Among Lumet' s monumental filmography ,"child's play" must be ,even more than the overlooked "the group" ,the movie nobody knows or loves to hate .
Personally, I have always thought that Lumet is particularly at ease when he directs films the action of which takes place in an enclosed space: a tribunal in "12 angry men" ,a bank in "dog day afternoon" a train in "murder on the orient express" a house in "deathtrap" or "long day's journey into night" the Strategic Air Command in "fail safe" ,a prisoners camp in "the hill".....
"Child's play " happens entirely in a boys high school but the students are not often on the screen ;unlike some naive works such as "dead poets society" ,the nice modern beloved teacher (Robert Preston) is not the one you think he is ;he is a distant relative of the "good" teacher Miss Brodie in "the prime of miss Jean Brodie ";whereas the old maid was urging her students to fight for "noble " causes such as Spanish fascism,her
colleague uses them to put his old "pal" James Mason down,to drive him crazy;his motives are very obscure (the fact that he wants to teach the twelfth graders is not really convincing and one could write that "some people who do not fit get the only fun they get by putting people down ",as John Prine sings ."So cold ,sometimes it looks so cold" .Women (apart from a nurse) are completely absent and no one among the secular staff has a girlfriend or a wife ,even the young naive gym teacher.Beau Bridges is a bit clumsy and as a sports teacher ,well...besides he lacks charisma and his dramatic range is ineffective in the scene when he blames his colleague (just compare with young Pamela Franklin playing opposite Maggie Smith in a similar scene at the end of "Miss Jean Brodie").
All in all,when you cannot mention it in the same breath as Lumet's works I mention above ,if you like this director,you should catch it :James Mason is excellent in his part of a fallen pitiful Latin teacher (you can also notice his subject had already begun to lose the prestige it used to have in ancient times) and Robert Preston is all the more scary since he remains cheerful or straight-faced.A flawed but nonetheless worthy work .
Like this ? try these.....
"Unman,Wittering and Zigo" (McKenzie,1971)
"The prime of miss Jean Brodie (Neame,1970)
