OSCARS '62: The Miracle Worker
“It's less trouble to feel sorry for her than it is to teach her anything better.”
CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of deafness, blindness, ableism,
If you’ve ever done theater, and we definitely have, you dread the thought of having to deal with anything related to this movie and this story. And you’d be right to, because all too often we tell a sanitized, ableist, overacted retelling of a very real story: the breakthrough Annie Sullivan had teaching her student Helen Keller to communicate. So you’ll have to pardon our shock while watching the original film adaptation of the Broadway success, and finding it’s in fact a brilliant film. Director Arthur Penn is brilliant in adapting his own stage production by showing and not telling, a move that seems impossible for most stage to screen adaptations. Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, reprising their roles from Broadway, are absolutely phenomenal. And sure, the supporting cast might as well be cardboard cutouts, but it doesn’t matter when you’ve got a film as compellingly made as this one. We finally get a winner for Oscars ‘62 as we talk about The Miracle Worker on Macintosh & Maud Haven’t Seen What?!
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Intro music taken from the Second Movement of Ludwig von Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Hong Kong (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 HK) license. To hear the full performance or get more information, visit the song page at the Internet Archive.
Excerpt taken from “Main Title” from the original soundtrack to the film The Miracle Worker, written and composed by Laurence Rosenthal. Copyright 1962 Playfilm Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt taken from the main theme in the original soundtrack to the film The Longest Day, written and composed by Maurice Jarre. Copyright 1962 Darryl F. Zanuck Productions, Inc. and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, renewed 1990. All rights reserved.
