Queer Cinema Club | The Children's Hour

Every month at the Paradise Theatre, curator and host Peter Knegt is offering queers (and anyone who loves them) a classic queer film, special guests and performers, and some good old fashioned drinks and conversation in the Paradise’s stunning lobby bar. Each film is paired with a different local queer artist, who will design an original poster for the screening.

Longtime friends Martha (Shirley MacLaine) and Karen (Audrey Hepburn) run a boarding school for girls. When an unruly child, Mary (Karen Balkin), is punished for lying, she concocts a story that Karen and Martha are having a lesbian relationship. When the story spreads, parents withdraw their children from the school. The women's lawsuit for libel hits many snags when they lack witnesses to speak for them. All the stress adversely affects Karen's engagement to Joe Cardin (James Garner).

General Admission $15.00 + HST/eventbrite fees

Buy tickets: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/queer-cinema-club-presents-the-childrens-hour-tickets-900388705857?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=ebdsshcopyurl

More details: https://paradiseonbloor.com/films-and-events/queer-cinema-club-presents-childrens-hour

Door tickets are available for purchase on the day of screening. Refunds can be requested up to 12 hours before the screening. All refunds must be requested and processed through eventbrite.

Paradise Theatre
1006 Bloor ST W.
Toronto, ON M6H 1M2

about the book

Based on a play by Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour (1961) was the first mainstream commercial American film to feature a lesbian character in a leading role. It centres on a teacher at a girls’ school (Shirley MacLaine) who is accused of harbouring feelings for her co-worker (Audrey Hepburn) and depicts the intense moral panic that ensues. Produced in the social climate of the Lavender Scare, the film reveals deep insights into the politics of sexuality and censorship in midcentury America, only a few years before more visible struggles for queer liberation.

The director, William Wyler, lobbied hard to get the film made after an earlier straight-washed version in 1936. The tense road to production included debates about whether to eliminate mentions of lesbianism from the script and how implicitly queer subject matter might conflict with the Production Code, by then weakened but still in force. Julia Erhart’s reading of the film’s conception, production, and reception advances a nuanced case of censorship as a productive force. While contests between Hellman and Wyler suppressed scenes of overt affection between main characters Karen and Martha, reception was comparatively fixated on the characters’ lesbianism: it threatened middlebrow movie critics in the mainstream press and resonated with queer audiences. Erhart’s attentive interpretation of both the script and the sonic landscape yields a detailed analysis of the soundtrack as an original pro-lesbian element.

As issues of queer censorship continue to permeate life and culture more than fifty years later, Erhart demonstrates that The Children’s Hour is as salient to social and political tensions around gender and sexuality today as it was in the 1960s.