Robert Aldrich | The Killing of Sister George / 1968

how to turn a friendly nurse into a bawling beast

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Heller (screenplay, based on the stage play by Frank Marcus), Robert Aldrich (director) The Killing of Sister George / 1968

 

Given Robert Aldrich’s fascinating if downward-spiraling career in which, after producing one of the most important of late film noir works, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), he went on to create several works that were just a step above exploitation films—including Sodom and Gomorrah (1962), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (also 1962), Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), and The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968)—which because of their truly campy plots and dialogue and their use of motion picture stars that were working beyond the standard limits of their career or in periods in which their careers seemed almost to be dying, transformed these near-gothic films into popular gay cult movies; yet in the end, one has to admit that his version of The Killing of Sister George, based on a British stage black comedy of 1964 was not that truly awful.

    As in Baby Jane, in which he paired the warring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and Sweet Charlotte which reached back into the 1930s and 40s for its brilliant cast of Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotton, Agnes Moorehead, and Mary Astor, Sister George, in which he first sought to cast Davis, then Angela Lansbury—both of whom might have been brilliant in the role, but, at least in the case of Lansbury, realizing that she still had a full career ahead of her, declined from playing Aldrich’s sleazy characters—featured Beryl Reid, who had played the central character June “George” Buckridge on stage, and Susanna York, the pretty ingenuine of Freud (1962), Tom Jones (1963), A Man for All Seasons (1966), whose beauteous innocence was quickly washed away by makeup artist Bill Turner who seems, at moments, to have dipped her entire head in cold cream, while at other moments painting her in white-face. We’re told, moreover, that at 32-years of age, she had at 15 had illegitimate child almost as old as the female producer Mercy Croft (Coral Browne) with whom she eventually runs off.

    Aldrich encouraged Reid to shout out her lines as if she were still on stage attempting to reach the second balcony, and turned the black comedy into a semi-tragic tale of an end of a career/end of life elder lesbian actor with plenty of tears and sentimental rages tossed into the mix. At moments, Aldrich seems to be attempting to recreate the battle scenes between these two lesbians as if they were performing an alternate version of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And, as some commentators have pointed out much of the lesbian content, some of which Aldrich added to the original play, is filled with numerous stereotypes.

    Yet, for all that this film from 1968 is a hell of a lot more honest about gay life and presents it in a more fascinating manner than almost any work of its day and far into the future. And The Killing of Sister George, is a film, I’d argued, that has been vastly mocked and overlooked.

   The plot is truly a one-liner. June Buckridge (Reid) has long played a character on the BBC series, Applehurst, named Sister George, a nurse, who rides around town in a motor scooter offering up gentle and healing advice.

    Since several the characters in the series had been killed off, she is now certain that she may be next, hence the title of the work. We are not quite sure whether her suspicions are correct or whether her behavior with regard to what she suspects actually cause the event to occur. But in person “George,” the name she now goes by, is quite the opposite of who she really is. Off screen is an often a drunken, opinionated, foul-mouthed lesbian whose relationship with “Childie” (York), who collects numerous dolls and herself might remind film-goers of the role played by Carroll Baker in the 1956 film Baby Doll, written by Tennessee Williams, is almost as perverse.

    In this case, however, Childie is apparently quite involved with George sexually, and their relationship, given the abuses heaped upon her lover by George for fear of Childie’s possible involvement with younger men and women, along with George’s punishment of the girl by insisting when she is found guilty of bad behavior to kneel before her and chew up and swallow of the butt end of a cigar, suggests that they relationship consists mainly of sado-masochistic games.

     When she becomes inebriated, which she often does, George is quite capable of what Childie describes as “naughty things,” such as, walking off the set in fear of being cut and catching a cab

within which sit two young (novitiate) nuns who she quickly begins to sexually abuse. As she describes her love of gin later in the film: “Appearing to be drunk happens to be one of the easier ways of getting out of some of life's most embarrassing situations.”

     With increasing concerns over her behavior, the officials at BBC actually do consider finding a way to kill off their beloved character. One of the producers, Mercy Croft (Coral Browne) is actually sent off to George’s and Childie’s home to demand an apology in writing to church authorities for the taxicab incident.

     Once the officious and superficially charming Croft gets a look at Childie, she quickly befriends her, praising her poetry (which we can only suppose is quite infantile) and basically attending to her in a far kindlier manner than George. What we soon discover, finally, is that Croft herself is a far more reserved and closeted lesbian.

     And indeed, at the next reading of the script, George discovers that she has been written out of a couple of episodes of the show, suffering the fiction of a cold.

     Despite all these tensions and difficulties, George and her much younger lover, who have now been together for several years, are basically in love, spending one of the loveliest scenes in this film in a lesbian nightclub, the Gateways, where they perform together a quite charming Laurel and Hardy skit, after which the lesbians across a crowded room, hit the dance floor to the memorable tunes of the club band.

     While there have been other, usually brief depictions, of lesbian and gay bars in film, this is certainly the first time we encounter such a full picture of a gay nightclub in a Hollywood movie, the only previous film lengthy images of a lesbian bar being portrayed in the privately filmed work Mona’s Candle Light of 1950. We perhaps do not get such a full view of a gay bar or club again until Saturday Night at the Baths (1975), The Ritz (1976), and Nighthawks (1978).  

     It is at Gateways, where Mercy Croft unexpectedly shows up, that George is finally told that she actually will be killed off by riding her scooter into a ten-ton truck. George quips: “I refuse to die in such a ridiculous manner!”

     But even though she brilliantly and quite comedically does everything she can to undermine the filming of the death scene, die she must and does.

       At a going away party she again does her best to scandalize TV officials, as Croft officiously claims to have found a new role for her, that of a cow on a children’s show.

       Croft, meanwhile, steals Childie away from the party, convincing her to pack up her clothes and join her instead of remaining with the abusive and incorrigible George. Back at George’s house, as Childie attempts to decide which dolls to take along, Croft finally makes her move in a long scene added by Aldrich, in which she finally gives into her lust, stroking the younger girl’s breasts, kissing her intensely, and moving into bed with her at the very moment George returns.

     After another furious attempt to keep Childie by her side, responding when the girl insists she wants now to live by herself, “By yourself? You couldn't even cross the bloody road by yourself!” But finally, she realizes the girl has openly betrayed her, as the 32-year-old mother a teenage girl goes off with the producer, leaving George without any role to play in life and utterly alone.

      If this is perhaps what heterosexuals imagine is inevitably the end of all homosexual relationships, at least we know that in George’s case, as one commentator argued, she will not enter the next room and hang herself as the closeted lesbian Martha Dobie (Shirley MacLaine) in William Wyler’s second version of The Children’s Hour did just 7 years earlier.

     What George does is return to the now empty studio, chuck the fake coffin in which her character was buried through the window, knock down a couple of expensive movie lights, and sit down to simultaneously mock and accept her ridiculous situation, ending the movie with the long bawling, lowing sound of a “Mooooooooooooooo.”

    Some of the reviewers of the day, notably The New York Times’ Renata Adler, seemed almost shocked by the openly sexual imagery of the work, Adler observing, from what today reads almost as a homophobic position:

 

 “The prolonged, simultaneously serious and mocking treatment of homosexuals, I suppose, inevitably turns vicious and silly—as homosexuality itself inevitably has a degree of parody in it. But there is a scene between Coral Browne (the gossip columnist in "Lylah Clare"), playing a villainous lesbian studio executive, and Miss York's left breast, which sets a special kind of low in the treatment of sex—any kind of sex—in the movies now. Miss York, whenever her face is in view, looks embarrassed. Miss Browne approaches the breast with a kind of scholarly interest, like an icthyologist finding something ambivalent that has drifted up on the beach. The scene goes on for ages (Mr. Aldrich's attempt, I suppose, to gather some of the refugees from Therese and Isabelle). It is the longest most unerotic, cash-conscious scene between a person and a breast there has ever been on screen, and outside a surgeon's office.”

 

      If The Killing of Sister George is a terribly flawed work, I nonetheless, mostly agree with what critic Derek Winnert wrote in his 2018 review:

 

"Aldrich has been accused of coarsening and commercialising a subtle play. But, nevertheless, it is a spirited, highly entertaining, even sometimes enlightening, possibly even liberating movie, pulling lesbians out of the closet.

    …. George is a great character, a gin-swigging, cigar-chomping, sadistic masculine woman, the opposite of the sweet character she plays on radio [TV]. Reid brings her to vivid life, both pathetic and sympathetic.”

 

Los Angeles, April 1, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).