Main Cast: Beryl Reid, Susannah York, Coral Browne, Ronald Fraser, Patricia Medina
Release Year: 1968
Country: US/UK
Run Time: 138 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
A year after helming The Dirty Dozen, director Robert Aldrich took on this controversial drama based on the play of the same name by Frank Marcus. Beryl Reid stars as soap opera star June, an alcoholic lesbian who spends most of her time with her younger lover, Alice (Susannah York). When vindictive television executive Mercy Croft (Coral Browne) takes a liking to Alice, she arranges to have June's character, Sister George, killed off the show. Drunk and paranoid, June struggles to keep it together or risk losing Alice. Because of its exploration of a subject as taboo as homosexuality, The Killing of Sister George earned an X rating. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide
Review
Robert Aldrich's The Killing of Sister George is a powerful black comedy that continues to generate controversy over its portrayal of lesbian relationships. The central relationship is disturbing and fascinating, not due to the sex of the characters, but due to its sometimes abusive nature. Aldrich, whose work often is a mesmerizing mixture of luridness, camp, and insightfulness, is in top form here, creating a claustrophobic onscreen atmosphere that causes the audience itself to feel as trapped as the characters. George herself is the most trapped, but also the one that struggles the most against it -- and ironically the only one still trapped by film's end. Beryl Reid's towering performance is stunning. The viewer is appalled when watching her humiliate Childie with a cigar butt, yet somehow sympathetic. Reid makes the audience root for her and feel for her, even when she is at her most monstrous. And her final scene, standing amid the debris of a television studio and mooing, is both harrowing and heartbreaking. Susannah York and Coral Browne also turn in incredible performances, and their five-minute love scene is shocking both for its frankness and the naked intensity of desperate emotion they bring to it. Overlong, discomforting, and sometimes over-the-top in content, Sister George is still a unique experience. ~ Craig Butler, All Movie Guide
Hugh Paddick - Freddie; Cyril Delevanti - Ted Baker; Sivi Aberg - Diana; William Beckley - Floor Manager; Cyril Elaine Church; Elaine Church - Marelen; Brendan Dillon - Bert Turner; Jack Raine - Deputy Commissioner; Byron Webster - Jack Adams; Meier Tzelniker - Mr. Katz; Cicely Walper - Mrs. Coote
Credit
William Glasgow - Art Director, Walter Blake - Associate Producer, Lynn Stalmaster - Casting, Renie - Costume Designer, Robert Aldrich - Director, Michael Luciano - Editor, Edgar J. Scherick - Executive Producer, Gerald Fried - Composer (Music Score), William Turner - Makeup, William Glasgow - Production Designer, Joseph Biroc - Cinematographer, Brian West - Cinematographer, Robert Aldrich - Producer, Dean Hodges - Sound/Sound Designer, Dick Church - Sound/Sound Designer, Lukas Heller - Screenwriter, Frank Marcus - Play Author, William Aldrich - Producer's Assistant
The Killing of Sister George is a 1964 play by Frank Marcus that was adapted as a 1968 film directed by Robert Aldrich.
Sister George is a beloved character in the popular radio series Applehurst, a nurse who ministers to the medical needs and personal problems of the local villagers. She is played by June Buckridge, who in real life is a gin-guzzling, cigar-chomping, slightly sadistic masculine woman, the antithesis of the sweet character she plays. June lives with Alice "Childie" McNaught, a younger dim-witted woman she often verbally and sometimes physically abuses. When June discovers her character is scheduled to be killed, she becomes increasingly impossible to work and live with. Mercy Croft, an executive at the radio station, intercedes in her professional and personal lives supposedly to help, but she actually has an agenda of her own.
Although it is strongly implied that June and Childie are lesbians, and towards the end it is suggested that Mercy could be as well, this is never explicitly stated. Marcus intended the play to be a farce, not a serious treatment of lesbianism, but because there was so little material about lesbians it became treated as such.
It was also clearly a parody of the killing of Grace Archer in The Archers (an episode much better known at the time the play was written than it would be in the 21st century) and has sometimes been compared with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?.[1]
The 1964 West End production starred Beryl Reid as June. Two years later she reprised the role on Broadway in a production directed by Val May. After 7 previews, it opened on October 5, 1966 at the Belasco Theatre and ran for 205 performances. The cast also included Eileen Atkins as Alice and Lally Bowers as Mercy. Beryl Reid won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play and the play and Eileen Atkins received nominations.
Lukas Heller wrote the screenplay for the 1968 feature film version directed by Robert Aldrich. Beryl Reid was cast as June. Bette Davis and Angela Lansbury were considered for the role. Susannah York played Alice and Coral Browne as Mercy. In the movie Applehurst became a televisionsoap opera, and the lesbian aspects of the plot are much more explicit. The film added many characters and shot many scenes on location. The opening sequence has June wandering through the streets and alleyways of Hampstead west of Heath Street. Another is in a real-life London lesbian hangout, the Gateways Club. Alice is portrayed as childishly naive rather than dim-witted, and June is more of an alcoholic. In one scene, while under the influence, she molests two novice nuns in a taxi, behavior that precipitates the beginning of the end for Sister George.
Between the time the movie started filming and ended production, the movie industry instituted the new MPAA ratings system. Largely on the basis of a graphic sex scene involving Alice and Mercy (deleted in some TV screenings) Sister George received an X rating, which limited its exposure in theatres and ability to advertise in mainstream newspapers. Aldrich spent $75,000 battling the rating, but his lawsuit was dismissed, and the film died at the box office.
Beryl Reid was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture Actress in a Drama. The film is available on DVD. Rarely seen on television, it was broadcast uncut by Turner Classic Movies as part of its June 2007 salute to gay cinema.
Radio adaptation
John Tydeman adapted and directed the play for BBC Radio 4. Broadcast on April 25, 2009, Sarah Badel played June, Lucy Whybrow played Alice and Anna Massey played Mercy.
