JohnHowardReid Copyright 1956 by Loew's Inc. An M-G-M Picture. New York opening at the Radio City Music Hall: 27 September 1956. U.S. release: 28 September 1956. U.K. release: 20 October 1957 (sic). Australian release: 8 April 1957. 10,977 feet. 122 minutes.SYNOPSIS: A re-make of John Van Druten's "Young Woodley" (1925), in which a mature schoolboy has a romance with his housemaster's wife, transferred to an American setting and brought up to date.NOTES: BIP released a film version of "Young Woodley" in 1930. Van Druten himself collaborated on the screenplay with Victor Kendall, whilst Thomas Bentley directed. Madeleine Carroll, Frank Lawton and Sam Livesey played the roles now enacted by Deborah Kerr, John Kerr and Leif Erickson.Robert Anderson's Broadway play opened at the Barrymore on 30 September 1953 and ran a highly successful 712 performances (though Joan Fontaine and Anthony Perkins took over from the original leads in the course of the run). It's fair to say that the stage play resembles "Young Woodley" far less than the film version. Deborah Kerr (in her Broadway debut), John Kerr and Leif Erickson played the roles they repeated for the film. Elia Kazan directed.Aided by the play's reputation and an all-out publicity campaign, "Tea and Sympathy" was most successful at the box-office, though not rating with the top ten money-makers of the year. Considering the film's comparatively small budget (it took only six weeks to shoot), M-G-M would have made a tidy profit. CinemaScope, I feel, didn't help the box-office by so much a single admission. Certainly Minnelli fails to use the process 95% of the time, being content to frame all his action center-camera.Number 9 in the Film Daily's annual poll of American film critics.VIEWER'S GUIDE: As an indication of just how far the play has been diluted, I would be inclined to rate the movie version as suitable for all but the most impressionable children.COMMENT: Although regarded by many critics (not this one) as a landmark film in its day, there can surely be no doubt it has dated badly. True, the central situation still has some elements of truth and close-to-the-bone realism, but the characters are so uncompromisingly one-dimensional they seem to have strayed on to the stage from a one-act farce not a three-deck morality play. Worse, they are unsympathetically and theatrically over-played. It's hard to say who is the worst offender, though the two Kerrs certainly run each other close. You can't say they do their best with the characters as written. They do their worst. Every false bit of business, every artificial gesture, every phony catch in the voice — all these techniques are ruthlessly, systematically and insensitively employed. The rest of the players are likewise hammy caricatures.Minnelli's direction does not help. He has an eye and ear for urban social chatter, but he overdoes these effects. The acting of the extras is just as overblown as that of the principals and featured players."Tea and Sympathy" does have something to say about non-conformity which is still relevant. But the approach both of the play and even more particularly the film is crassly pedestrian.A fair amount of effort has been made to open out the play. All the same, by M-G-M's "A" standards, production values are meager.

evanston_dad I watched "Tea and Sympathy" within a day or two of also watching "The Band Wagon," and the two films together went a long way toward increasing my admiration of Vincente Minelli, a filmmaker who I haven't generally cared much for in the past.Was any actress more elegantly luminous than Deborah Kerr? In this, she plays a faculty wife at a preppy college who feels pity for a young man (John Kerr) who is ostracized by the other boys for his sissy tendencies. The film is an overt exploration of masculine insecurity at a time when gender roles weren't allowed to be fluid at all. Deborah is simply marvelous, as she always was, while John Kerr is a little less successful, his acting a bit more obvious and heavy handed. But the film overall is wonderful, and should be seen by anyone who's interested in films that explore the ugly side of the middle class American dream that was so heavily trumpeted in the 1950s, a dream that was really a prison for so many.Grade: A

Shuggy I read the play when I was Tom Lee's age and deeply closetted, and it had a devastating effect: "At last someone understands: just because I'm not like the others doesn't mean I'm - heaven forbid - gay." I thought the play was great - liberating, even.I saw the film (on TV, with distractions) some 25 years after it was made, myself on the brink of coming out, and noted that it was much less clear that it was about homosexuality than the play had been. Tom's sexual orientation had been blurred down to the question of whether he was "a regular guy" or not. Key speeches like Laura's challenge to Bill's sexuality were missing. And Laura's letter at the end seemed just moralistic, and an obvious sop to the censors.To see the film today, out and proud, and with the benefit of nearly 50 years of hindsight, I find myself agreeing with many of the comments above, both positive and negative. The film is hard to watch because it is so overwrought. That is easier to understand when you know that all three leads are reprising their stage roles. Even so, there is a desperate tension running right through it. With the possible exception of the faculty wives, not a single person in it is comfortable with their sexuality. The guys are, without exception, over-anxious to prove something, and Laura is frustrated. (Ellie Martin at least knows what she wants - a radio that works - and what she wants to pay to get it.) Overlaid on this, nothing can be explicit, everyone talks all the time in circumlocutions. Of course, that was the rule in films of those days, and possibly real life as well. Therein lies a contradiction that can only be resolved from outside the film and in its future, now. The film was trying to liberate people like me (and heterosexual non-conformists) while staying within the confines of a deeply closetted and homophobic film industry.Should you see this film? As a piece of gay history, perhaps. As a commentary on a homophobic time, it is instructive, both for what it says and doesn't say. As a worthwhile drama that will involve you in its issues, no. Has it anything worthwhile to say, as someone says above, about the importance of love? If you concentrate on Deborah Kerr's performance and her predicament, perhaps, but it's like watching a beautiful butterfly struggling in a pitcher-plant.

encroisade Here we are in 2008, and the pendulum of sexual misunderstanding has swung both ways now, in a few generations. Once, homosexuality was despised. Now, increasingly, homosexuality is advocated as an enlightened preference. Propagating the human species is not a priority in what is perceived as an era of over-population. Besides, we have test tube babies today, and cloning people is probably already being practiced behind closed laboratory doors.What has remained the same in the past 40 years, however, is that people regard sex, in whatever form it takes, as the main priority of life. The pharmacies can't keep enough Viagra on the shelves."Tea and Sympathy," is only 'dated' for those people who don't realize that both the play, and the film, deal with the subject of love. Love is not sex. Sex is not love. You can have love without sex. You can have sex without love.Perhaps, in some future era of civilization, if we don't blow ourselves up first, the time will come when caring so much for another person that you are willing to sacrifice your future for him, or for her, is more than a Quixotic fantasy. Actually, this has been the cultural ideal on and off for centuries. Ancient Greece and Rome glorified sex and demeaned marriage, as our role models seem to do; and their orgy palaces fell into ruins in the dust of time. Later, in the Middle Ages, the troubadours sang of romantic, idealized love. By the 1600's, as the incredible book "Don Quixote" humorously demonstrates, chivalry was already dead, a laughing-stock, totally divorced from reality. In Victorian and Edwardian England, sexuality became schizophrenic - incredible debauchery existed side-by-side with the kind of love story personified in the lives of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on Wimpole Street.The two World Wars of the 20th-century despoiled and degraded many lives, on a wide scale never before seen in history. The film goddesses of the Silver Screen could play a whore one week, and a nun the next. Schizophrenia continued to reign, alive-and-well.But now, we are immersed in a pornographic dream.From that standpoint, of course "Tea and Sympathy" is dated. Some commentators here on the film even go so far as to entirely make up scenes which never occur in the movie, right out of the whole cloth of their own fantasies. No, in the last scene Laura never unbuttons her cardigan; and Tom never fondles her breast. More proof that people claim to see things that don't exist simply because they expect to see them. Even 'eyewitnesses' to major news events often don't really know what they're talking about.If this is a cult film for homosexuals, it is because they see what they want to see in the movie, and not what exists. Clearly, Tom Lee is smitten with Laura long before the film starts, just as his first love was a blond schoolteacher when he was only twelve. Laura's line to his roommate: "Maybe Tom is deeply in love" could only apply to Tom's feelings toward herself.What is to be learned from Maxwell Anderson's sensitive writing, as well as from Tennessee Williams' best work, is that love is the main thing, and that we choose those whom we love because they meet our psychological and emotional needs, and many times we are not even consciously aware what those needs really are. Reynolds, for example, although he was certainly ambivalent in his sexuality, still truly wanted a good woman to be his wife, which is why he married Laura and fully loved her in his own way; but he also needed patient help right from the start, whereas Laura was slow to realize his dilemma and, being admittedly a selfish woman at times, nursed her own hurts as their relationship deteriorated, quite apart from Tom's involvement at all. Her husband ended up a broken man, not because he was a frustrated, repressed homosexual, but because he had failed the love of his life and couldn't trust himself not to do the same again with another mate.In "Tea and Sympathy", and in reactions to the film for the past decades, we see how the norms of society can entrap all of us, at both ends of the spectrum.