A Child Is Waiting

The film Cassavetes made inside the studio system and eventually lost control of. Jean takes a job as a music teacher at a state school for children with intellectual disabilities. Dr Clark, who runs it, is disciplined and distant, and argues that the children must be prepared for life outside. Jean attaches herself to one boy in particular, Reuben, who has been left there by his parents, and tries to protect him. Its most striking quality is the casting: most of the children were not actors but children with intellectual disabilities, and it was shot in a real institution. Burt Lancaster plays Dr Clark and Judy Garland plays Jean, in one of her late roles. The producer Stanley Kramer and Cassavetes disagreed over the edit, and the film was released in Kramer's version. Cassavetes did not consider the result his; in his account Kramer's cut presented the children as pitiable while his own left them as they were. Important for anyone interested in 1960s American cinema and Cassavetes's studio period. Seen now, the language and the approach are dated; what counted as progressive in its own time is uncomfortable today.