If you only ever see one black and white movie in your lifetime, let it be “The Children’s Hour.”
I know that a monochromatic film adaptation of an old play that you could read a synopsis of on Sparknotes doesn’t sound like the most enticing use for your Saturday afternoon, but trust me. It may not be the best of its time – it isn’t romantic like “Casablanca” or charming like “Bringing Up Baby” – but I would say that it is the most contemporarily relevant of the black and white films.
If you’ve heard of “The Children’s Hour,” it’s probably because of its place as a trailblazer for LGBTQ+ media. It was the first Hollywood film to address homosexuality outright, and in 1961, that was a pretty major undertaking (just as it was for the source material’s debut in 1934). Hollywood had long censored and silenced films that tackled controversial subject matter, but by the sixties, that behavior coming to a close. “Men in White” had alluded to abortion directly in the plot as early as 1938 (albeit in a way that demonized it heavily), and “The Outlaw” took its place in Hollywood as the most heavily sexualized film of its time in 1943. The conservative barriers of cinema had already been challenged and broken down in many ways. By the time “The Children’s Hour” came to the silver screen, homosexuality was the last item on a checklist of untouched Hollywood taboos.
That said, the plot is…interesting. The film centers on two women, Karen and Martha, who are longtime best friends. They direct and teach at a boarding school for girls. One day, a young problem student becomes disgruntled at being punished by the teachers for her bad behavior. To get back at them, the child pitches a tantrum and tells her grandmother that Karen and Martha are lovers. The grandmother takes the child at her word, tells the rest of the town, and the next thing they know, Martha and Karen are subject to persecution, both societal and legal. Once the rumor is out, there is no coming back from it. Their lives are torn apart over the accusation; they lose their business, their friends, their position, even each other.
What is important to note here though, is that the women are not a couple. Even further, their sexual orientations are never explicitly stated. Karen is decidedly straight, and she maintains this through her consistent relationship with a man, whom she truly loves. Martha, however, is a bit more ambiguous; she DOES say that she has had some feelings for Karen and that she feels some guilt about them, but we never know for sure what her identity becomes. She could be bisexual, a lesbian, an asexual romantic, the list goes on. At best, Martha is questioning. What we DO know for sure is that she is somewhere on the spectrum of non-heterosexual.
So both of these women’s sexualities are ambiguous at best. And yet, the label of “lesbian” costs them everything.
What gets me about this film isn’t the idea of varied sexual orientations in a heteronormative world. Honestly, for being such a trailblazer of gay content, the film does a pretty terrible job of handling queer identity (as one would expect from mainstream media in the sixties). What killed me was that, once the label had been placed, it didn’t matter whether it was true.
We as viewers know that Martha and Karen have never acted imprudently, by our standards OR the standards of the day. We’ve seen the whole business come to pass from Karen and Martha’s perspective, and we know that they are, by all measures, innocent. The twist of the knife isn’t in the truth; it’s in the undoing of these women through one person’s bad judgment. No one ever asks Karen or Martha if there is any truth to what’s been said; in fact, no one in their town would speak to them at all. All it took was one influential enough person making up her mind about a label, and these two women’s lives were over.
The nature of human intelligence is that we work on the knowledge we have. We all use titles for things every day, titles that we had to learn. Our brains are label-makers, placing words to everything we cannot otherwise comprehend. This is not inherently a bad thing; we need labels to exist. There is a perfectly sound reason that we all agree that the sky is whatever “blue” is. The function of language is to be a bridge between what we see and what we can process, and it is.
But once we’ve made up our mind about what those identifiers mean, it is hard to change the definitions. Once you have it in your head that the sky is blue, you are going to be very dismissive of anyone who would call it purple. Which is fine, until you use a term wrongly, and then your automatic reflex is to defend your stance to the point of not acknowledging the other person’s statement. This is bad enough (and common enough) as is, but it becomes exponentially worse when terms like “retard” or “terrorist” or “faggot” find themselves in your lexicon of regularly used identifiers.
This is precisely what “The Children’s Hour” sets out to undermine. A label should never sum up the full complexity of what it identifies, nor should it ever be a substitute for complex knowledge of a situation. Words have power, and we see the worst possible instances of this in the film: both when they are used to communicate lies, and when they are used to silence others.
What was revolutionary about “The Children’s Hour” wasn’t how it dealt with being gay, it was in how queerness was a non-issue in comparison to the uncalled for the hatred that rose up in its opposition. The film does a genius thing in that it places homosexuality, which was conceived as a societal evil in the period in which the film was made, and placed it besides the true evils of ignorance, gossip, and quick judgment. Through this juxtaposition, we can see how silly the slander of the town seems in the face of what they are putting these poor women through. The fact that gayness should be a non-issue only adds another layer of fuel to the fire. By the time we get to the end of the film, none of us care whether Karen or Martha are gay. We care about the human lives at the root of the circumstance.
“The Children’s Hour” is not the best film ever made. It isn’t even really that good, as far as movies go. There isn’t anything outstanding in how it is shot, how it is directed, or how the screenplay was adapted (in fact, I have gripes, but that’s another article). However, it gave LGBTQ+ issues a grand entry into the mainstream in its acknowledgment that at the end of the day, a person's orientation doesn’t matter. Decency between human beings matters.
The film states it in black and white. Humanity, in the end, is all that matters.
