who gives him a letter that Laura has mailed from wherever she is. The letter serves to tell us that Tom is now married (so he CAN'T be gay, right) and has written a book about his time at the school and his relationship with Laura. Totally unnecessary and making what once must have been a half-decent film even more risible.

MarieGabrielle This film came to audiences at a rather schizophrenic time, things were changing, but not that much. Roles were assimilated, but not too drastically. People were questioning things, as long as it wasn't radical.Women were still patronized, there were still clear role boundaries (witness the scene where Tom is knitting and catches derision for spending ten minutes in a sewing circle.) Not sure why that was a crime of the century, but whatever.Deborah Kerr is tender and memorable as an unhappy wife to the school master at a prep school who realizes her marriage is a sham. She realizes this when she sympathizes with a student and resident at her home, a confused young man who simply is shy and has doubts about his future. There are some nuances regarding sexuality, but in all honesty that was a side-story, from what I inferred.The message I take away from this film is not simply about ostracism and hatred; Minnelli as director also addresses female emotion, the reasons why Kerr empathizes with the young man, and how he eventually moves on. In the long rung, it is life affirming, although rather opaque in its message.Discrimination and hatred take many forms, and sometimes the subtler forms are most repellent. Highly recommended. 8/10.