The Killing of Sister George (1968)
Directed by Robert Aldrich

Film Review

Apart from a morbid affinity with the decay of rancorous harridans, it is hard to fathom why the American film director Robert Aldrich would ever consider attempting an expensive screen adaptation of Frank Marcus's fairly insignificant British stage play The Killing of Sister George.  It had taken the director many fraught decades to secure financial independence and having attained this with his action-packed blockbuster hit The Dirty Dozen (1967) it seems odd that he should turn away from the gritty male-oriented genres he was most adept at (thrillers and action movies) and instead serve up an unpalatable pair of female-dominated critiques of the entertainment industry.  It was an act of professional self-harm that would earn Aldrich more notoriety than he could ever have bargained for, at the cost of trashing his hard-won reputation as a serious filmmaker.

The Legend of Lylah Clare was the first film that Aldrich made for his recently acquired independent film studio in Los Angeles - a bitter assault on the stultified Hollywood system that the director hated as it had considerably limited his artistic freedom since he started making films.  At the time, this pungent satire ruffled a few feathers, partly on account of its overt portrayal of bisexual and gay women, but also because it reeked too strongly of sour grapes.  Aldrich followed this j'accuse vanity project with an equally spiteful attack on the no less contemptible world of television (of which he had had plenty of firsthand experience), using Frank Marcus's play to vent his loathing for that most dastardly Machiavellian of all species, the all-powerful TV executive.

A desire to repeat the rip-roaring success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) may have been part of the director's calculation, with Marcus's low-key play re-fashioned along the lines of these two popular black comedies to cash in on the continuing craze for Grand Dame Guignol.  Through its dominant central character, an ageing actress whose world falls apart when she suspects she is about to lose the role that has made her famous, The Killing of Sister George certainly has elements of the psycho-biddy crowdpleaser, but it is in the film's brazenly graphic portrayal of lesbianism that it proved to be most controversial.  The original play made subtle allusions to the Sapphic relationship between the three main protagonists, but in Aldrich's film this is brought right to the fore and becomes the driving force in the narrative.  By doing so, the film broke new ground in cinema's depiction of gay women, but in a way that could not fail to stir up a howling tornado of censure and righteous indignation.

The Killing of Sister George was awarded an X-rating because of its one explicit lesbian sex scene, limiting its distribution to the extent that the film lost money at the box office on its initial release.  Despite this, and despite the pretty damning reviews it received from almost all quarters, particularly the rightwing press, the film proved to be highly popular with cinema audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.  Its initial US release came right towards the end of 1968, a year that had been marked by fierce anti-government riots in both France and America as the first generation born after WWII made its anti-authority, anti-conformity and anti-censorship feelings felt across the world.  (The UK release followed in March 1969, in a similar climate of revolutionary fervour).

The Age of Aquarius seemed well and truly nigh and Robert Aldrich's most provocative, most sexually explicit film was well-timed to take advantage of this.  Such was the furore made by the censors on both sides of the Atlantic (especially so in the UK) that for many years afterwards The Killing of Sister George was considered a pornographic movie, a precursor to the slew of soft-core porn movies that came along in the mid-1970s, in the wake of the success of the tawdry French erotica Emmanuelle and its ever-more explicit sequels.

The reputation that Aldrich's film soon acquired after its release was a world apart from that enjoyed by Frank Marcus's original play, which offered little if anything in the way of shock value.  The play had been running for several years on the London and New York stage and was already looking decidedly old hat.  By the late 1960s, the killing off of a leading character in a popular soap opera no longer had the public interest it had enjoyed in the previous decade, which had seen BBC Radio air the violent death of Grace Archer in its long-running teatime saga The Archers (ostensibly to steal attention away from the launch of the new rival TV channel ITV, in truth to dump an actress who had dared to ask for a pay rise).  Marcus's wry commentary on the inhumanity of the entertainment business needed something to spice it up, so Aldrich's take on The Killing of Sister George was less about the dirty politics of television programme making and more about the increasingly unseemly lesbian interplay of the three female protagonists - June, Alice and Mercy, played to perfection by Beryl Reid, Susannah York and Coral Browne.

Reprising the stage role that had won her the Tony Award for Best Actress in 1966, Beryl Reid effortlessly dominates the film from start to finish with her tragicomic portrayal of a vinegary 50-something frump of an actress running up against multiple crises as the staggering vacuity of her existence suddenly becomes apparent to her.  It never rains when it can pour in great torrents and poor June Buckridge finds herself in a Biblical monsoon when the axing of her character Sister George in a prime TV soap coincides with the irreversible breakdown of her relationship with her younger female lover Alice. As in Aldrich's previous Grand Dame Guignol romps, we are invited to sympathise with an unpleasant and unattractive central woman protagonist, but here Reid's portrayal is so outlandishly grotesque, so chock-full of vile and bitterness, that it is a struggle not to be completely repulsed by her.

It is only in a few all-too-brief cutaway scenes that we are given a glimpse of a more sympathetic side to June's nature.  The scenes in which she is driven to her prostitute neighbour for a shoulder to cry on are genuinely touching and show that, far from being a heartless insensitive dragon, Miss Buckridge is actually a likeable and humane person - one who feels compelled to put up a butch, intimidating front to conceal her insecurities and crushing loneliness.  Her crisis of identity is apparent from the mere fact that she allows people - including those nearest to her - to call her George, after the character she plays on TV.  It's no wonder June is sent into the screaming depths of an existential crisis when her screen alter ego is suddenly given the heave-ho.

With a non-stop gob too big for her face and a matriarchal sneer that can doubtless wipe out an armed platoon from a distance of fifty paces, June does everything she can to alienate herself from everyone around her.  If we are looking for someone to sympathise with it is natural that we should turn to this hell-hound's principal victim, her submissive, doll-faced rent girl Alice.  The Killing of Sister George's most shocking aspect is not its ugly flirtations with censor-baiting erotica, but the truly gruesome nature of the relationship between Miss Buckridge and her seemingly much younger partner.  Susannah York portrays Alice as a willing hostage victim, one who actually enjoys the cruelty and abuse her tormentor subjects her to - she accepts every verbal and physical assault without complaint, with a child-like submissiveness.  In one memorably suggestive scene, June forces her under-the-heel darling to chew the end of one of her cigars and then flies off in a rage when her victim looks as if she is deriving a perverse pleasure from the punishment.

That the intrinsically sadomasochistic nature of their relationship is known and accepted by the two women is grimly apparent in their spot-on parody of Laurel and Hardy, a playful digression into slapstick that takes a horribly sadistic turn.  June seems to revel in the power she has over the less financially and emotionally secure Alice, and it is quite a shock to discover late in the film that the latter is a married 30-something with a daughter of her own.  Alice's inability to cope with real life, her susceptibility to flights of fancy and childish delusions, ultimately makes her appear even more pathetic than her partner-cum-torturer.  She is a sick, maladjusted wretch who thrives on pain and suffering, in contrast to June who has almost zero capacity to deal with life's slings and arrows and can only survive by inflicting pain on others.

A vixen-like Coral Browne completes this most perverse of ménages-à-trois as the most despicable character of the trio, the unsuitably named Mercy Croft.  Despite her more genteel air, polished manners and smoother tongue, Mercy is every bit as repellent as the pugnacious June, but she is considerably more dangerous.  Her superficial charms, superior intellect and obvious lack of morals have earned her a position of authority that allows her to get away with murder.  The killing of Sister George is the least that Mercy is capable of.  Not content with robbing a troublesome actress of her job, status and identity, she then goes on to steal her long-term lover with empty promises of future success as a television writer.

The pathologically poisonous relationship between June and Mercy feels like a direct lift from what we find in Aldrich's earlier films What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, but here the approach is far more subtle, and this gives it an even nastier, much sharper edge.  Whilst it is hard to shed any tears for June as she wakes up, like a savagely post-modern Hamlet, to the abject fakery of her existence (ironically by tearing up her character's phoney coffin on a deserted TV set), you cannot help feeling a wave of nauseous disgust at the double victory of the more overtly sociopathic Mercy.

Our contempt for the merciless Mercy reaches its apogee when she finally make her move to seduce the all-too-willing Alice.  In the scene that brought the film instant notoriety as the porno sensation of the time, audiences were treated to cinema's first explicit lesbian bedroom fumble.  Not surprisingly, this was the most problematic scene that Aldrich had to shoot for the movie, with both actresses and many of his crew reportedly struggling against the urge to vomit in the course of their work.  Susannah York was so repulsed by the idea of being fondled by another woman that the scene had to be shot with both actresses separately.  There is very little that can be described as erotic in the end-result.  Indeed, the coldly mechanical way in which the scene is played and shot makes it appear like an act of ritual sacrifice, with Mercy fulfilling the role of High Priestess as she exults in her triumph over the weaker younger woman.  Louis Malle's Les Amants (1958) was at once hailed as a taboo breaker a full decade before with a similar right-to-the-edge scene involving a pair of heterosexual lovers, but Aldrich's flagrant breach of cinema etiquette was of a far greater magnitude.  The shameless screening of a lesbian orgasm was to make The Killing of Sister George the most provocative film of the decade.

Ludicrously mild by today's standards, the film's lesbian sex scene has attracted - and still attracts - far more attention than it perhaps deserves.  Judging the film in the round, it feels at best like a totally unnecessary dollop of self-indulgence, at worst a cynically motivated act of provocation.  Whatever the reasons for its inclusion, this piece of sensationalist yuk detracts from what is probably the most daring aspect of the film - Aldrich's decision to shoot a substantial sequence within the confines of a real-life lesbian nightclub, the Gateways Club in Chelsea, London.  Interestingly, this is the only part of the film where we get a real taste of Britain's famous Swinging Sixties, as the bulk of the narrative takes place in claustrophobic interior sets that match the wan dowdiness of the main character.

As the camera wends its way, like a mildly stoned bon viveur, through the milling crowds of dancing, hugging and kissing female couples of all ages, the impression you get is that of being suddenly projected into another dimension - Alice's groovy late '60s Wonderland.  The instant change in tone and style is as striking as the change in ambiance, a startlingly unexpected lunge towards cinéma vérité that makes this appear much more a fly-on-the-wall documentary than staged dramatic fiction.  It is here that the titular metaphorical murder takes place, and the fact that the killing (actually an act of professional betrayal) happens amid so much freely given love and tenderness is what makes it seem all the more cruel and poignant.  If The Killing of Sister George has any claim to be a genuinely subversive film, it is in the vibrant nightclub sequence midway through the film that Aldrich achieves just this.  This dazzling side-step into contemporary slice-of-life realism is what redeems an otherwise dubious piece of exploitation gimmickry, pulling off what the main narrative spectacularly fails to do - to present amorous relationships between women as both normal and positive.  After this, cinema's depiction of lesbians could only get better.

Film Synopsis

London, 1968.  June Buckridge is a dowdy actress in her early fifties who has become a household name, thanks to her prominent role as Sister George in the popular BBC television soap opera Applehurst.  In stark contrast to the affable, clean-living district nurse she plays on screen, Miss Buckridge is a coarse, mouthy and temperamental lesbian who is over-fond of liquor and used to getting her own way.  In her private life, she plays the dominant role in a sadomasochistic relationship with her younger lover Alice, who shares her cramped London apartment and meekly accepts the abuse she is subjected to on a daily basis.  June's growing antagonism towards her submissive child-like lover is fuelled by a suspicion that she is carrying on a string of sordid affairs behind her back - with men and other women.

After several characters in the TV series are written out, June becomes paranoid that Sister George is going to go the same way.  Her behaviour becomes even more erratic and vituperative than before, and after she is reprimanded for physically assaulting two nuns in the back of a taxi June is certain that her character's departure is imminent.  Sure enough, when the axe falls the actress is both outraged and devastated.  George has become such a large part of her life that she cannot see a future for herself beyond the role.  June takes no consolation from the one proposal of work she is offered - voicing an animated cow in a new children's TV show.  With her career on the skids, June's behaviour towards her live-in lover becomes even more abusive.  This leads Alice to start an intimate relationship with June's former producer, Mrs Mercy Croft, another controlling individual but one who offers Alice a chance of fulfilling her artistic aspirations...