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The opening image is a dollhouse revealed to be within the larger dollhouse of a movie set, Richard Fleischer in his debut already establishes a balance of the emotional and the analytical. Witnessing Mom (Madge Meredith) kissing a man in the park unmoors the world of the seven-year-old protagonist (Sharyn Moffett), her playground mates spell it out with the guiltless cruelty of childhood: "Just because people get married, doesn't mean they always stay that way." Dad (Regis Toomey) wises up in due time, prayers for the parents to reconcile go unanswered so the tyke painfully makes her way to the witness stand for the divorce hearing, a tiny figure rattling in the harshly lit courtroom. ("Keen" is her byword, "scandalous" is a new one she learns along the way.) The proximity to De Sica's The Children Are Watching Us and Kazan's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is to be noted, the incisive sensitivity is soon taken up by Lupino and Mackendrick. "A sense of permanence" is what the doctor orders and precisely what eludes the divided juvenile, she counts the months to leave Mom and the usurper she's married (Walter Reed) only for the homecoming ice-cream to curdle upon meeting Dad's new fiancée (Doris Merrick). Boarding school is an easy solution for adults and the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end for children, the roommate (Ann Carter) flinches whenever "Home Sweet Home" chimes on the bells. One sustained hour of limpid technique and empathetic clarity, closing on two prematurely weary girls gazing out the window and into the unsettled future. "But we'll just have to wait until we grow up, I guess." "Yeah, we'll just have to wait." With Una O'Connor, Harry Cheshire, Selmer Jackson, and Lillian Randolph. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |