Cinema: What Ever Happened to Childie McNaught?

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"There's not enough kindness in the world," whimpers the chunky lesbian, knocking back the booze. The worn insight is typical of the maundering dialogue in The Killing of Sister George, an autopsy of a homosexual affair. The heroine (Beryl Reid) is an actress with a single role: Sister George, a kindly, cuddly nurse on a British soap opera. Offscreen, she drops the smarmy smile and becomes an abrading machine running on alcohol and programmed for self-destruction.

Her inamorata, "Childie" McNaught, is a red-cheeked pippin of a girl (Susannah York) with a mind that has stopped and a body that will not quit. Their relationship, on the skids before the film begins, collapses utterly when George learns that she is to be written out of the program. The bearer of the sad tidings is a venomous BBC executive, Mercy Croft (Coral Browne), who doesn't give Childie a second look—she is too busy with the first. As with George, deception is the key to character. Childie belies her name—she has abandoned the illegitimate child she bore at 15 and is now herself a slow 32 years old. As for Mercy, she has no character at all; her external priggishness cloaks a savage Sapphic hunger. George is promptly cast out of the triangle and crawls, wounded, to obscurity. Her new job: the voice of a puppet called Clarabelle the cow.

Skirted Subjects. In truth, that is what she has been playing all along. Though she is a superb comedienne and a subtle actress, Reid is called upon to moo and moan around the set with scarcely a shred of alleviating humanity. York's innate beauty and growing skills are dissipated in a role that calls for little more than wide eyes and elliptical chatter. What is most wrong with The Killing of Sister George is its essential conception. Director Robert Aldrich has regrettably decided to make this adaptation of Frank Marcus' play into pure Hollywood Gothica, in the style of his What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Because the cast is superior, there is no scenery chewing. There is tobacco chewing, though, when Childie humbles herself before George and crunches a cigar butt in her mouth. There is also the customary hugging of childhood dolls, the eerie apartment, the screeching lovers' quarrels. Mercy and Childie have one love scene of unprecedented explicitness, but even that is not let alone. George catches the lovers en flagrante, throwing open the door in the manner of a Joan Crawford melodrama. In the fervent exploration of once-forbidden terrain, film makers are understandably attracted to themes of homosexuality. Still, treating lesbians as if they were only men in skirts is like treating children as if they were only small adults. Both attitudes are false to facts and dishonest to drama.