This Month

Sundays in July | 5 Double Features, 10 Movies

Movies are often  an escape from reality. At the same time, many of the screen’s greatest stories illustrate and illuminate the most real aspects of human existance.

Over the course of film history, the people’s experiences with disabilities has proven to be a reliable, regular source of both dramatic and realistic storytelling.

Sundays in July, TCM is presenting five double features devoted to showcasing both familiar and lesser-known aspects of this important,  always-evolving cinematic  exploration.

Starting off this series is not only one of the best movies about disabilities, but one of the most beloved movies of the 1940s and beyond. Samuel Goldwyn’s Best Picture winner, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) was one of the first to show the harrowing effects of World War II on soldiers and their families. It tells the story of three veterans returning to their hometown of Boone City who are all in different states of physical and mental distress after the war. Dana Andrews plays Fred, an Army Air Forces captain who now cannot seem to find any better work than the drug store soda jerk job he had before he left for the war. He is also having troubles with his entitled wife (Virginia Mayo). Army sergeant Al Stephenson (Frederic March in his second Oscar winning performance) has tried to return to his normal life as a banker but is now turning to alcohol at the distress of his devoted wife (the great Myrna Loy in perhaps her most well remembered performance). Then there is 2nd class petty officer Homer Parrish (played by real life war veteran Harold Russell) who is returning home without his hands. Though Homer’s childhood sweetheart Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell) still loves him, but Homer is still adjusting to this new way of life. Harold Russell became a double arm amputee during a training exercise during WWII when an explosive accidentally detonated in his hands. Director William Wyler, who himself acquired severe hearing loss during the same war advocated to hire Russell, who had never studied acting because he wanted a true veteran who could play this very important role honestly. Wyler even stopped producer Samuel Goldwyn from arranging for Russell to have any acting lessons prior to making the film. This was a rare case of a person with an actual disability playing a character with a disability. Russell deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in addition to a historic  honorary Oscar “for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans.” 

In addition to more well-known and beloved classics, this month’s Disability Reclaimed program also features several lesser-known films which showcase both familiar and lesser known issues and circumstances encountered by disabled people. Harold Russell followed the advice of his director William Wyler and chose not to pursue a career in Hollywood. Instead, he attended business school at Boston University and devoted most of his life to advocacy work for veterans and for the disabled. In 1990, Russell returned to the screen over thirty years after The Best Years of Our Lives in Richard Donner’s Inside Moves (1980). John Savage plays Roary, a depressed man who became disabled following a failed suicide attempt. He stumbles onto a local bar which has several regular patrons from a variety of backgrounds with a diverse array of disabilities. One is the bartender Jerry (David Morse) who, if it were not for a leginjury, has the talent to become a star basketball player. Both Jerry and Roary have feelings for the young waitress Louise (Diana Scarwid). Scarwid earned an Oscar nomination for her tender performance. Unfortunately, she followed this with one of the most notoriously bad movies of all time, Mommie Dearest (1981).

Many people’s experience of  disabilities are not a result of a specific injury or incident but ongoing conditions they have had since birth or childhood. In Bright Road (1953), Dorothy Dandridge plays Jane, a compassionate young schoolteacher. Jane is determined to help C.T. (Philip Hepburn), a troubled little boy in her class succeed despite little support from the other teachers and even the principal (played by Harry Belafonte, who himself was diagnosed with dyslexia later in life, in his film debut). All have offensively dismissed C.T. as “a backwards child.” This was Dandridge and Belafonte’s first screen pairing before perhaps their most famous film, the musical Carmen Jones (1954). Though not an outright musical, this film has the bonus asset of several songs by both talented performers.

Bright Road is but one of many stories which spotlight how those with illnesses or disabilities can not only survive but thrive if someone believes in and supports them. This was the case in the true-life story of the blinddeaf Helen Keller. Helen’s story of first learning to understand and communicate has been adapted for stage and screen several times. The first of these was the silent film Deliverance (1919) with Etna Ross and Ann Mason playing Helen as a child and young woman and Edith Lyle as Helen’s beloved teacher and companion Anne Sullivan. Like a few early silents, this story is told very symbolically. Ignorance and Knowledge are both portrayed as actual figures, one in a dark robe and one in white, who both try to persuade Helen to follow them. The real Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan both make appearances in this rare silent film, which has been long overshadowed by the better remembered Oscar winner The Miracle Worker (1962). Keller plays herself in the third act giving the film added historical relevance.

More often than not, depicting disabilities on film is has historically been material for a deeply serious movie (or the occasional slapstick by Mel Brooks) with most people living in the messy middle, somewhere  between the extremes. Comic genius Charlie Chaplin used blindness as the foundation for one his most beloved romantic comedies. 

City Lights (1931) marked a number of firsts for Chaplin. This was his first film in three years and his first in the era of the talkies, however the film still uses title cards and has no spoken dialogue. There is a soundtrack however, with sound effects and a beautiful musical score composed by Chaplin himself, his first of several he created for his last few films. Though he always preferred making silent cinema, Chaplin wanted to be certain that his film would find an audience three years after the talkies had taken over Hollywood. As the producer of the film and cofounder of its distributing studio, United Artists, auteur Chaplin personally oversaw the film’s release himself. He funded much of the film’s publicity and even co-funded the completion of a new movie palace in downtown Los Angeles for the film’s world premiere, the still standing Los Angeles Theatre. This dedication paid off when the film became one of the genius’ most successful efforts. Chaplin returns as his iconic Little Tramp, who has fallen in love with a young blind flower girl (movingly played by Virginia Cherrill). The tramp (and Chaplin) does all of his trademark pranks and tricks to raise the money which will pay for an operation to restore the girl’s sight. The final moment of this timeless, somewhat bittersweet film is considered by many to be Chaplin’s ultimate masterpiece and one of the most perfect blends of laughter and tears.

Some of the best films not only comment and bring attention to people’s disabilities, but to the major world events which caused them. Almost an update to the themes explored in Best Year of Our Lives, Coming Home (1978) was one of the first and best films to address the aftermath of the largely protested Vietnam War. Jane Fonda had wanted to make a film about veterans ever since she befriended antiwar activist, former Marine, and paraplegic Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic. She made this one of the first projects for her newly founded production company, Indochina Peace Campaign Films. The Oscar winning screenplay tells the story of Sally Hyde (Fonda) the military wife of Marine captain Bob (Bruce Dern). While Bob is serving in the war, Sally spends her time working in the veteran’s hospital. Sally’s eyes are opened to the perils of war when she befriends and slowly falls in love with Luke Martin (Jon Voight), who became paraplegic during his time in the service. Voight and Fonda won the Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Actress. Many actual Vietnam vets appear in the film and share semi-autobiographical stories based on their own.

In her Oscar acceptance speech for the film, Fonda famously signed part of her speech in recognition of the 14 million people who are Deaf and spoke of how while making the movie she and “all on the movie became more aware of the problems” faced by disability communities, who according to the most recent figures released by the federal Center for Disease Control and Prevention make up 27%, or more than 1 in 4 of the U.S. population .

Great movies have the power to bring awareness to the most important human issues like no other medium and all the films of this series powerfully demonstrate the broad spectrum both of what is, and what can be possible once we liberate ourselves from the limits of our imaginations and the barriers, both physical and beyond, that are erected by them.