NR | 1h 31m | Drama, Comedy | 1943
This lighthearted drama dwells on how pivotal parental figures are in a child’s life.
Professors at the Pickering Institute of Child Psychology bring up an orphaned baby girl as an experiment to prove that scientists are better than parents at raising children. To them, typical parenting wastes the early childhood years, teaching children “nothing of future value.” Scientists would much rather pump children with encyclopedic knowledge and prodigious skills.
By the time she’s 6 years old, they figure they’ve given their prodigy-protégé, the angelic Alpha (Margaret O’Brien), holistic instruction: music, languages, math, economics, chess, history, philosophy, physical exercise—even a little play. Never mind that she’s been quarantined from the real world of parents, siblings, and playmates.
Enter news reporter Mike Regan (James Craig) who, while working up a feature story on Alpha, broadens her sterilized and arrogant worldview. Unimpressed by the world she knows of facts and figures, he introduces her to a world she doesn’t know (fairy tales, magic, and dreams). He suspects that, for all her knowledge and skill, she’s missing a child’s sense of fun, faith, trust, and wonder.
Alpha warms to Regan’s wit and affection. She flees the institute to seek him out, losing her way, then finding it. She, too, suspects something: His world of what can be may be more interesting than her world of what is.
Suddenly, an outbreak of measles at the institute turns the tables. Smug scientists are now quarantined. Alpha roams free. She discovers the joys of a fatherly figure in Regan and a mother figure in Regan’s sweetheart Katie Mallory (Marsha Hunt). Both want her to be happy without having to master something profound at every turn. When the scientists come to reclaim Alpha, they realize she may have found something they couldn’t provide: a chance to love and be loved.
Commitment Is Key
Isobel Lennart’s screenplay draws on a story by writer Angna Enters. Like Regan, Enters’s husband was a journalist. Childless, Enters’s yearnings and pathos find wondrous expression in her playful yarn about a precocious child. Lennart infuses scenes with just enough comic tension to keep them fun without descending into farce. Sample this: Regan’s hammering away at his typewriter, trying urgently to get a story out to the desk. Alpha hovers, like a pocket-sized editor, gatekeeping words that pour out onto the page, clucking her approval and disapproval in turns.Alpha (smiling): “Oh Mike, that’s good.”
Mike (impatiently): “Go away, honey.”
Alpha (frowning): “But Mike, you’re splitting an infinitive.”
Mike (exasperated): “Okay, let me split it in peace!”
Regan’s grown up on the outside, but is still a child inside; Alpha’s the reverse.
Regan’s childishness shows in his fear of commitment. His editor isn’t the only one fed up with his penchant for poker and nights out drinking or at boxing matches. Mallory’s fed up, too, waiting for him to propose marriage. When he does, she knows, his heart isn’t in it yet. He prefers his familiar world of what is, to the mystery and magic of what can be: their future together. When he shirks responsibility of caring for Alpha, Mallory chides him, “You don’t get anything for nothing. ... When you love people … you’ve got to give something … a little of your freedom … your time … and yourself.”
After considering a large group of babies as test subjects, the scientists believe they’ve found the “perfect” baby in Alpha. She’s free of physical deformity, responding on cue to every stimulus they try on her: sight, smell, sound, touch.
Like the scientists, Regan misunderstands that a child needs nothing more than stimulus for the mind and body. He imagines that the “magic” he shows Alpha in everyday life outside the institute beats her drab, lab-like world of books and blackboards. Only later does he realize that Alpha’s far more moved by his “magic” touch: his understanding, patience, humility, sacrifice—a stimulus also for her heart and soul.
A mother on a train, seeing Regan cheer up her little boy who’d stumbled in the aisle, notices his way with children. Since he’s traveling alone, she asks, “How many children do you have?” Regan’s single and not yet a parent. But watch to see what he answers and how.
