Word: children
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Into this congregation walks Charlie Hook, strewing cigarettes, tarts, Playboys, and liquor bottles--disrupting the Mother worship. The children make him their new idol. After all, he's Mother's husband...
...idols have their obligations. Charlie suffocates under his, lashes out at his crew of idolators, gets murdered. This second death knocks the children out of childhood...
There have been other movies about children. But what children! Our Gang exists somewhere west of the moon. You don't bump into Shirley Temples at the grocery store. Once, in Tiger Bay, before she freaked out as Polyanna, Hayley Mills played a child. But the movie, like Sundays and Cybele, focuses on a sexy little girl's relationship with a fugitive. Every other little girl isn't so lucky...
This switch of allegiance reflects the fact that the children don't think. They don't seek explanations, meditate, choose camps. They get emotionally attached and become zealots. Actually they're fanatics. There's a Cotton Mather, a medium and a high priestess in the group. The children take life hard themselves; they make it hell for others...
...shows how children operate. They have about as wide a range of experience as a cat living in a closet. So they demand an authority, somebody older, to lead them into life. At first it's the Mother in Our Mother's House. A boy picks up her Bible-quoting habit and throws verses at his siblings. A little girl combs her mother's hairpiece like a slave, then cultivates her own pigtail. These same little saints, when Charlie becomes their authority, take up cigarettes and twist in the halls. The Bible-quoter turns purveyor of whorish wisdom: "Men have...