"The Miracle Worker" (1962)

James Keller (Helen’s father): “Sooner or later we all give up, don’t we?”

Annie Sullivan (Helen’s teacher): “Maybe you all do, but it’s my idea of the original sin.”

Sometimes we just need to be inspired by something outside of our daily experience, to be moved by a story about someone who had no chance in life, yet prevailed.  The life of Helen Keller is the unlikeliest of success stories.  “The Miracle Worker”, director Arthur Penn’s film about Keller and the woman who was the most important influence in her life, is a timely demonstration of hope and perseverance, which still resonates in these days of uncertainty.

Born in Alabama in 1880, Helen suffered a mysterious illness (possibly meningitis) before the age of two. The disease left her blind and deaf, in the most extreme state of isolation, no longer able to communicate or express herself effectively.  She lived in a fog, unruly as an animal, indulged by her family who loved and pitied her, but felt that she was beyond hope.

When Helen was seven years old, Anne Sullivan, a young teacher, arrived at the Keller household to instruct Helen in the skills of language and of life.  Almost blind herself, and raised in terrible conditions in a squalid orphanage, Sullivan emerged from the experience strong-willed, and fought to have a school education, from which she graduated at the top of her class.  

Her quest to teach Helen how to understand words, and to help Helen to communicate using a manual alphabet (and eventually her own voice), was a trying and painstaking challenge. 

As an infant, Helen was so exceptionally intelligent that she could say the word “water”, showing promise and potential until her tragic illness. Under the unrelenting, patient guidance that drove Sullivan to exhaustion, Helen grew to have a life of enormous and enviable achievements. 

In spite of her blindness and deafness, Helen Keller was able to: read people’s lips using her hands; earn a Bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe; write twelve published books and many articles; travel the world to give inspiring lectures about her life; advocate for the disabled, for women’s suffrage and birth control, and for pacifist causes; and help found the ACLU.  In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson awarded Helen the Medal of Freedom.

“The Miracle Worker” recounts the details of that first grueling month in which Anne Sullivan worked with Helen, battling wits with both Helen and her family, subduing her wild behavior, gaining her trust, and finally breaking through and reaching her.

 Adding emotional depth and texture, the film reveals Sullivan’s painful childhood through the creative use of brief, barely-focused flashbacks.

Based on the 1959 Tony Award-winning play by William Gibson that was directed by Arthur Penn (both of whom reteamed for the film as screenwriter and director), “The Miracle Worker” featured acclaimed portrayals by relative unknowns Anne Bancroft, as Ann Sullivan, and young Patty Duke, as Helen Keller.  

In spite of United Artists seeking big-name stars for the film, fortunately Bancroft and Duke were cast to reprise their classic performances.  They both won Oscars for their astonishing work.

Anne Bancroft draws on profound reserves of energy as Anne, and her portrayal is a triumph of strength and the will to keep trying.  Anne Sullivan may have been driven to atone for the death of her little brother in the orphanage, a death that still haunts her dreams, and Bancroft captures that layer of regret beneath the growing love—often the tough love—that she develops for Helen.

Bancroft is heroic in how she portrays Sullivan’s fight to help this unfortunate girl out of darkness, to persistently train Helen out of her unrestrained behavior, and to open up the world to her.  In short, to teach her just one word: “Everything”. 

Patty Duke made her film debut as Helen Keller. Although she was fifteen at the time of the filming, Patty Duke was convincing as a younger Helen, and made this role completely her own.  

It is impossible to fathom the skill with which Duke uses every aspect of her physical presence—her face, her vocal sounds, her blank expression belying her intelligent eyes, her probing hands, her intense and impassioned body movements—to illustrate Helen’s dark inner world of frustration and need.  It is an impossibly physical performance. 

The famous centerpiece, in which Sullivan trains an obstinate Helen to eat properly at the table and fold her napkin, is a violent dance of wills. It is a protracted, knock-down-drag-out scene in which Anne insists that Helen sit in a chair and feed herself with a spoon.  The thrashing and shouting, grabbing and screaming, crashing glass and relentless repetition, are photographed with a hand-held intimacy, making it as strong and compelling a sequence that has ever been filmed. (Both actresses suffered minor injuries over the five days of filming, even though they wore padding under their costumes.)

Arthur Penn’s direction is strong with Bancroft onscreen alone, as she expresses Anne’s desire to help, and doubt about her ability to influence, Helen.  Penn is even more powerful in his scenes with Helen and Anne together, as they test and respond to each other, at first as adversaries, and then slowly as they reach a bond of affection together, all with little spoken dialog. 

Penn wisely treats this film as a chamber piece, in which we are focused intensely on the central characters, to the exclusion of most everything else, opening up the play only enough to make sense of the transitions between scenes. Penn’s use of camera, and his guiding of the two main actors, is superb.  The chiaroscuro lighting gives the film a look and an unforgettable mood that is helped by Laurence Rosenthal’s sparse but moving musical score.

The film’s writing and direction are weakest in sequences involving Helen’s family members.  Important as these scenes are, they are more melodramatic than the film deserves.  Victor Jory and Inga Swenson, as Helen’s caring but overwrought parents, needed a firmer hand to provide some restraint.  Only Andrew Prine, as Helen’s older stepbrother James, brings a cheeky energy and watchability to his scenes with Bancroft.

The film is intense.  You are likely to feel emotionally and physically exhausted at the end.  But the final breakthrough, as a light turns on in Helen’s mind with her utterance of the word “water”, is deeply moving.

Anne Sullivan never gave up hope. The education that she provided Helen Keller did not restore Helen’s sight or hearing, but it gave Helen the opportunity to lead a richer life.  There’s hope for our situation as well.  When a vaccine or treatment for this insidious virus is available to the world, it may not obliterate the virus; but it may allow us to live, once again, fuller, and maybe better, lives.