Love Is Not Enough

A Child Is Waiting. There are 5,700,000 "mental defectives" in the U.S., about a third of them children. Some are helpless imbeciles, but many can be educated at the primary level. Only in the past decade, however, have modern methods of instruction and therapy been offered to any considerable number of defectives; several millions are still stored in antiquated institutions or tended by loyal relatives.

This is the situation examined in this picture. It is not a pleasant situation and it is not a pleasant picture. But as far as it goes the film is bone-honest, and at moments it is mortally moving. Adapted by Abby Mann from his 1957 television play, A Child Is Waiting describes in fiction that keeps close to fact what is being done in the better state schools for retarded children. And in the process it permits the spectator to spend 102 minutes in the company of 40 children clinically classified as imbeciles, idiots and morons--real retardates, not Hollywood brats pretending to be feebleminded. Indeed, the picture forces the spectator to look these damaged human beings in the face. It isn't easy. They look so much like the rest of us.

The story centers on Reuben (Bruce Ritchey), whose parents (Gena Rowlands and Steven Hill) self-indulgently refuse for more than five years to admit that they have produced a moron, and then resentfully abandon him in a state school. Crushed by this rejection, Reuben vaguely longs for the parents who let him be a baby and specifically hates the psychologist-headmaster (Burt Lancaster) who demands that he grow up. One day a new teacher comes to the school, an amiable but muddled musician (Judy Garland) who represents the common confusions of feeling about defective children. At first she feels revulsion, then she feels pity, finally she feels love. All three reactions, the film asserts, are inadequate.

So are the teacher's motives for wanting to help the helpless: she feels that her life is empty and hopes that the chil dren will fill it. She loves Reuben truly, but she cannot see that if love solves her problem it does not solve Reuben's. Passionately the psychologist tells her: "Your love is not enough! These children need discipline. Their lives are a never-ending battle for small victories. No one ever needed to succeed in any little way so much as these children do." The cli max harshly proves the point.

The script of A Child Is Waiting is put together with care and conscience, and on the whole Director John Cassavetes (Shadows) does a remarkably mature and measured job of putting it on film. Garland is good, Rowlands and Hill are excellent, Lancaster has never been better, and young Ritchey lives his role with such empathy that most spectators will simply assume he is one of the real defectives. But time and again the real defectives steal the show. At first the spectator can see only their defects, but at last he sees what lies behind the defects: children much like other children, children who wonderfully touch the heart. At this point. Scenarist Mann says simply and effectively what he fundamentally means to say: "These people have a right to life."

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