Of all the neglected masterpieces of cinema from the late 1960s and early 1970s, The Killing of Sister George has not lost any of its power, its venom and its shock.
And of all the great monsters of cinema, Beryl Reid's character must be considered among the worst. She’s sharp, she’s rude, she doesn’t give a monkeys and to top it all, she’s a domineering lesbian. The Killing of Sister George tore the screen apart in 1968, and it can still do the same today.
First let it be said that there is no sense that The Killing of Sister George could have sprung upon the British public without warning in 1968. Not only does it contain acts of lesbianism, but the very idea that sexuality such as this could have been presented overtly and discussed between the characters would have resulted in blanket bans and national shock. Therefore, it’s no surprise to learn that The Killing of Sister George was a hugely successful stage play, before it came to be filmed.
Robert Aldrich (Kiss Me Deadly (1955), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), The Dirty Dozen (1967)) made the film even more risqué than the play however, extending everything where he could; George was more of an alcoholic, Susannah York as Alice is portrayed as naïve rather than simple, as she is in the play.
On the basis of a sex scene involving Coral Browne as Mercy Croft and Susannah York, The Killing of Sister George received an X certificate, which limited its screening and ability to advertise in mainstream newspapers. Forty five years later, and you’ll watch it gobsmacked, partially because of the tenderness, and partially because you will be impressed that anybody in the 1960s would have filmed this for the mainstream anyway. Aldrich spent $75,000 battling the rating, but his lawsuit was thrown out, and the film consequently died at the box office, more is the pity.
The play of Sister George is a British national treasure and deserved a good film rendering, which it got. Beryl Reid was an expert at playing Sister George, and played it in the West End and on Broadway, and picked up several awards for doing so between 1964 and 1966. If you don’t know what to expect from the film then you will enjoy it all the more. There is a fairly unusual credit sequence in which Beryl Reid marches frumpishly through the streets of Hampstead, west of Heath Street, to a most incongruous action film score, but these claustrophobic alleys create a strange effect and by the time the credits are complete, you aren’t sure what to expect. In the first four minutes however, you will have been made aware of Beryl Reid’s character, from her fraudulent posh accent, to her false charm and her enormous anger.
Sometimes I think that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf has more to answer for than we realise, but I think that when Edward Albee’s play hit the stage and then the screen, a lot of writers were inspired to see just how much power could be generated by two or three characters battling it out in a living room — and there is a lot of that here. When it’s just Beryl Reid and Susannah York together, or if it is the two of them and Coral Brown, the drama and comedy is superb, world class in fact.
Oddly enough, it was the success of The Dirty Dozen the year before that gave Aldrich the opportunity to work on The Killing of Sister George. The scene in the lesbian bar was filmed in a real one, the Gateways Club in London, and of course this generated controversy, as audiences were not in the slightest used to seeing lesbians interacting openly with each other.
There are also a lot of truly great lines in The Killing of Sister George (‘I'm going to give the people what they really want — commercials!’) and although the general public missed out in 1968, there’s no excuse for people not to see this. It was Robert Aldrich’s favourite of his own films and mjust without doubt be considered as a British classic, which must be rediscovered. My personal favourite line is as follows:
Alice (Susannah Yorke) : Not all women are raving bloody lesbians, you know.
George (Beryl Reid) : That is a misfortune I am perfectly well aware of.
Also to watch out for in The Killing of Sister George is Patricia Medina, who plays a bizarrely creepy neighbour, one of many upright and indoors women in the scratch-the-surface world of English lesbianism portrayed. Life is strange, and after watching this film at the end of April 2012, I went on the Internet Movie Database shortly afterwards to find that Patricia Medina had died the day before I’d watched the movie. Weird world.
Coral Browne is very good too and exudes pounds of malevolent fake charm and arch superiority, playing the predatory dyke better than it has ever been done. Coral Browne was an amazing lady, born in Australia and often playing superior upper class types, she was funny and versatile and worked on stage as much as screen.
The Killing of Sister George is still amazing after so many years. Watching it you may wonder how it ever achieved any kind of cinematic release in its day, and what is particularly cool is how slowly the women's love for each other dawns on the casual viewer.
The Killing of Sister George is so wildly entertaining that it will never let you down, and as a period piece it’s an essential item of British history. For those that know Beryl Reid from her myriad appearances on British television, The Killing of Sister George will be a further treat, to see the power and the humour that she had, playing this foul-mouthed booze-swilling beast.
