The Miracle Worker is built around two performances so good, and works so well when it focuses on those performances, that you can forget how shaky it is when it doesn’t. Maybe that’s why, despite winning Oscars for Anne Bancroft for Best Actress and Patty Duke for Supporting Actress, and getting nominated for Arthur Penn’s direction and William Gibson’s script (based on his play, which was based on his television play), it was actually passed over for Best Picture in favor of bigger, splashier films like The Music Man, The Longest Day, and Mutiny on the Bounty. It might be better than at least one of those films, and the Academy might’ve been swayed by size and expense—it wouldn’t have been the first time.
But maybe, on some level, they could tell that the film as a whole didn’t quite add up, that it was a decent telling of a great story, elevated by its leads but not by much else. It’s still a good film, at the very top of *** for me, but it’s too uneven, too reliant on those two performances to go higher.
The story is one you probably know: in the 1880s, Annie Sullivan (Bancroft), a graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind, is hired to teach young Helen Keller (Duke), who has been blind and deaf since early childhood. Her doting parents, Arthur (Victor Jory) and Kate (Inga Swenson), have had little success reaching through to her, and as she grows older, her lack of discipline (borne of her parents’ sense of pity) and her struggle to perceive the world around her have made her behavior increasingly difficult to control. Sullivan, who struggles with her own poor eyesight and the demons of her past, finds herself with her hands full.
Finally determining that the Kellers’ interference will keep her from making any progress, Sullivan asks to live alone with Helen in a hunting lodge on the family property, where she can apply her methods day and night. She only seems to make incremental progress, and only when it seems as if her work will all be undone does Helen make the famous connection of water to the word “water” as spelled with Sullivan’s manual alphabet. The miracle has been worked; the rest is history.
From the very beginning, the strengths and weaknesses of The Miracle Worker are readily apparent. The opening scene, where the Kellers discover that Helen has lost her sight and hearing, goes frightfully over the top, as Kate snaps her fingers desperately, screams for Arthur (generally referred to as “Captain”), and when he rushes into the room, screams her lines such that they can hardly be understood (“Not an eyelash!”). She continues screaming her lines and despairing in the background while Arthur starts bellowing Helen’s name and clapping like Charles Foster Kane as the scene fades out. It’s just too overplayed, too frantically paced, and it throws the film off from the start.
But the opening credits sequence which follows, with its striking B&W imagery showing the growing Helen groping blindly through the world backed by Laurence Rosenthal’s spare, woodwind-heavy score (which swells effectively when necessary), is so much better, especially the image of the falling Christmas ornament—our first hint at Helen’s tendency to destroy objects in moments of frustration and anger—that it gets the film back on track.
However, it remains uneven, moving between moments of great power, overwrought melodrama, and odd farce. Penn would later perfect this mixture of comedy and drama in Bonnie and Clyde, but here, perhaps because he was just a bit too close to the material (having directed both the original television drama and the original Broadway production of the play), he lets the comedy and much of the drama go too far over the top. Likewise, his specifically cinematic touches, many reflecting the French New Wave influences which would likewise reach full flower in Bonnie, often come off as self-conscious and unintentionally funny.
Take the farcical sequence where Helen locks Sullivan in her room, and Arthur must set up a ladder to retrieve her, complete with Sullivan grabbing onto Arthur’s face with comic effect. It’s all just a bit too goofy for its own good. Or take Sullivan’s flashbacks to her tragic childhood, portrayed with dim, grainy images and echoing voiceover. It’s clear what Penn and cinematographer Ernesto Caparrós were going for, but the effect is more silly than haunting.
But compare that to scenes like the great breakfast scene, where Sullivan and Helen fight for minutes on end, Sullivan determined to get Helen to eat with something like normal table manners, and Helen, used to helping herself from everyone else’s plates and to being consoled by her mother whenever she’s upset, resenting every second of it. It’s grueling to watch, unflinchingly performed and shot (much of it with a handheld camera), and even rather funny, especially when Sullivan flings a bucket of water into the sulking Helen’s face and Helen leaps to her feet, spitting furiously.
Or the most famous scene, when Sullivan drags Helen from the dinner table to fill a pitcher with water (after Helen has flung it in her face), and Helen, feeling the water on her hand, suddenly has the moment of insight which breaks through the darkness and silence and calls back the one word she can speak, “Wah…wah.” Sullivan realizes what’s happening, and Helen starts running around the yard, eagerly demanding the names for the ground, the porch, the pump, and so forth, all of which Sullivan tells her, her heart and ours pounding as the music swells and she cries for the Kellers to come and see. And it works magnificently, landing perfectly where so many of the other scenes in this vein stumble.
It helps that these scenes are built almost entirely around Bancroft and Duke, and I really can’t say how much their work makes the film. I’d thought it was a bit odd that Bancroft won, because the “inspirational teacher” archetype, at least as a lead, tends to be a more common nominee than a winner; such characters are usually relatively static and serve to support their more compelling students, whether or not those students get nominated. But Sullivan is no mere inspirational figure; she’s got her own arc, her own demons to battle, her own determination to get through to Helen, her own struggle against both Helen’s blindness and deafness and the Kellers’ indulgent parenting.
Bancroft had played the role on stage and Penn had to fight for her, accepting a much lower budget in exchange for casting her over a bigger name (apparently Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor were considered). He was validated, of course, not just by the Oscar but by her sincere, witty, tender performance. She makes Sullivan’s sardonic quips work as well as her urgent attempts to get Helen to understand her, and she conveys her anger and frustration as movingly as her love and empathy (though when she desperately asks “How can I reach you” it’s hard not to hear Cartman saying “How can I reach these kids,” even if that was spoofing a whole different inspirational-teacher film). It’s not a faultless performance—her Irish accent is a bit dodgy—but she really is very good and I can’t say she didn’t deserve the Oscar.
A side note: the accent work in this film is all over the place. Bancroft’s passable Irish accent, Swenson and Jory’s iffy Southern accents, Jack Hollander’s over-the-top Greek accent as Mr. Anagnos, or the way over-the-top Irish accents from the child actors voicing young Sullivan and her brother…the film is a bit of a mess of vocal approaches, and the rather poor sound on the DVD (and the lack of subtitles) meant that I had to rewatch several scenes multiple times to fully make out what was being said.
Anyhow, if Bancroft is very good, Duke is incredible, and one has to wonder if Penn’s nomination was at least partially in recognition of how seamless her performance is (not unlike how Lenny Abrahamson’s surprise nomination for Room was probably in part a recognition of his work with Jacob Tremblay). Duke had also played the role on stage, and indeed the studio had doubts about her casting simply because she was already in her teens, but as with Bancroft Penn stuck to his guns and was proven right. Playing characters with physical and/or mental handicaps for the sake of awards recognition is an out-and-out cliché, but Duke is one case where the awards were fully merited.
It would’ve been so easily for her grasping, her desperate grunts and cries, her blank stares, her tantrums, and all the other elements of her performances to come off as hollow mannerisms, as practiced tics, but Duke never lets that happen. There’s a rawness to her work, a ferocity that keeps it from feeling rehearsed or contrived, but there’s also that grasp of Helen’s intelligence and humanity, of her desperate need to understand what’s going on around her and to communicate with her family, that keeps it from being an empty piece of physicality. It’s a stunning performance, and even considering the competition (namely Angela Lansbury’s amazing villainous performance in The Manchurian Candidiate, one of my favorite films of all time), she deserved to win.
The rest of the cast, however, is a mixed bag at best. Swenson has her moments, to be sure; it’s a very sincere performance, and at her best you get a fine sense of the mother who just wants to help her daughter, but can’t bear to be strict with her. Unfortunately, too much of the performance screams “Actor’s Studio,” especially her overripe accent and her overly practiced deliveries (“Let her come!” is a particularly hammy example). As for Jory, by this point he’d been in Hollywood for over 30 years, and his performance definitely lapses into old-fashioned blustering, especially of the comic variety (Arthur Keller is the kind of gruff father whose bark is lovably worse than his bite). He likewise has his good moments, especially when he doesn’t push for effect, but his work further underlines the film’s tonal issues.
The most successful supporting turn, as it is, is Andrew Prine as Helen’s older half-brother James. The character of James shifts to suit the needs of the story; he’s mostly a sarcastic foil to the other characters, especially Sullivan, but at the climax he defies Arthur on behalf of Sullivan, demanding that his father consider the possibility for once that he could be wrong. Prine, however, plays his comic moments deftly and naturally and his dramatic moments comparably well; his performance simply rings much truer than Swenson’s or Jory’s.
Gibson’s script is, as I’ve touched upon throughout, a mixed bag, and some of the scenes which don’t work too well, like the flashbacks, fall short as much because of his writing as because of Penn’s direction. But when he sticks to the story that we all came to see, when he sticks to the two characters who battle each other and need each other in equal measure, when he explores that dynamic and lets it blossom, it works very well indeed. I can’t compare the film to the play because I haven’t seen the latter in many years; ironically, the only scene of the play I remember is James recoiling from Helen’s attempts to read his lips by feeling them as he speaks, a scene which isn’t in the film at all.
The play continues to be revived (there was a critically-acclaimed if short-lived production on Broadway in 2010), and the film was remade for television twice, once in 1979 with Duke taking on the role of Sullivan. It’s a story which endures and the telling is solid enough, especially if you’ve got two leads who can do it justice, to merit that. This version shouldn’t be seen as truly definitive, but it should be seen, if only for those performances.
Score: 76
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