Joan Crawford never said no to a melodrama she didn't like, and this movie is no exception to the rule, but this time, the production values are first-rate and the writing is uniformly excellent.
Touching such themes as the rape upon a minor who to top it all is disabled by blindness and muteness, THE STORY OF ESTHER COSTELLO predates THE MIRACLE WORKER by several years. This time, it doesn't deal with the title character's disability exclusively (and as intensely as the 1962 film) as much as skirt around it while also relating the story of the people around the girl, notably the failed marriage of Margaret and Carlo Landi, here played by Joan Crawford and Rossano Brazzi.
And it's this failed marriage that provides the fulcrum for the darker events of the story to unfold. Carlo Landi, only interested in reuniting with his wife for the money he can get out of her, subtly goes after the impaired Esther and in one disturbing scene rapes her while she is in bed, alone in Margaret's house, as a storm rages on. Esther, horrified at what has happened to her, tries to commit suicide, but is stopped by an equally horrified Margaret who makes a terrible decision about herself and Carlo.
While I think Margaret's character could have gone the other way around in regards of the way her character meets fate, this was the late fifties, and usually heroines in psychodramas had the tendency to choose ending their own lives rather than face the consequences head-on (see THE CHILDREN'S HOUR for a similar, off-screen death scene of the main female character). Even so, Crawford does not overplay it and her introspective approach makes her character believable, less soap-opera like. Heather Sears, though, is all revelation and steals the movie from Crawford, more so since she has no lines (until the end of the movie when she has recovered her voice) and has to emote all of her feelings from the inside. This is one of the few movies in which Crawford was equally, if not more so, matched by a younger female star and did not try to snatch scenes away from her with her need of a last shot (her character's death is off-screen), and I think that she respected this material too much to sabotage it. Her pairing with Rossano Brazzi could have been more to cash in on his appearance with Katharine Hepburn in SUMMERTIME, and he plays his character with the veiled repulsiveness that is needed, especially for the difficult rape scene. A big winner, an intelligent melodrama, one which should have been Joan Crawford's last film instead of the pause before her entrance her horror movie exploitation period of which she would never re-surface again.
Touching such themes as the rape upon a minor who to top it all is disabled by blindness and muteness, THE STORY OF ESTHER COSTELLO predates THE MIRACLE WORKER by several years. This time, it doesn't deal with the title character's disability exclusively (and as intensely as the 1962 film) as much as skirt around it while also relating the story of the people around the girl, notably the failed marriage of Margaret and Carlo Landi, here played by Joan Crawford and Rossano Brazzi.
And it's this failed marriage that provides the fulcrum for the darker events of the story to unfold. Carlo Landi, only interested in reuniting with his wife for the money he can get out of her, subtly goes after the impaired Esther and in one disturbing scene rapes her while she is in bed, alone in Margaret's house, as a storm rages on. Esther, horrified at what has happened to her, tries to commit suicide, but is stopped by an equally horrified Margaret who makes a terrible decision about herself and Carlo.
While I think Margaret's character could have gone the other way around in regards of the way her character meets fate, this was the late fifties, and usually heroines in psychodramas had the tendency to choose ending their own lives rather than face the consequences head-on (see THE CHILDREN'S HOUR for a similar, off-screen death scene of the main female character). Even so, Crawford does not overplay it and her introspective approach makes her character believable, less soap-opera like. Heather Sears, though, is all revelation and steals the movie from Crawford, more so since she has no lines (until the end of the movie when she has recovered her voice) and has to emote all of her feelings from the inside. This is one of the few movies in which Crawford was equally, if not more so, matched by a younger female star and did not try to snatch scenes away from her with her need of a last shot (her character's death is off-screen), and I think that she respected this material too much to sabotage it. Her pairing with Rossano Brazzi could have been more to cash in on his appearance with Katharine Hepburn in SUMMERTIME, and he plays his character with the veiled repulsiveness that is needed, especially for the difficult rape scene. A big winner, an intelligent melodrama, one which should have been Joan Crawford's last film instead of the pause before her entrance her horror movie exploitation period of which she would never re-surface again.