Tea and Sympathy

John Kerr and Deborah Kerr reprised their roles from Robert Anderson’s popular Broadway play Tea and Sympathy for Vincente Minnelli’s screen adaptation, a sensitive consideration of virulent homophobia at a boarding school, delineated here in a resplendent color palette by cinematographer John Alton. Tom Lee is different from the other boys, an introvert more inclined toward sewing, gardening, and crooning folk songs than tossing the pigskin, and his fellow classmates terrorize him as a result. He finds a confidante in faculty wife Laura Reynolds, however, and gradually a love flowers between them. Their relationship would suggest that the whispers about Tom are unfounded, but the narrative still raised the hackles of the Production Code office. “In retrospect,” Minnelli recalled, “it wasn’t a very shocking picture, but it might have set up a brouhaha at the time. Ostrich-wise, the censors refused to admit the problem of sexual identity was a common one.”