Description:
A Child Is Waiting stars Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland as employees at the Crawthorne State Training Institute, a cloistered school intended for challenged kids to learn and interact with others like themselves. Garland's Jean Hansen, a newly hired music teacher, develops a special bond with one student, a slow yet otherwise regular-appearing boy named Reuben (Bruce Ritchey). Miss Hansen's attentiveness toward the boy goes against the rigid principles of Dr. Matthew Clark (Lancaster), who runs the school with a firm yet sympathetic hand. Although Miss Hansen has the best intentions in mind, Clark cautions that she's diverting
A Child Is Waiting stars Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland as employees at the Crawthorne State Training Institute, a cloistered school intended for challenged kids to learn and interact with others like themselves. Garland's Jean Hansen, a newly hired music teacher, develops a special bond with one student, a slow yet otherwise regular-appearing boy named Reuben (Bruce Ritchey). Miss Hansen's attentiveness toward the boy goes against the rigid principles of Dr. Matthew Clark (Lancaster), who runs the school with a firm yet sympathetic hand. Although Miss Hansen has the best intentions in mind, Clark cautions that she's diverting Reuben's love from where it should be - the boy's parents (played with nuance by Steven Hill and Gena Rowlands). Reuben ends up feeling abandoned by his mother and father, however, when they fail to show up on the school's visiting days. Abby Mann's perceptive screenplay gets its thrust from the conflict between two sets of ideals - whether these kids should be hidden away from society, kept in the hands of experts, or whether parents should be better-educated for dealing with autistic or Down's Syndrome-afflicted offspring. Kind of a daring topic for 1963, made all the more realistic with the casting of actual developmentally disabled kids as students.
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Manufacturer: Kino Lorber
Number of discs: 1
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