Mandy – 1952 | 93mins | Drama | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Mandy, is the story of a middle-class child, but one born with a handicap that would be just as devastating no matter what her background, she is stone deaf. It is one of Ealing’s most moving films, directed by Alexander Mackendrick (his only non-comedy for the studio) with a script by Jack Whittingham from a novel The Day is Ours by Hilda Lewis. Parents as well as the child must suffer, and as the girl reaches school age the family itself is in danger of breaking up. She enters a school for deaf children, run by a dynamic and gifted teacher, brilliantly played by Jack Hawkins, who is beset by the power politics necessary to keep the institution functioning.

Some critics in 1952 felt that the documentary view of deaf children – the school scenes were shot at the Royal Residential School for the Deaf in Manchester – was marred by being a story akin to magazine fiction, but at least the ending was remarkably honest, as well as touching, clearly stating that Mandy could never overcome her handicap, but that she might begin to cope with it. The child was played by seven-year-old Mandy Miller, whose acting career, albeit brief, had begun the year before when she played a little girl in The Man in the White Suit.

Extract© George Perry: Forever Ealing.