Lillian Hellman Movies

This excellent biographical documentary looks at the life and work of director William Wyler. The film is dominated by clips from many of Wyler's better-known works, such as Roman Holiday, Ben-Hur, and Funny Girl. A long interview with the director himself (conducted a few days before he died) provides his personal perspective on his work and interviews with his actors and colleagues offer some surprising comments about the man. Terence Stamp feels Wyler may not have had a good command of English, while Laurence Olivier notes that Wyler taught him how to drop theatrical exaggerations and act for the camera. Bette Davis gives the most extensive commentary. Excerpts from home movies show Wyler and his family on vacation and also record a bit of the making of Wuthering Heights. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

All hell breaks loose in a Texas town when an escaped convict heads home in Arthur Penn's Southern gothic melodrama. Appointed by local kingpin Val Rogers (E. G. Marshall), benevolent Sheriff Calder (Marlon Brando) manages to keep the peace in Tarl, but the situation starts to fester one Saturday when news filters in that wild child Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford) has jumped prison. Bubber's impending arrival arouses hostility among Tarl's citizens, such as Edwin Stewart (Robert Duvall), who believes that Bubber will come after him to settle an old score, and Damon Puller (Richard Bradford), who, between grope sessions with Edwin's wife Emily (Janice Rule), uses Bubber as an excuse to terrorize black residents. As the atmosphere heats up, Calder wants to keep Bubber alive, and he convinces Bubber's wife Anna (Jane Fonda) and her lover, Val's son Jake (James Fox), to find Bubber and coax him into surrender. Val's fear that Bubber will kill his son, however, sparks a long confrontation that leaves rational law and order pummeled into the ground by the town's ignorant cruelty. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi

Based on the 1934 play by Lillian Hellman, The Children's Hour is set at an exclusive girl's school managed by best friends Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. When student Karen Balkin is punished for one of her many misdeeds, the mean-spirited youngster rushes to her wealthy aunt Fay Bainter, and, randomly choosing a phrase she has undoubtedly read in some magazine, accuses Hepburn and MacLaine of having an "unnatural relationship." As Balkin's lies grow in viciousness, the student's parents withdraw their children from the school. Hepburn and MacLaine sue Bainter for libel, only to lose their case when MacLaine's aunt Miriam Hopkins refuses to testify as a character witness. The trial takes its toll on the relationship between Hepburn and her boyfriend James Garner. When Bainter discovers that her niece has been lying, she tries to make amends, but it is too late. Director William Wyler had also helmed the first film version of Children's Hour, 1936's These Three, which due to censorship restrictions of the time did without the lesbian angle (the little girl's accusations involved a supposed romantic triangle between the two ladies and a male friend). Miriam Hopkins, who plays a supporting role in The Children's Hour, originally essayed the Shirley MacLaine role in These Three. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Another Part Of The Forest begins some twenty years before the events of Lillian Hellman's play and movie The Little Foxes and shows how that film's Hubbard family became the ruthless, greedy lot they were. It's fifteen years after the Civil War, and the Hubbards dominate their small Southern town financially, if not socially; The patriarch of the family (Fredric March) sold salt for $8 a pound to the Confederate Army at a time when they needed it most. Edmond O'Brien and Dan Duryea play his sons, the former as mean as his father, the latter and younger one a weakling. When the elder child finds out that his father was responsible for the death of Southern troops during the war, he threatens to expose the truth unless the family fortune is placed in his hands. In the end, only Hubbard's wife (Florence Eldridge) stands by her husband during his inevitable fall, and she banishes her own children from their house. Brilliant acting by all, especially March, Duryea, and O'Brien, plus a sharp script, make this unrelentingly grim melodrama fascinating to watch. ~ Don Kaye, Rovi

In this bit of WWII propaganda (designed to boost support of America's alliance with Russia against Germany), Kolya (Dana Andrews), Kurin (Walter Huston), Damian (Farley Granger), and Marina (Anne Baxter) are members of a farming collective in the Ukraine known as the North Star. The hard-working but happy members of the North Star find their way of life shattered when Germany, in defiance of previous treaties, storms the nation and begins a brutal occupation. Dr. Otto Von Harden (Erich Von Stroheim) begins gathering children -- who are to be used for blood transfusions and medical experiments. Many of the outraged farmers take to the hills to fight with the anti-Nazi resistance, while those who stay behind bravely destroy precious crops and materiel rather than turn them over to the Nazi war machine. Producer Samuel Goldwyn made The North Star at the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (whose son James was an executive at Goldwyn's studio). Ironically, several members of the film's creative team (including screenwriter Lilian Hellman) later found their motivations for making the film questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee, who declared it Communist propaganda. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Playwright Lillian Hellman first wrote of the horrible Hubbard family in her 1939 play The Little Foxes. In this lavish 1941 film version, Bette Davis takes over for Broadway's Tallulah Bankhead in the role of conniving turn-of-the-century Southern aristocrat Regina Hubbard Giddens. Regina's equally odious brothers (Charles Dingle and Carl Benton Reid) want her to lend them 75,000 dollars to help build a cotton mill. To do this, she must make peace with her long-estranged husband, Horace (Herbert Marshall) -- and failing that, she tries to arrange a wealthy marriage between her daughter, Alexandra (Teresa Wright), and her slimy nephew Leo (Dan Duryea). Horace refuses to give Regina the money, whereupon Leo is pressured by his father (Reid) to steal bonds from the family business. Regina uses this information as a means of blackmailing her brothers for a share in the new mill. In retaliation, Horace claims that he gave Leo the bonds as a loan, thereby cutting Regina out of the deal. When Horace suffers a heart attack, Regina makes no effort to give him his medicine, and he dies without revealing his willingness to loan the money to Leo. Regina is thus still able to strongarm her brothers into giving her a piece of the mill -- but the price for her evil machinations is the loss of her daughter's love and respect. The Little Foxes caused a censorship stir in 1941; by refusing to give Horace his medicine, Regina technically gets away with murder. However, the censors decided that Regina was punished enough when her daughter left her to marry an honest newspaperman (Richard Carlson). Given the usual Tiffany treatment by producer Sam Goldwyn, The Little Foxes was a success; several years later, Lillian Hellman wrote a "prequel" to The Little Foxes, titled Another Part of the Forest. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Lillian Hellman's 1934 Broadway play The Children's Hour was such a hot potato that film producer Samuel Goldwyn was denied Production Code permission to use the play's original title. The reason was the story's lesbian theme, a factor that also blocked The Children's Hour from winning a Pulitzer Prize. In the original story, lifelong friends Martha Dobie and Karen Wright manage an exclusive girl's boarding school. Spoiled rotten student Mary Tilford, angered at being disciplined, fabricates a story that casts a questionable light on the women's friendship. In attempting to defend themselves against the accusations of the little girl's wealthy and powerful aunt, Martha and Karen lose everything in court. By the time the girl has admitted her lie and the aunt has come to apologize, it is too late. After confessing that she has harbored "unnatural" feelings towards Martha, Karen commits suicide. In adapting her play to the screen, Lillian Hellman expertly weeded out all hints of lesbianism, and also eliminated Karen's self-inflicted death ("suicide as a plot solution" was another Production Code no-no). In the revised version, Mary Tilford (played with unbridled venom by Bonita Granville) spreads a rumor that Martha (Miriam Hopkins) has been carrying on an illicit affair with doctor Joseph Cardin (Joel McCrea), the boyfriend of Karen (Merle Oberon). The end result is essentially the same -- the school is destroyed, along with Martha and Karen's reputation -- but Karen manages to survive to fade-out time. In defending the evisceration of her play, Hellman defended herself by noting that her original point was not to force a lesbian subtext down the throats of the audience, but to show how a vicious lie -- any vicious lie -- can have disastrous consequences. While it makes a good story, it is probably not true that, when informed that the leading characters in The Children's Hour were lesbians, producer Goldwyn replied, "Who cares? We'll make them Americans." These Three was refilmed in 1961 by its director William Wyler, under its original title The Children's Hour, with Hellman's original text -- lesbianism and all -- intact; ironically, the censor-ridden earlier film is the far superior version. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi