A Child is Waiting

John Cassavetes – 1963 – USA  
 

At an experimental clinic for developmentally disabled children, administrator Burt Lancaster and green teacher Judy Garland do their utmost to help, help, help. The rap on this film has always been that it is an early failed attempt by Cassavetes to be a respectable Hollywood director, but otherwise has little of value, at least with regard to his looming career as a maverick independent. I can’t argue with that too vociferously. There is much more of producer Stanley Kramer’s famous do-gooder values in it that what we usually associate with Cassavetes. And yet, there they are: the faces of Gena Rowlands, and John Marley, and Paul Stewart, all familiar members of Cassavetes’ informal stock company of actors. And most importantly, there is the horrifying emotional battlefield in which all of Cassavetes’ best work takes place, where the lines between normality and insanity are tragically thin and fluctuating. The issue is not so much the primary subject of mentally retarded children being reached by caring staff, but the aspects of the healthy adult characters that drive them to forgo more carefree lives in order to deal with the frustrations and few rewards of working with the handicapped. Yes, it comes off as a bit of a star-vehicle for Garland, designed to give her an Anne Bancroft-in-The-Miracle-Worker-type of role, with its accompanying Academy Award, but it is also genuine and effective. Had it been more successful, Cassavetes might indeed have eased into an Arthur Hiller/George Roy Hill type of career as a maker of benign, only occasionally robust mainstream fare.