Deliverance (Helen Keller Film Corporation, George Kleine Productions, 1919)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, July 23) Turner Classic Movies did three silent movies in a row, two as part of their month-long salute to the portrayals of people with disabilities in films and the third their regular “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature. I bypassed the first one, Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, but watched the other two, and the first one I saw turned out to be utterly fascinating. It was called Deliverance – not to be confused with the 1972 melodrama by John Boorman based on James Dickey’s novel about two friends (Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight) who take a whitewater-rafting trip to the country and meet several sorry fates. This Deliverance was made by George Kleine in 1919 and is the life story (to that point) of Helen Keller. Helen Keller was born in 1880 in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, the daughter of a local newspaper editor and former soldier in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. At 19 months she got a disease then diagnosed as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain" (which according to modern researchers was likely meningitis) which left her both blind and deaf. As Keller’s Wikipedia page describes it, “In 1886, Keller's mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of Laura Bridgman, a deaf and blind woman, dispatched the young Keller and her father to consult physician J. Julian Chisholm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice. Chisholm referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised them to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated. It was then located in South Boston. Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked Anne Sullivan, a 20-year-old alumna of the school who was visually impaired, to become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a nearly 50-year-long relationship: Sullivan developed as Keller's governess and later her companion.”

The story was told by Keller herself in her first book, The Story of My Life (1903), later dramatized by playwright William Gibson as The Miracle Worker and turned into a movie of that title in 1962 that won Academy Awards for both Anne Bancroft, who played Sullivan, and Patty Duke as Keller. The big breakthrough came at the Keller family’s water pump, when Keller finally realized that the word Sullivan was spelling out to her using the finger alphabet was “water” and represented the liquid coming out of the pump – and Deliverance director George Foster Platt staged this scene much the way Arthur Penn did in The Miracle Worker. “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers,” Keller wrote in The Story of My Life. “Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!” Keller pursued her studies with a fierce determination, not only learning to read in Braille but studying various languages, including French, German, Latin and Greek, as well as mathematics. In 1900 Keller was admitted to Radcliffe College, the women-only auxiliary of then men-only Harvard University, where she excelled and became the first deaf and blind person to win both undergraduate and graduate degrees. (Anne Sullivan had to sit next to her in her classes, spelling out the words the lecturer was saying so Keller could understand them.) Keller also became a social activist, usually on the Left – she was a member of the Socialist Party, U.S.A. and later the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), she donated to the NAACP and was a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920 – though she also briefly supported the pseudo-science of eugenics, the idea that human evolution was still going on and needed to be consciously directed by humans so the “superior” people would breed and the “inferior” would die out. (Eugenics was a fashionable cause in the 1920’s and 1930’s until its association with the Nazis, who justified the Holocaust largely on eugenic grounds, would taint it and lead to its virtual disappearance.)

I had expected the film Deliverance to be an historical curio; instead it turned out to be intensely moving and well-made. It’s divided into three acts, “Girlhood,” “Maidenhood,” and “Womanhood,” and it’s distinguished in that different actresses play Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan in each episode. In “Girlhood” we get Etna Ross as Helen and Edythe Lyle as Anne; in “Maidenhood” Ann Mason plays Helen and Edythe Lyle repeats as Anne; in “Womanhood” Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan both play themselves. Naturally writer Francis Trevelyan Miller couldn’t resist making an already intense story even more melodramatic; Helen has a childhood friend named Nadja (Tula Belle in the first act, Flora Braidwood in the second and Arditta Mellinnina in the third) who studies music, meets and marries a fellow music student named Josef (Josef De Serino), only he catches an unnamed disease and dies. Nadja is left with a son (J. Parks Jones) who reluctantly enlists in World War I and comes back blind, but when your best friend is Helen Keller mere blindness isn’t that much of a problem for you: Helen gets her airplane pilot brother Phillips (also playing himself, as is their mother) to fly Nadja’s son to a super-doctor who can help him rehabilitate. Naturally Helen is exhilarated by the sensations of flying in an open-cockpit plane. Apparently the real Helen Keller was not happy with some aspects of the film, particularly its assertion that she could tell just by touching an object what color it was, but it dramatizes that she could appreciate music by sensing the vibrations of the instruments that played it even though she could not actually hear it. There’s a scene in the movie in which Nadja is playing a harp and Helen is standing next to her doing just that. Deliverance is an amazing movie, fully alive and sensitive to the implications of its story, though I wondered how George Kleine’s budget extended to the elaborate allegorical scenes of the American Revolution (triggered by Helen’s visit to the tree where George Washington received word that he would be the commander in chief of the Continental Army) and other historical sequences that allegedly came to life in Helen’s imagination – or were they stock footage from other films, even this early in the history of moviemaking?