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(More customer reviews)The most amazing thing about the film version of "The Miracle Worker" is its absolutely timeless quality. It still holds up beautifully for a film that's almost 40 years old.
I've seen "The Miracle Worker" probably a dozen times. And it never gets tiring, boring, or unemotional. In fact, I dare say that after each viewing, I pick up more details and the tears still come neither cheaply yet more freely than they did when I first saw it years ago.
The Oscar-winning performances by Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke are shattering, the grainy flashback and dream sequences involving Bancroft's character, Annie Sullivan are wonderfully spooky -- and the fabulously haunting score by Laurence Rosenthal adds a perfect counterbalance to "The Miracle Worker," bringing emotional resonance to an otherwise purposely unsentimental telling of the Helen Keller story. Yet while I say it's unsentimental, the ending is arguably sentimental, which is why the devastating last 10 minutes are so wonderful. The film covers only the short period leading up to Helen Keller's breakthrough to others as a child of intelligence -- instead of a child who's incorrectly believed to be mentally handicapped.
Director Arthur Penn, who later went onto to lens his classic, "Bonnie and Clyde (1967), did a wonderful thing translating William Gibson's play to the visual language of cinema. There isn't a flaw I can detect with this film, especially his pans, dissolves, double exposures and grainy images with the dream sequences. It's a remarkable portend of things to come for this director, and frankly, I enjoy "The Miracle Worker" a lot more than "Bonnie and Clyde," an acknowledged classic that for me, is more recognized for its counter-establishment storytelling style and the shocking violence depicted at the time. That "Bonnie and Clyde" made the American Film Institute's "greatest 100 films ever made list" and the "Miracle Worker" did not is the greater shock. If you go over the list and see some of the junky films that made it on the basis of "name" instead of quality, you almost retch.
Sharing the New York stage with Patty Duke in 1960, and the producer's insistence that Bancroft be kept as the lead for the film version of "The Miracle Worker" -- over bankable names like Elizabeth Taylor or Audrey Hepburn -- is the stuff Hollywood dreams are made of. Then of course, Bancroft gets her Oscar and five years later, she lands the role that's as big to film history as Scarlett O'Hara....Mrs. Robinson in "The Graduate!"
One scene I must comment on...it's the famously long sequence in the dining room where no more than perhaps five lines of dialogue are uttered by Bancroft. It is relentlessly physical, a dazzling and exhausting battle of wills, so entrancing a show by Bancroft and Duke as they run around the room, spoons thrown, with every object getting trashed. It is violence in a different form, one with an extremely productive purpose that makes it impossible to avert your eyes. It's mesmerizing.
In sum, this film is a treasure that pops up on television from time to time, but it's also a film that is worth owning in all of its widescreen glory and to view the trailer offered on the DVD. The reason many people rent movies instead of buying them -- is because so few of them -- are worth watching more than once.
Well, "The Miracle Worker" DVD is comparable to what it costs to see a film in a theater these days, and there's no doubt in my mind that this is a film worth putting into your library.
Perhaps my only regret, as an Oscar buff, is that the film wasn't nominated for Best Picture. I don't mind that "Lawrence of Arabia" won that year (another classic), but to see it get bumped for a Best Pix nomination by the inferior Brando remake of "Mutiny on the Bounty" kind of makes you scratch your head.
The passage of time, and hindsight, will do that to 'ya... Just ask people who wonder why Judy Garland lost an Oscar in 1954 for "A Star is Born" to the "dressed down" performance Grace Kelly gives in "The Country Girl." There's no rhyme or reason for such things. You simply have to be satisfied knowing that "The Miracle Worker" is one of the greatest American films ever made...
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Starring in what isquite possibly the most moving double performance ever recorded on film(Time), Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke are remarkable in their OscarÂ(r)-winning* portrayalsof Annie and Helen.Ennobling and uplifting(Variety), this inspirational story of courageand hope isone of the finest works of art in the history of motion pictures(Boxoffice).Locked in a frightening, lonely world of silence and darkness since infancy, 7-year-old Helen Keller has never seen the sky, heard her mother's voice or expressed her innermost feelings. ThenAnnie Sullivan, a 20-year-old teacher from Boston, arrives. Having just recently regained her own sight, the no-nonsense Annie reaches out to Helen through the power of touchthe only tool they have in commonand leads her bold pupil on a miraculous journey from fear and isolation to happiness and light. *1962: Actress (Bancroft); Supporting Actress (Duke)
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