Performance Piece

The Miracle Worker (Playfilms; United Artists) was. on Broadway, essentially a set piece for two actresses whose dialogue was a matter of touch, since one was playing a deaf, blind, mute child. It was less play than performance, done night after night with emotional brilliance by Patty Duke as the seven-year-old Helen Keller, and Anne Bancroft as her teacher, Annie Sullivan.

Hollywood is seldom impressed with that sort of miracle-working, and the film version might well have starred, say, Doris Day as Helen's teacher and Rock Hudson as her father, with this little handicapped kid running around bumping into things and jerking tears. So Broadway Producer Fred Coe. Director Arthur Penn and Playwright William Gibson kept the movie rights, formed their own production company, rehired Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke and captured for good what is quite possibly the most moving double performance ever recorded on film.

The child is a little animal, rooting, grunting, stringy-haired and grimy, her mind buried alive in the wreckage caused by a disease of infancy. Outdoors, in the front yard of her family's home in Tuscumbia. Ala., her hands grope upward to a sky she will never see. Indoors, she wanders around the dinner table like an overindulged house pet, grubbing for bits of food. The family talks of sending her for the rest of her life to an asylum for mental defectives--but then finds and hires a young teacher from Boston. Half-blind herself, the teacher knows that if she can give the child a sense of the existence of language, she can give her the world.

Whenever the child's hand touches something, the teacher takes the other hand and spells into it by touch-alphabet the name of the object: doll, water, mother, mug, spoon. The child imitates the hand motions, but does not understand. Yet repetition of touch-spelled words in a framework of discipline is the only way that a spark can ever jump the distance between imitation and imagination, so the teacher is rough and unsentimental. The child kicks and slaps, and the teacher slaps back. The famous ten-minute fight between them is fully as long and exhausting on film.

Along the way, the picture has the same defects the play had. The pure drama at the center is enough to hold fast any audience capable of seeing and hearing, but Writer Gibson nervously includes some fabricated tensions and artificial dramaturgy. There is much shouting, sneering and threatening by Helen Keller's father (Victor Jory) and stepbrother (Andrew Prine). and much bungling by her mother (Inga Swenson). Teacher Sullivan is given a two-week deadline to produce results. The main story is too strong to require that sort of buttressing.

As a biographical playwright. Gibson might have been tempted to plant the information that the blind, speechless, apparently hopeless little girl would one day be graduated with honors from Radcliffe College, make lecture tours and write nine books. But he wisely refrained. As a silent child unable to hear or see. Patty Duke is not so much Helen Keller in 1887 as language itself in an undiscovered state a hundred centuries ago, and watching her stumbling, vaguely communicative gestures, it is possible to feel the emptiness of a world without words. Then the whole miracle of language and literature comes through in a single word when the child, feeling the familiar cool fluid from the front-yard pump running over her hands, finally comprehends that it is called water.

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