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).
