A Child Is Waiting

A Child Is Waiting

JOHN CASSAVETES
BURT LANCASTER
JUDY GARLAND
WHAT?!
whoa
i wasn't sure judy was gonna make it through the film...
"An emotionally fragile woman takes a job teaching mentally handicapped children."

could not believe this thanksgiving crap!

from imdb: Director John Cassavetes (for whom this was his first major studio production) and Producer Stanley Kramer had many creative / economic differences and during the editing phase, Cassavetes was fired.

from tcm: In the end, the tense relationship between Kramer and Cassavetes came to a head during the final editing of A Child is Waiting. According to the picture's editor, Gene Fowler, Jr., in the aforementioned Gary Fishgall biography, "It was a fight of technique. Stanley is a more traditional picture-maker, and Cassavetes was, I guess, called Nouvelle Vague. He was trying some things, which frankly I disagreed with, and I thought he was hurting the picture by blunting the so-called message with technique." Fowler cited one instance where a scene was jumpy because the camera ran over a cable during filming so he replaced it with a smoother take, only to have Cassavetes complain, "My God, you damn Hollywood people. All you can think of is smoothness of camera. What we want is to get some rough edges in here." Subsequently, Kramer fired Cassavetes and finished the editing himself with Fowler's assistance, prompting the director to disown it. After the film's release, however, Cassavetes remarked, "I didn't think his film - and that's what I consider it to be, his film - was so bad, just a lot more sentimental than mine." For his own part, Kramer admitted, "My dream was to jump the barrier of ordinary objection to the subject matter into an area in which the treatment of it and the performance of it would be so exquisite that it would transcend all that. Somewhere we failed." Yet, many critics found things to praise in A Child is Waiting, such as Time magazine's assessment that "Lancaster has never been better" and Time Out's opinion that "Cassavetes elicits magnificent performances from his cast, making especially fine use of Garland's tremulous emotionalism."

liked the credit sequences