A Child Is Waiting

You know, hidden beneath the very Hollywood sheen of Stanley Kramer, who clearly overran this production despite what the director credit says, A Child Is Waiting has a very honest and thorny look about how mentally handicapped and ill children are treated and thought of in this country. Perhaps if John Cassavetes had been given freer hands it would have been a perfect movie, as it is, despite its many problems, it’s still quite good and offers many tender moments.

The behind the scenes drama is interesting, but the fact that Child turned out remotely watchable and enjoyable is even more interesting. Cassavetes wanted to make one of his more experimental, realistic social dramas, while Kramer and the stars were pure studio-system dynamic. The film does live with this tension and remains uneven in tone, slipping too far into melodramatics one moment and turning on a pin towards a kind of cinema-verite. Too sentimental by turns and also rather harsh, if realistic, A Child Is Waiting is fractured, but saved by the three central performances.

Their dynamic is fairly routine – two educators with opposite beliefs in how to deal with children eventually learn to meet in the middle – but Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland were great dramatic actors. Garland wants to mother the children while Lancaster thinks that strict discipline and teaching them to be self-reliant where possible is better for them. It’s hard to argue with either approach, and their meet-in-the-middle agreement is probably the best treatment. Lancaster’s striking features can harden and appear steely very easily, but his eyes convey the caring and nurturing at the heart of his character. Garland, in a rare but excellent purely dramatic performance, is all vulnerability, melancholia and a leaking faucet of love and warmth for the children. Bruce Ritchey is extremely convincing as Rueben, who the film dubs “retarded,” but I thought of him as a more high-level autistic child than anything else. Most of the film revolves around him, and he holds it up without resorting to precociousness or cutesy mannerisms. That he is able to appear in a scene with either of the big name stars and not dim into the background is fairly astonishing in its own right.

There’s much to like about A Child Is Waiting, but I really wish Kramer hadn’t interfered so damn much. He gilds the lily in obvious places, creates a film that, in Cassavetes words, wasn’t bad but too sentimental. Gena Rowlands turns up, of course, in a brief performance as the boy’s mother and it is in those moments that the Cassavetes touch is most obviously felt. It’s a better film because it doesn’t easily adhere to the conventions of the “social problem” pictures that Hollywood and Kramer, in particular, fairly often rolled out. What’s most striking and lingering is how these kids are free from self-pity, but society feels nothing but pity for them, choosing instead to lock them away elsewhere and ignoring the underlining issues at hand. Well, I guess the more things change….