Children in Darkness

David and Lisa is a tribute much more deeply touching: a story of two terrified children, lost in the deep black mine of the mind, who are found there by the means that Freud discovered and are led back to life by the bright red thread of love.

David (Keir Dullea) is a 17-year-old boy with a high IQ and an obsessive-compulsive neurosis. He lives in morbid horror of dirt, in insane ambition to stop time and so cheat death, in panic dread that someday someone may touch him--"because a touch can kill." Lisa (Janet Margolin) is a 15-year-old girl with soft brown eyes and schizophrenia. She is split into two well-defined personalities. As Lisa she is a silly four-year-old who talks all the time but only in a "word salad" seasoned with rhyme ("A big fat sow--and how and how"); as Muriel she is a demure adolescent who communicates in writing because she can't talk.

The children, who meet in a home for disturbed adolescents, are almost inaccessible to therapy. But their doctor (Howard da Silva) works with steady devotion, and one day a miracle happens. Lisa comes sidling up to David and says shyly: "Me, the same; Lisa, the name." Startled but pleased, David replies: "Me, the same; David, the name." After that they often talk, though always in rhyme--when they talk in prose, Muriel comes back, and Lisa doesn't like Muriel. But she adores David, and he is half in love with her too.

His sickness keeps him from admitting it. He can't take the risk of relating to people--only to clocks. Clocks he can start and stop whenever he likes, but people he can't control. One night he has a dream in which he tries to cut Lisa's head off with the hand of a giant clock, tries with all his might--and fails. Next day he says to her tenderly: "I see a girl who looks like a pearl. A pearl of a girl." She glows like a pearl. Then all at once Lisa stops bothering about rhyme, and Muriel makes a drawing that shows her two personalities united in an all-inclusive Me.

David feels the change in her, a new depth of love and trust that makes a change in him too. He fights it. All the fear in him fights it. But he can't resist. He can't hold out against the terrible and wonderful warmth that steals through his limbs whenever he sees her, that makes his cheeks burn andhis eyes swim and his heart pound and his hand reach out to --No! A touch can kill! Death is in her hands! But love is in her hands too, and love conquers death. In terror, in bliss, his face a sepulcher torn open, his eyes a resurrection, David turns to Lisa, one lost child turns to another lost child and stammers the three little words that make him a member of mankind: "Take my hand." Based on a case history written with distinction by Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin, David and Lisa was made in suburban Philadelphia by a director (Frank Perry), a scriptwriter (Eleanor Perry, the director's wife) and a leading lady (Margolin) who had never made a motion picture before. Amazingly, this gang of greenhorns has produced a minor masterpiece, easily the best U.S. movie released in 1962. The script is a tour de force of iatric intuition. The performances are stunningly good--Dullea in particular works with a subtlety, accuracy and intensity of feeling that indicate important talent. And Director Peiry, heretofore only an associate producer of Broadway plays, leaps to the public eye as a cinema natural. In his use of the camera, in the pace of his cutting, he displays in rare degree what Sergei Eisenstein called "the film sense." But in the inspiration and manipulation of his actors he reveals a more profound and significant gift: the sense for what is specifically human in human beings, the sense of the heart.

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