Producer Stanley Kramer modeled the film’s school on the Vineland Training School in New Jersey. He wanted to bring the plight of mentally and emotionally disturbed children to the movie-going public and try “to throw a spotlight on a dark-ages type of social thinking which has tried to relegate the subject of retardation to a place under the rocks.”
Grade: C+ (**1/2* out of *****)
| Child Is Waiting | |
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Theatrical release poster
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See also our formal review, with cast and crew credits:
emanuellevy.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=76814&action=edit
He wanted to cast Burt Lancaster because the actor had troubled child of his own (his son Bill had polio that made one leg shorter than the other).
Ingrid Bergman, Katharine Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor were all considered for the role of Jean Hansen, which went to Judy Garland.
Garland previously had worked with Lancaster and Kramer on the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, which earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination.
She was experiencing personal problems at the time and the director felt a supportive work environment would help her get through them.
When original director Jack Clayton was forced to withdraw due to a scheduling problem, he was replaced by John Cassavetes, on the recommendation of screenwriter Abby Mann.
Cassavetes was fond of improvisation and his approach to filmmaking clashed with those of Kramer and the leading players.
Most of the students in the film were portrayed by children with actual mental disabilities from Pacific State Hospital (later known as Lanterman Developmental Center) in Pomona, California.
After the film’s release, Kramer recalled, “They surprised us every day in reaction and what they did.” Lancaster said, “We have to ad-lib around the periphery of a scene and I have to attune and adjust myself to the unexpected things they do. But they are much better than child actors for the parts. They have certain gestures that are characteristic, very difficult for even an experienced actor.”
Problems arose between Kramer and Cassavetes during post-production. Editor Gene Fowler, Jr. recalled, “It was a fight of technique. Stanley is a more traditional picture-maker, and Cassavetes was, I guess, called Nouvelle Vague. He was trying some things, which frankly I disagreed with, and I thought he was hurting the picture by blunting the so-called message with technique.”
Cassavetes felt his personal feelings about the subject matter added to the disagreements with Kramer, who eventually fired the director.
In a later interview, Cassavetes said, “The difference in the two versions is that Stanley’s picture said that retarded children belong in institutions and the picture I shot said retarded children are better in their own way than supposedly healthy adults. The philosophy of his film was that retarded children are separate and alone and therefore should be in institutions with others of their kind. My film said that retarded children could be anywhere, any time, and that the problem is that we’re a bunch of dopes, that it’s our problem more than the kids’. The point of the original picture that we made was that there was no fault, that there was nothing wrong with these children except that their mentality was lower.
Cassavetes disowned the film, stating after its release: “I didn’t think his film – and that’s what I consider it to be, his film – was so bad, just a lot more sentimental than mine.”
Kramer observed, “My dream was to jump the barrier of ordinary objection to the subject matter into an area in which the treatment of it and the performance of it would be so exquisite that it would transcend all that. Somewhere we failed.”
The film was a commercial flop, with a loss of $2 million at the box-office.
