Cinema: The New Pictures, Jul. 12, 1954

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"Can you see a world?", an interviewer once asked Helen Keller. "If you can, what is it like?" "Yes, yes, yes," Helen Keller said. "I can see, and that is why I can be so happy in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a man-made world." The golden night of Helen Keller will probably in the long run outshine the limelight she has lived in. Like the "golden flower" of the Chinese contemplatives, her experience has been a redoubtable witness to a doubting age that when other helpers fail and comforts flee, the help of the helpless abides. The Unconquered, her technically awkward but moving film biography, therefore quite suitably presents itself as a sort of modest footnote to The Lives of the Saints.

The picture tells simply—with the help of yellowed snapshots, newsreel footage and the narrative voice of Katharine Cornell—the well-known story of how at the age of 19 months Helen lost sight and hearing from a childhood illness. At the age of seven she "began to live" when Anne Mansfield Sullivan, a trained teacher of the deaf and blind, came to work with her.

Helen learned so prodigiously well that within three years, at the age of ten, she was corresponding vigorously with Phillips Brooks, the Episcopalian divine. Also at ten, she published a short story in the St. Nicholas magazine. Before long she was reading and writing fluently in five languages, and at 24 she was graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College.

Soon after, she published a book of poetry that showed a feeling ear for the English she could not hear, and then set forth on the first of the long lecture tours—speaking in a sort of strangled soprano, which is the closest she can come to intelligible English, with Teacher Sullivan translating—that were to make her name a household word.

Fame carried her to Hollywood in 1919, and here the sober script calls a thoroughly slap-happy recess to watch a flag-waving Helen, as the star of the film Deliverance (supposedly based on her life story), lead the charge of a revolutionary rabble across something that looks suspiciously like Concord Bridge.

And so it goes: on from her salad days in vaudeville, through the incessant confrontations with celebrity ("She made Calvin Coolidge smile"), the endless charity appearances, and the amiable little extraversions (she once gratified an impulse "to feel a lion," reported that "he was very handsome"). In the end the audience sees her in the yellow leaf of her eighth decade, as she lives and works now with her second companion, Polly Thompson, in their Connecticut home—drying dishes, following her guide rail for a walk in the fields, choring through the morning mail, touching music in a radio, caught reading a volume in Braille beneath the bedclothes late at night.

The impression that remains is not one of a life of worldly scurry, of an almost brutally strong retort to adversity. What hangs in the mind is the image of a clear old face out of a legend, of features that breathe a little of the quiet glory of the last lines of King Lear:

The oldest hath borne most: we who are

young, Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

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