Any movie that's fresh, advanced, forward-looking, in impression or technique, usually pushes further than almost all other mainstream movies sharing the same era or genre, which is to say: too far for some tastes. The innocuousness of most of our movies is received with such stock expectations that when an American movie goes outside that box to pull a real reaction out of us, it tends to pull that same reaction out of the trends in mainstream movies as well. So, as Arthur Penn's work would build open famously shortly hereafter, The Miracle Worker is a film that rages where most biopics tread softly. The showpiece is a one-room, nine-minute battle of wear and tear, as the teacher forces table manners on her untamed ward. It's a shatter-and-batter melee bursting at the seams, played out with thoroughgoing diligence.
Likewise remarkable is Penn's sense of familial histrionics on a postwar Southern estate. Despite its complicated genesis through a range of mediums including real life, the story of Helen Keller in film form, an understandably intimidating notion, nevertheless outclasses many true stories and stage adaptations in the domain of visual technique. Penn creates clever, lasting flourishes of cinematic storytelling and atmosphere-sculpting. The calculated, leisurely dissolves, focal changes, filtering and use of light augment the well-known story in depth.
There are occasions when two actresses are so in step with each other, they seem like they're but one character and one performance. Such is the situation with The Miracle Worker starring Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan a weak-sighted teacher struggling to reach blind and deaf Helen Keller played by the gifted young Patty Duke. They collaborate like few performers can, drawing us into their challenged rapport and keeping us stuck to their triumphs and catastrophes. While Duke's hardly been a solid presence in film or TV over the past thirty years, there was little misgiving of her flair and skill. Bancroft, though, sustained an outstanding career for several decades, and her performance in The Miracle Worker is astonishing for its precise vividness and emotional reverberation. Neither role lacked hefty challenges and both actresses surrendered exceptional career-making and ultimately Oscar-winning performances.
Penn was a sharp leader of actors, but his work was always powerfully dynamic and state-of-the-art because of his exemplary equilibrium of attention to visual motifs and filling the atmosphere of a movie with an emotional grab of the our collars. The Miracle Worker was made in 1962, and maybe it's not the byzantine audiovisual takeover of The Manchurian Candidate, but Penn does nevertheless employ some camera, cutting and focal techniques, resulting in the story being told through the truly agitated emotional situation of Annie Sullivan. Her coarse, translucent flashbacks bring us first-hand into Sullivan's visually-impaired world. And I'll never forget those various cross-dissolves panning around and around on a loop. Or how characters will sit in silhouette in their respective moments of doubt and vulnerability.
Likewise remarkable is Penn's sense of familial histrionics on a postwar Southern estate. Despite its complicated genesis through a range of mediums including real life, the story of Helen Keller in film form, an understandably intimidating notion, nevertheless outclasses many true stories and stage adaptations in the domain of visual technique. Penn creates clever, lasting flourishes of cinematic storytelling and atmosphere-sculpting. The calculated, leisurely dissolves, focal changes, filtering and use of light augment the well-known story in depth.
There are occasions when two actresses are so in step with each other, they seem like they're but one character and one performance. Such is the situation with The Miracle Worker starring Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan a weak-sighted teacher struggling to reach blind and deaf Helen Keller played by the gifted young Patty Duke. They collaborate like few performers can, drawing us into their challenged rapport and keeping us stuck to their triumphs and catastrophes. While Duke's hardly been a solid presence in film or TV over the past thirty years, there was little misgiving of her flair and skill. Bancroft, though, sustained an outstanding career for several decades, and her performance in The Miracle Worker is astonishing for its precise vividness and emotional reverberation. Neither role lacked hefty challenges and both actresses surrendered exceptional career-making and ultimately Oscar-winning performances.
Penn was a sharp leader of actors, but his work was always powerfully dynamic and state-of-the-art because of his exemplary equilibrium of attention to visual motifs and filling the atmosphere of a movie with an emotional grab of the our collars. The Miracle Worker was made in 1962, and maybe it's not the byzantine audiovisual takeover of The Manchurian Candidate, but Penn does nevertheless employ some camera, cutting and focal techniques, resulting in the story being told through the truly agitated emotional situation of Annie Sullivan. Her coarse, translucent flashbacks bring us first-hand into Sullivan's visually-impaired world. And I'll never forget those various cross-dissolves panning around and around on a loop. Or how characters will sit in silhouette in their respective moments of doubt and vulnerability.