#732) The Miracle Worker (1962)

The Plot: Before she was a world-famous author and disability rights advocate, Helen Keller was a child left deaf and blind after a bout of meningitis at 19 months old. By age seven, Helen (Patty Duke) lives an uncommunicative, almost feral existence with her family in 1880s Alabama. Faced with the prospect of institutionalization, Helen’s parents (Victor Jory & Inga Swenson) contact the Perkins School for the Blind, who send one of their recent graduates Anne Sullivan (Anne Bancroft) to be Helen’s teacher and governess. Nearly blind herself, Anne quickly realizes the difficulties Helen presents to her, but she is determined to teach Helen communication skills, showing her manual sign language, and strictly disciplining her bad behavior. What follows is a powerful movie about two inspirational people played by two outstanding actors.

Why It Matters: The NFR calls the film “an inspiring account of human potential and ability realized”, praising the “remarkable” performances of Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke.

But Does It Really?: Longtime readers know that I submit “The Miracle Worker” for NFR consideration every year, so I’m very happy that the film finally made the cut. Despite having never seen “Miracle Worker”, I nominate it every year as a favor to my mom, a disability rights advocate herself (and lifelong Patty Duke fan). Having finally seen it, I get the appeal. “The Miracle Worker” portrays Keller and Sullivan as real people without any false sentimentality or manipulation, thanks in large part to the compelling, committed performances of Bancroft and Duke, as well as the organic, intuitive direction of Arthur Penn. It is this unsentimental approach to the material that makes the film hold up far better than so many other movies dealing with disability and keeps the film watchable all these decades later. Thank you NFR for giving “The Miracle Worker” its rightful spot on the list and freeing up a space on my annual ballot.

Everybody Gets One: Born to an alcoholic father and clinically depressed mother, Anna Marie Duke was taken in by unscrupulous talent managers John and Ethel Ross, who pushed her into showbusiness and changed her first name to Patty to ride the success of fellow child actor Patty McCormack. In her early career, Patty Duke worked primarily in television, including as a contestant on the fixed game show “The $64,000 Question”. At age 12 she landed the role of Helen Keller in the Broadway production of “The Miracle Worker” because during her audition, a very physical scene where Anne slaps Helen, she was the only actor who slapped Anne Bancroft back. By the time Duke left the show to appear in the film adaptation, her name on the theater marquee had been moved to star billing above the title alongside Bancroft. 

Title Track: Anne Sullivan was dubbed “the miracle worker” by none other than Mark Twain, who had a friendship and correspondence with both Sullivan and Helen Keller around the turn of the century. Unlike practically every other quote attributed to Mark Twain, we have evidence that it was Twain, and not one of his more obscure contemporaries, who referred to Sullivan as a miracle worker.

Seriously, Oscars?: “The Miracle Worker” received five Oscar nominations, including Director and Adapted Screenplay. Although the film lost out in those categories to, respectively, “Lawrence of Arabia” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” (and missed out on a Best Picture nod), both Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke took home acting trophies. Bancroft was in New York on Oscar night, so her Best Actress award was accepted on her behalf by Joan Crawford (but that’s another story). Winning Best Supporting Actress at age 16, Patty Duke was the youngest competitive Oscar recipient ever until Tatum O’Neal in “Paper Moon”.

• We open with a pre-credit scene of Helen’s parents discovering that she is blind and deaf. It’s a bit distressing, but thankfully the hysteria of this scene is tampered down for the rest of the movie. Also, thanks to one shot in the opening credits of a Christmas tree ornament, “The Miracle Worker” qualifies for my “Die Hard Not Xmas” list.

• Normally I would devote part of this write-up to the real Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, but I’m holding off until I’ve watched their other NFR representation: the 1954 documentary “Helen Keller in Her Story”. What I will point out is that in real life Anne Sullivan did not speak with an Irish brogue. Anne Bancroft played Sullivan with an Irish lilt to help shake off the pronounced Bronx accent she used in “Two for the Seesaw”. Despite this historical inaccuracy, practically every Anne Sullivan since Bancroft has performed the part with the brogue.
• For anyone who only knows Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson, watching her riveting performance here demonstrates her underrated range as an actor. I especially love Anne’s first scene with Helen as she tries to teach her the words “doll” and “cake”. In an almost-one take sequence, we watch Sullivan as she is simultaneously teaching and learning from Helen, calculating the best way to approach her first student. There’s a steady determination in Bancroft’s performance that propels the character throughout the movie.

• On the one hand, the role of Helen Keller is not a supporting one; she’s a co-lead whose screentime takes up well over half the movie. On the other hand, you can’t have Patty Duke competing against her co-star at the Oscars, to say nothing of such competition as Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis, so the Supporting category it is. Despite all this, Duke is worthy of any trophy you want to give her for this performance; somehow playing all of Helen Keller’s disability without becoming saccharine or cringe-inducing. Side Note: Helen Keller was still alive when both the stage and film versions of “The Miracle Worker” premiered, and while I don’t know what her thoughts on either of these were, she did meet Patty Duke in the spring of 1961, just before filming began.
• In addition to the great performances by our two leads, I also enjoyed Inga Swenson as Helen’s strong-willed mother Kate. It’s nice to know that Inga Swenson’s acting capabilities went far beyond trading Germanic barbs with Robert Guillaume.
• The most memorable scene in the film is Anne teaching Helen how to behave at the breakfast table, which quickly escalates into an extended physical altercation as Helen lashes out and Anne tries to restrain her. The 10-minute sequence contains almost no dialogue, but thanks to these two performances and some excellent staging, you know exactly what they’re both thinking as they recognize each other as an equal adversary. And shoutout to an uncredited Beah Richards as the family maid, who gets to deliver the scene’s punchline.

• One weird thing about this movie is that while there are several scenes between Anne and Helen with minimal dialogue, the scenes with Anne and the rest of the Keller family are spoken at a quick, Sorkin-esque pace. It’s like they’re making up for lost time or something. Thankfully, the dialogue slows down for the crucial parts, but there were times where I debated putting on the subtitles.

• Surprisingly, there were several moments in this film that made me laugh out loud. The film’s occasional comic relief never feels forced and always stems from the characters and their interactions. My favorite is Anne trying to sign “crochet” for Helen but forgetting how to spell it midway through and instead signing “sewing”. “It has a name, and sewing isn’t it.” Having once read “crocheted” aloud in school as “crotch-et-ed”, this hit hard for me.
• The film’s climax, in which Helen finally comprehends that Anne has been teaching her the corresponding words to everything she encounters, has appeared throughout pop culture for the last 60 years, and I was afraid the occasional parody would ruin it within its proper context (I blame “Family Guy”). But I’ll be damned if I didn’t tear up when Helen finally exclaims “Waa-waa”. The moment is a natural extension of everything that came before it, and I couldn’t help but be moved by it.

Bonus Clip: Great, now I got the “Patty Duke Show” theme song in my head. “But they’re cousins, identical cousins all the way…”