I can only guess that the more gushing reviews of this movie are for the subject matter, not the actual movie. Yes, the story of Helen Keller and her teacher is a moving one. Also, I thought Patty Duke gave an admirable performance, not just "for a child" but for anybody. But as for this movie, I struggled to get through it and had to mute the sound much of the time. I found the characters, other than Patty Duke/Helen Keller, to be incredibly annoying. They were so irritating that at the beginning, when Helen is running around smashing things and hitting people, she was still the most likeable character on screen. The movie starts with her parents, the father played by the old and revolting Victor Jory (wearing a hideous goatee for good measure), and the mother, played by the young and beautiful Inga Swenson as his trophy wife, realizing that the child is deaf and blind. They then proceed to scream, sob, yell, and pound on things, as if perhaps they could frighten the baby out of her deafness. Throughout the rest of the movie they continue along these lines, with Swenson as Helen's mother crying and whining constantly, and Jory as Helen's father yelling all his lines and otherwise portraying his character as a bellowing moron. I started muting the sound every time these two appeared on the screen. I also found Anne Bancroft's fake Irish accent (the real Annie Sullivan was not Irish, as noted here), and smug attitude unsympathetic. And those long soliloquies accompanied by vague "arty" images of her flashbacks superimposed on each other made my head hurt. Again, I believe the movie basks in the reflected glory of its "virtuous" subject matter. But when viewing it simply as a movie, I found it very hard to sit through.
Review of The Miracle Worker
