The Cider House Rules (FilmColony, Miramax, Nina Saxon Film Design, 1999)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, June 10) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies that probably neither of us would have sought out deliberately, but it was one of those nights when the TCM Web site was glitching out and not listing anything after Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) at 5 p.m. I was curious about what else they were running, and it turned out they were doing a tribute night to movie composers: Bernard Herrmann for Psycho, Franz Waxman for the 1951 film A Place in the Sun (directed by George Stevens and starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters in a nominal adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy, which I remember as one of the most God-awful movies ever made that’s earned a “classic” reputation; Raymond Chandler joked, “They should have called it Speedboats for Breakfast”) and Rachel Portman for the film we watched last night, The Cider House Rules (1999). British-born Rachel Portman had just become the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Original Score for the adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, and she got nominated again for this – though she didn’t win. The film was also Academy Award-nominated for Best Picture and won for Best Adapted Screenplay for John Irving – though it’s long amused me that you can win an Academy Award for “Adapted Screenplay” when the work you’re adapting was written by you in the first place, as here – and Best Supporting Actor for Michael Caine.

The Cider House Rules actually spent 15 years in “development hell” before John Irving was finally able to get it made; the project apparently cycled through four directors (including one who died) before finally ending up with Swedish director Lasse Hallström. It was greenlighted by Miramax when it was still an independent company, and while it’s more than a bit creepy to see the names of Harvey and Bob Weinstein on the credits as two of the four producers (especially since a sex crime is a crucial plot point of this film!), I’m glad it got made, I’m glad I finally caught up with it, and it’s a quite good movie even though it suffers from the damnable quirkiness associated with most of Irving’s work as a writer. The setting is an orphanage in Maine (though the film’s geography consists of equal parts Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont, and the big building where the orphanage is located was an abandoned state mental hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts) run by Dr. Wilbur Larch (Michael Caine). Dr. Larch runs the place as a sort of laying-in hospital for unwed mothers who want to give birth to their kids and put them up for adoption, only he doubles as an illegal abortionist for women who don’t want to carry a pregnancy to term and be faced with the burden of a child they aren’t in a position to raise. Dr. Larch’s favorite resident is a young man named Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire, top-billed and reminding us all of what a fine young actor he was before his career got sidetracked by playing Spider-Man). Dr. Larch has tried to place Homer with two adoptive families, only the first one turns him down because he never cries (Dr. Larch explains that orphans are taught never to cry), and he reclaims Homer from his second set of adoptive parents after he finds out they’re beating him.

So Homer stays at the orphanage and, though he’s dropped out of high school, his combination of natural intelligence and Dr. Larch’s training skills gives him the knowledge to handle much of Dr. Larch’s obstetrics practice – though he draws the line at assisting with abortions because they’re illegal and he’s morally opposed to them. When Dr. Larch realizes that the board in charge of the orphanage wants to let him go and bring in a younger man to replace him, he decides to groom Homer as his replacement. Since Homer doesn’t have any medical credentials, Dr. Larch forges him a complete set of documents using his own (real) ones as the templates. Only fate derails Dr. Larch’s plans for Homer in the person of Candy Kendall (the young Charlize Theron), who’s just got pregnant from her upper-class boyfriend Wally Worthington (the young Paul Rudd). Homer immediately develops crushes on the young Candy and on Wally’s fancy new convertible, and on Candy’s invitation Wally drives him away from the orphanage and to an apple orchard owned by Wally’s mother Olive (Kate Nelligan). There Homer becomes a fruit picker and part of a team of Black migrant farmworkers headed by Mr. Rose (Delroy Lindo), who seems sympathetic at first until his daughter Rose Rose (Erykah Badu, given an “Introducing” credit and a surprisingly good actress since she’s known almost exclusively as a singer) becomes pregnant. It doesn’t take long for Homer to figure out that she’s in an incestuous relationship and the baby’s father is her own dad. Homer breaks out a doctor’s bag Dr. Larch had sent him and gives Rose Rose an abortion, and as soon as she recovers she bails out on her dad and his community and heads for the open road. Meanwhile, Homer has been dating Candy while her boyfriend Wally has been off fighting in Burma during World War II (the film takes place from 1942 to 1945), and they make out and ultimately have sex in a deserted drive-in theatre (it’s deserted because of the wartime blackouts).

Homer has been told he has a bad heart and has been given an X-ray that supposedly proves that, but the X-ray really came from Fuzzy (Erik Per Sullivan), a chronically ill kid in the orphanage who lives his entire life in a plastic tent. (Such things actually didn’t exist in the early 1940’s; a real tent for this purpose would have had glass walls.) Dr. Larch substituted an X-ray of Fuzzy’s heart for one of Homer’s so Homer could get a deferment and therefore wouldn’t have to be drafted to fight the war. There are a few quirky anachronisms, like the print of the 1933 King Kong that regularly gets shown in the orphanage (it’s the only movie they have and the only one Homer has ever seen until Candy takes him to see the 1939 Wuthering Heights on one of their dates, and Homer finds it confusing after the primal conflicts of King Kong) that contains the legendary “strip scene.” This sequence, in which Kong’s giant fingers feels up Fay Wray’s crotch and takes off her undies, was part of the original 1933 release but was ordered deleted when RKO re-released the film in 1938 in the era of strict Production Code enforcement and it wasn’t restored until 1971. There’s also a scene in which Dr. Larch accidentally kills himself with an overdose of ether – he’s been regularly using the stuff as a sleep aid – and his phonograph, which we’ve often seen playing his favorite record, Vaughn De Leath’s “Ukulele Lady,” keeps running after his death even though it’s an old-style wind-up gramophone and would therefore have stopped in a few minutes when its clockwork motor ran down.

And Homer’s idyll with Candy ends abruptly when Wally Worthington (ya remember Wally Worthington?) comes back from the war permanently disabled below the waist from a mosquito-borne encephalitis he caught while escaping from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and naturally Candy returns to him to be his caregiver. Overall, though, The Cider House Rules (the title comes from five martinet-style rules the owners of the orchard have posted in the bunkhouse even though most of the workers can’t read) is a first-rate movie even though there’s nothing particularly special about Rachel Portman’s score. For a film shown as a tribute to movie composers, the music is pretty ordinary and the director, Lasse Hallström, is far more artful in his use of source music than in anything he got from Portman, not surprisingly since Hallström got his start as a director making short films for Swedish television and music videos for the dance-pop band ABBA. Most of the songs, including “Ukulele Lady,” “My Ideal” and “All I Want Is Just One Girl,” are the work of Ralph Rainger, one of the most talented and quirky songwriters of the classic era (he wrote “My Bluebird’s Singing the Blues” for Baby Rose Marie and “A Guy What Takes His Time” for Mae West, as well as a number of Bing Crosby’s early hits, including “The Day You Came Along” and “Black Moonlight”) and they add atmosphere to a film that has a lot of quirks but overall is quite appealing and features characters we care about instead of projecting the almost lab-rat detachment of all too many modern films.