Abstract

Films

This article presents the author's views on the movie about either Tea and Sympathy and The Bad Seed. These very skillful Broadway hits have been brought to the screen substantially intact and will presumably absorb and disturb movie audiences as they absorbed and disturbed the theatre public. The extreme terms in which producer Robert Anderson must frame Tea and Sympathy in order for his problem to work with even surface plausibility. His schoolboy must be afflicted with a father who is a coward, a bully, a snob and a fool, a housemaster who overcompensates for his own lack of sexual security by ludicrous displays of extrovert athleticism; he must attend a school that is gripped by hysterical virility, and he must have availed for his pathetic test a prostitute who plays her trade in the campus soda shop.