Movies Made Here: Child's Play (1972)

Before there was the EF school mounted on our Tarrytown hilltop, there was Fordham, and before Fordham there was Marymount and it was a Catholic school for girls. In the dark and drab Child’s Play of 1972 (not to be confused with the Chucky possessed-doll movies of the same name, which everyone reviewing it on Amazon seems to have done), Marymount gets to experience gender reversal as a Catholic school for boys. Creepy boys. Lots of odd looking creepy boys who don’t speak much and seem to swarm innocents like buzzards.

I appreciate often in British cinema that the actors look so real, bad teeth and all. In the U.S., they are too blemish- and wrinkle-free to ever achieve true believability. Unless, it turns out, the movie was made in the ‘70s! These boys and the priests that preach to them excel in their ordinariness/ugliness. James Mason does a good haggard Latin teacher. The only one a little too attractive perhaps is the aptly named Beau Bridges, so very young here, playing the role of the newbie gym teacher at this starched up school gone wrong.

What could go wrong with all these crucifixes here and there and everywhere? The boys, you see, are randomly attacking each other, as if possessed by demons (or, one would argue, as if teenagers). Meanwhile in the faculty lounge, there’s a growing animosity between Mason’s bruised and paranoid character Jerome Malley and the seeming spotlessness of his nemesis English teacher Joe Dobbs (played by Robert Preston). The students love the nurturing Dobbs and hate the mean Malley, but the movie turns on flipping their roles. The real bad guy turns out to be Dobbs, who is pulling the boys’ strings like a cult-leader. (Fun aside: Marlon Brando was signed on to play Dobbs until he realized the Malley role was so much juicier. Perhaps Godfather was a better route).

Marymount is listed as sole location for shooting this film, and you really get an insider’s perspective on every nook and cranny of this school – dorm beds, kitchen, chapel, lockers, classrooms, lounges, hallway, all that dark wood and tan paint. (There’s no color in this film to speak of, if you discount the many shades of brown). There’s no outsider’s perspective possible: we never break free from all these interior spaces and if we do, for a second, the camera is cropped tight on one bit of the building. Never do we see those slooping hills that Tarrytown-filmed movies always seem to luxuriate over.

Despite the big fame of actor James Mason and director Sydney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Murder on the Orient Express), who died earlier this year, this film has never been available on home video of any sort in this country. (I had to purchase it digitally for $10 on Amazon, the only option I found.) It’s not a horror movie (which might have helped) but somewhere in the realm of mystery/suspense, without an extremely compelling amount of either. Perhaps what it is is a document of our Marymount of yesteryear, without all those girls. No girls allowed here.