It's always tricky revisiting a great film of the past.  Will it hold up?  Will your memory of it match your current feelings? This week I got to see 1962's THE MIRACLE WORKER on a theater screen, and I'm happy to report that it's just as powerful, just as moving as ever.  The icing on the cake was meeting its star, Anne Bancroft, following the screening.

I don't think I'd seen the film in its entirety since it was new.  I was just a kid, and I was primed for it by a class trip to see the play--the first Broadway show I ever attended.  I've remembered the story all these years, of blind, deaf Helen Keller, and Annie Sullivan, the steel-willed woman who's determined to find a way to communicate with her.  It would be impossible to forget the lengthy scene--a tour-de-force on film as well as on stage--in which the two do battle over, under, and around a dining room table, as Annie tries to establish who is in charge. 

I also remembered the stark, black and white look of the film.  But I didn't remember its austere beauty, or the remarkable restraint of director Arthur Penn in telling the story.  He allows the emotions to flow from his characters, but he never comments on them:  there are no swooping camera moves, no swelling music.  (In fact, Laurence Rosenthal's beautiful score is very spare.  I can't imagine that happening today:  most 1990s moviemakers would have the music attempting to SUPPLY those emotions.)  Penn knew William Gibson's material intimately, having directed the original PLAYHOUSE 90 television show as well as the Broadway play that

sprang from it.  As Annie Sullivan shows Helen no pity, Penn takes the same approach to his story; this is not a sentimental film.  When the final scene comes, we cry--and you can't help but cry--because the outpouring of emotion has been earned, not cajoled or manipulated.

The screening of THE MIRACLE WORKER and dinner to follow was organized by the American Film Institute's AFI Associates.  Anne Bancroft proved a candid, charming and articulate guest as I interviewed her about the film, with interjections from her husband, Mel Brooks, who met her during the run of the play.  The first surprise she shared was that the film was shot in New Jersey, filling in for the bucolic, antebellum South.  (She also remembered that there was a virus in the vicinity, and two weeks before production was over she contracted walking pneumonia.  As determined as the woman she was playing, she forced herself to go to work every day; when the movie wrapped, she collapsed and went to the hospital.)

Wary of attending the screening, she decided to watch the film again at home, and succumbed to it just as much as we did.  She also admitted--with prodding from her husband--that she spent a certain amount of time admiring her youthful good looks and shiny black hair!

She credits Arthur Penn with opening the door to a true understanding of the art of acting.  He had directed her on television, and in William Gibson's previous play, TWO FOR THE SEESAW, before they embarked on THE MIRACLE WORKER (with just a month off in-between).  As for Patty Duke, Bancroft explained that theirs was a close-knit relationship--as it almost had to be for the two to work together with such intensity over a long period of time.  Duke idolized her, and Bancroft admits that she relished the role of mentor and role-model, even though she says she was not the stable, secure woman the youthful actress pictured her to be. 

As to the exceptional dinner-table battle scene, Bancroft explained that every bit of it was written out in Gibson's script, move by move.  It was then choreographed, like a ballet.  I asked how she and Duke didn't kill each other as they manhandled one another night after night.  She replied that they DID have some injuries at first in the rehearsal process:  she slapped Patty one day while the girl's jaw was set, and it chipped off a tooth.  Then Bancroft gave herself a horrible bruise by kicking a chair; it swelled so badly that she had to stay off her feet during much of rehearsals.  Her understudy walked through the scenes while she read her lines with her foot propped up.

Once they set the scene, however, there were no more mishaps. Bancroft enthused that when you really know a scene, and know a character, after extensive rehearsals, you can feel free--as she and Duke did--and invest the scene with emotion.          

By the time the movie was made, Anne Bancroft had been playing Annie Sullivan for one year and four months on stage.  How, I asked, could she and Patty Duke still achieve such amazing spontanaeity in their performances?  Without missing a beat, she smiled and said, "Talent!"