Child's Play (1972)

If you're the type of movie watcher who prefers to be entertained without having to really invest in the film (and that's absolutely fine) then this movie is probably not for you. I'm fortunate in that I enjoy all types of film from juvenile slapstick such as Top Secret to classic epics like The Godfather. This particular film builds very slowly and although there's little "action" in the first third, it's well written and acted and the you can feel the tension build. Without giving too much away, it's brilliant how convincing one of the main protagonists is due to the quality of the lines attributed to him in the screenplay. Although I personally believe this movie deserves a wider audience, I fully understand that it will not appeal to a significant number of viewers. Recommend if you appreciate slow paced, well acted drama.

Idealistic new gym teacher at an all-boys Catholic boarding school, his alma mater after graduating there nine years ago, is warned by one of the priests on arrival that the students have changed over time, their attitudes towards each other have become malicious and their violent actions touched by evil. Overcooked melodrama from Robert Marasco's Tony-winning play is, at its core, a battle of wills between two veteran instructors: one, a sagging-faced, paranoid old taskmaster (James Mason) whom the students deplore and the other (Robert Preston) a gregarious, glinty-eyed teacher who has rallied the students to his side. When these men face-off, the material hints at something headier than what director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Leon Prochnik really hope to present: the dehumanization of young men into soldiers of misfortune. Broadway showman David Merrick made an inauspicious debut here as movie producer, and his first mistake was to hire Lumet as director. Lumet, who specializes in his keeping his actors riled-up on-screen, wants to give us the shakes with bloody beatings, an eye-gouging and a desecration in the church (underlined by Michael Small's "scare music"), scenes which are nasty and unpleasant to sit through--and also time-consuming. The real drama, between Mason and Preston (with Beau Bridges caught in the middle), is nearly buried under the morass. Though ultimately too theatrical to feel honest, the performances by the principals are at least polished by the actors' professionalism, bringing substance to a picture caught in the balance between melodrama and its own horror-movie subtext. *1/2 from ****

Among Lumet' s monumental filmography ,"child's play" must be ,even more than the overlooked "the group" ,the movie nobody knows or loves to hate .Personally, I have always thought that Lumet is particularly at ease when he directs films the action of which takes place in an enclosed space: a tribunal in "12 angry men" ,a bank in "dog day afternoon" a train in "murder on the orient express" a house in "deathtrap" or "long day's journey into night" the Strategic Air Command in "fail safe" ,a prisoners camp in "the hill"....."Child's play " happens entirely in a boys high school but the students are not often on the screen ;unlike some naive works such as "dead poets society" ,the nice modern beloved teacher (Robert Preston) is not the one you think he is ;he is a distant relative of the "good" teacher Miss Brodie in "the prime of miss Jean Brodie ";whereas the old maid was urging her students to fight for "noble " causes such as Spanish fascism,hercolleague uses them to put his old "pal" James Mason down,to drive him crazy;his motives are very obscure (the fact that he wants to teach the twelfth graders is not really convincing and one could write that "some people who do not fit get the only fun they get by putting people down ",as John Prine sings ."So cold ,sometimes it looks so cold" .Women (apart from a nurse) are completely absent and no one among the secular staff has a girlfriend or a wife ,even the young naive gym teacher.Beau Bridges is a bit clumsy and as a sports teacher ,well...besides he lacks charisma and his dramatic range is ineffective in the scene when he blames his colleague (just compare with young Pamela Franklin playing opposite Maggie Smith in a similar scene at the end of "Miss Jean Brodie").All in all,when you cannot mention it in the same breath as Lumet's works I mention above ,if you like this director,you should catch it :James Mason is excellent in his part of a fallen pitiful Latin teacher (you can also notice his subject had already begun to lose the prestige it used to have in ancient times) and Robert Preston is all the more scary since he remains cheerful or straight-faced.A flawed but nonetheless worthy work .Like this ? try these....."Unman,Wittering and Zigo" (McKenzie,1971)"The prime of miss Jean Brodie (Neame,1970)

Chances are you will never have an opportunity to see this film as it hasn't been on TV for ages. However, I wouldn't say it is as bad as some of the comments. I thought it was well acted, but the ending left the viewer confused about exactly what had happened with the boys. The fates of two of the three major characters are also left to the viewer's imagination. Robert Preston and James Mason made interesting foils. Mason managed to make his character a man to be despised and pitied. Preston was also quite capable in his role - all sweetness and light with increasingly malevolent undertones.If it had been as dull as described in some of the other comments, I probably wouldn't have been able to stay awake since I watched it in the wee hours of the AM.