by D Server

Created on: June 12, 2009

In 1934, Lillian Hellman wrote a play which appeared on Broadway that had the scandalous overtones of homosexuality. Nothing graphic was ever seen on stage and most of the matter was just vaguely discussed. But this was all far too daring for Hollywood and when the play was turned into a film a couple of years later called "These Three," all hints of homosexuality were dropped.

The rather unpleasant story of the play is about two young women who operate a school for girls who also reside at the location. One of the girls is particularly mean and bullies the others and at one point, when she doesn't get her way, she runs to her grandmother. She tells her a story about how mean the two women were to her and, desperate to be believed, makes up a story that she saw the two women engaged in lesbian activity. The grandmother believes her and immediately takes the child out of the school and gets all the other families to remove their girls, thus ruining the school and the lives of the two teachers. Eventually, the grandmother finds out that her granddaughter is lying and tries to makes reparations, but it is too late, at least for the women's personal lives. One of the women was engaged to be married, but the controversy eventually led to that being broken off. And then the other women admits that she actually had the kind of feelings for the other teacher that the child had described. Unable to bear the truth, she shoots herself (in the play, there is a gunshot offstage.)

For the movie, the story is changed so that the child tells her grandmother that she saw the fiancee of one of the teachers carrying on with the other woman. The whole homosexual storyline has been dropped, though the story proceeds in the same way, with the child's lies eventually being discovered. But for the movie, the ending is made much happier. The one woman and her fiancee are reunited in love, while the other woman does not kill herself. The much less grim ending does not fit the rather ugly nature of the story, but it fit the censorship requirements of the time.

The story was filmed again more than 25 years later, oddly with the same director, William Wyler. And one of the actresses who played one of the young women in"These Three," Miriam Hopkins, returned to play the very annoying dowager aunt. This version of the story, which used "The Children's Hour" title, was quite faithful to the play. In 1962, the year this movie was made, censorship in film had relaxed enough so that the subject of lesbianism could be dealt with. This version captured the more grim nature of the play than "These Three" and did not include a fake happy ending. The depiction of the suicide of the woman is changed from the more theatrical gunshot offstage in the play to the more cinematic view of the shadow of the woman's body hanging from a noose. Other than that, the story is not updated at all.

Perhaps the moral issues in this story seem dated at this time, since the issues involved would likely be dealt with much differently today. But in its time, the subject matter was highly controversial if not scandalous.

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