JinRoz For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

JohnHowardReid Copyright 1956 by Loew's Inc. An M-G-M Picture. New York opening at the Radio City Music Hall: 27 September 1956. U.S. release: 28 September 1956. U.K. release: 20 October 1957 (sic). Australian release: 8 April 1957. 10,977 feet. 122 minutes.SYNOPSIS: A re-make of John Van Druten's "Young Woodley" (1925), in which a mature schoolboy has a romance with his housemaster's wife, transferred to an American setting and brought up to date.NOTES: BIP released a film version of "Young Woodley" in 1930. Van Druten himself collaborated on the screenplay with Victor Kendall, whilst Thomas Bentley directed. Madeleine Carroll, Frank Lawton and Sam Livesey played the roles now enacted by Deborah Kerr, John Kerr and Leif Erickson.Robert Anderson's Broadway play opened at the Barrymore on 30 September 1953 and ran a highly successful 712 performances (though Joan Fontaine and Anthony Perkins took over from the original leads in the course of the run). It's fair to say that the stage play resembles "Young Woodley" far less than the film version. Deborah Kerr (in her Broadway debut), John Kerr and Leif Erickson played the roles they repeated for the film. Elia Kazan directed.Aided by the play's reputation and an all-out publicity campaign, "Tea and Sympathy" was most successful at the box-office, though not rating with the top ten money-makers of the year. Considering the film's comparatively small budget (it took only six weeks to shoot), M-G-M would have made a tidy profit. CinemaScope, I feel, didn't help the box-office by so much a single admission. Certainly Minnelli fails to use the process 95% of the time, being content to frame all his action center-camera.Number 9 in the Film Daily's annual poll of American film critics.VIEWER'S GUIDE: As an indication of just how far the play has been diluted, I would be inclined to rate the movie version as suitable for all but the most impressionable children.COMMENT: Although regarded by many critics (not this one) as a landmark film in its day, there can surely be no doubt it has dated badly. True, the central situation still has some elements of truth and close-to-the-bone realism, but the characters are so uncompromisingly one-dimensional they seem to have strayed on to the stage from a one-act farce not a three-deck morality play. Worse, they are unsympathetically and theatrically over-played. It's hard to say who is the worst offender, though the two Kerrs certainly run each other close. You can't say they do their best with the characters as written. They do their worst. Every false bit of business, every artificial gesture, every phony catch in the voice — all these techniques are ruthlessly, systematically and insensitively employed. The rest of the players are likewise hammy caricatures.Minnelli's direction does not help. He has an eye and ear for urban social chatter, but he overdoes these effects. The acting of the extras is just as overblown as that of the principals and featured players."Tea and Sympathy" does have something to say about non-conformity which is still relevant. But the approach both of the play and even more particularly the film is crassly pedestrian.A fair amount of effort has been made to open out the play. All the same, by M-G-M's "A" standards, production values are meager.

frankwiener As a child in the 1950's and then as an adolescent and teenager during the 60's, I have many mixed feelings about the era. I loved the music, many of the movies, the "Golden Age of Television" (which lured me away from despised homework assignments each and every night), the relative safety, especially for a kid, and the uncomplicated simplicity of the times. What I don't miss, however, are the oppressive, narrow-minded stereotyping and the stifling social conformity that were so prevalent during that period. So what if you occasionally or even frequently enjoyed your own company and wanted to listen to phonograph records by yourself or, on impulse, even hopped the Number 8 bus to downtown Elizabeth, New Jersey where there were no fewer than four different movie theaters on the same block from which to choose, a really big deal at the time. I didn't find this movie dated at all. Not only does it offer a glimpse of what life was like in the 1950's, which should have some historical significance to younger folks today, but its message regarding the enslaving circumstances of rigid social conformity is ageless. Although it is obviously a stage adaptation, praise goes to director Vincente Minnelli for so vividly bringing it to the wide screen. The three leads, Deborah Kerr, John Kerr (no relation), and Leif Erickson, who all revived their original Broadway roles, were exceptional. I also loved the scene when Al (Daryl Hickman), Tom's socially pressured roommate, attempts to provide Tom with tips on how to appear more manly to the world. Norma Crane, who wonderfully played Golde in the film version of "Fiddler on the Roof", perfectly portrayed a very "unsympathetic", if not nasty, Ellie Martin. Ironically, Edward Andrews depicted Tom's demanding father as anything but manly, perhaps intentionally. Be as I say, Tommy, not as I am. While Tom at first appeared to be the focus of the film, the stories of Laura and Bill Reynolds, the dorm house parents, slowly begin to overshadow Tom's miserable situation. This amounted to some excellent work by screenplay writer Robert Anderson, who also wrote first-rate scripts for "The Nun's Story", "The Sand Pebbles, and "I Never Sang For My Father." And what is Bill Reynolds doing at the end of the movie? Listening to phonograph records by himself. Heaven's to Betsy! What's the matter with him? My only criticism is that it ran a bit long and could have been reduced in length without losing its powerful impact.

PWNYCNY Conformity is a drag, especially when it's imposed on someone. That is the theme of this movie. It's no joke being the target of a smear campaign, especially when the smearing is groundless. Overall, this is a good movie. John Kerr and Deborah Kerr give excellent performances as two persons who discover that they have a lot in common. Metaphors abound in this movie; characters take on sociological meaning. The movie is both subtle and powerful. The movie portrays the kind of repressiveness that can literally drive one to despair. Of course, being based a stage play, the movie itself is also stagy. Nevertheless, the actors succeed in bringing the story to life. Although the story revolves around the relationship between a married woman and a young teenage boy in a boarding school, it is more about the woman and less about the boy who is an instrument through which the woman gets in touch with her own feelings. The movie deals with this storyline in a forthright manner and for that reason alone this movie is worth watching. Kudos to Deborah Kerr for a marvelous performance.

Robert J. Maxwell There's some touching and unintentionally amusing material here. Deborah Kerr is the sensitive mistress of a boarding house for a couple of college kids, and the wife of bluff Lief Erickson, headmaster. One of the kids who lives upstairs is John Kerr. She's not only nurturant, she's gorgeous too, despite the lurid period make up.Kerr is the odd kid out. He doesn't walk like a man. He was taught to sew by his maid after his mother's death. He has long hair instead of the ubiquitous crew cuts. He doesn't know any girls. He doesn't know how to dance. He has no interest in making a fortune after he graduates. He listens to classical music and wants to become a folk singer. He reads "poetry" off by himself. He wins at tennis but not by forceful drives but by chops and slices. At one point, his father, Edward Andrews, visits the campus and asks his old friend Erickson how Kerr is making out. Erickson lowers his face and forces himself to reveal all: "He was found on the beach with the faculty wives -- SEWING." Deborah Kerr observes all this and can't keep herself from interfering, although the rules declare that she must do nothing more than provide "tea and sympathy" to the boys on Sundays.D. Kerr goes much farther than that to help the wounded J. Kerr. She begs J. Kerr's empathic but helpless room mate to give him lessons on masculinity. She argues with her husband over the rough treatment, begs him to see that it stops. He's compelled to refuse. Maybe some rough treatment will make a man of J. Kerr.Well, all of this is mighty dated. First of all, J. Kerr is not merely "out of step" with the others, which is all the movie script implies. He's a homosexual dressed in the moral code of the time. Second of all, all those buzz-cut jock types playing grabass on the beach and bragging about their conquests are stand-ins for the attitudes that some felt the nations of the Free World should take towards the Collectivists behind the Iron Curtain. Treat 'em rough and maybe it will teach 'em a lesson. Most forcefully, and most generally, this is a critique of the very real enforced conformity of the 1950s which the Beatniks finally challenged publicly.The stereotypes abound. Not in real life. I doubt that in the 1950s, or maybe EVER, was the gender structure of campus life ever so bifurcated, except maybe in some isolated and selective settings. The stereotypes represent, not verisimilitude, but the intention of the screenwriter, Robert Anderson, to simplify our vision of life so that our choices are made more easily. In this case, both of the Kerrs are right and everyone else is wrong. There now. Wasn't that easy? At times the script becomes almost hilarious, a self parody. The boys alternately shun and humiliate J. Kerr. They call him "Sissy Boy." But D. Kerr knows better. If he has grave doubts about his own masculinity, she solves the problem by seducing him in a furry glade. Thus, she "cures" him of his homosexual disease.What I'd have loved in that tender scene is to see it go beyond the point at which the beautiful and liminally sexual D. Kerr slips off her sweater, gently clasps J. Kerr's face to her bosom, and says, "When you talk about this in later years -- and you will -- be kind." First of all, I'd like to have seen a little more eagerness on the part of the neglected, love-starved wife, more than just the desire to help someone else. After all, she thinks he's an ithyphallic eighteen-year-old stud-in-waiting. I'd have loved to see a graphic sexual scene in which J. Kerr turns out to be completely impotent despite the most ardent ministrations of D. Kerr. I'd have liked seeing J. Kerr disgusted throughout the ordeal. And finally he should have stood up, buttoned his clothes, and spat out an insult, "Keep your filthy hands off me from now on, you witch. If you want to talk to me in the future, I'll be at Shelley's making focaccio. And -- by the way -- that DRESS you're wearing is a complete CATASTROPHE." Her husband, playing rough house with the boys out on the gridiron, should suffer an injury that causes him to lose one of his testicles. J. Kerr's room mate, the one bulging with muscles, the one with a neck the width of a utility pole, should be found in the bathroom stall with a muscle man magazine in his lap. The captain of the football squad needs have his closet full of ladies' shoes revealed.That would have provided a perfect ending to a movie that now, from our current enlightened, sophisticated, liberated, and thoroughly corrupt perspective, we can recognize for the comic enterprise that it is.