Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Child's Play Blu-ray Movie Review

No Chucky in sight, and that's a good thing.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 5, 2012

Olive Films has the rare distinction of having released two films now that bear titles that were later reused for other properties, two films which not so coincidentally I tried for years to track down either on television or through rentals with absolutely no success. As I mentioned in my review of the 1968 William Castle feature Project X, I had fallen in love with that film’s source novel, British science fiction writer L.P. Davies’ The Artificial Man, when I was a kid. I had then found out sometime thereafter that it had been adapted into a film. Project X (at least this particular Project X) never seemed to turn up on television and I could never find a rental, and so when Olive released it, on Blu-ray no less, it was like finding an old treasure that you had given up on ever unearthing. Something fairly similar happened when I saw that Olive was preparing to release a 1972 film called Child’s Play, not to be confused with the later series starring the demonically possessed doll Chucky. No, this particular Child’s Play deals with a potential other demonic possession, one of a bunch of boys attending a somewhat dilapidated Catholic boarding school. The film was adapted from a well regarded and quite successful Broadway play by Robert Marasco (the only play he ever wrote, though his later novel Burnt Offerings was adapted as a Bette Davis film), a multiple Tony winner which I became familiar with when it was included in the annual Burns Mantle Best Plays series, a book franchise I became nerdily fascinated with in my teen years, checking as many of the tomes out of my local library as I could find. I had initially been drawn to the 1969-70 edition of the Burns Mantle yearbook because it included the Stephen Sondheim – George Furth musical Company, whose cast album I had fallen in love with but whose libretto I really knew little about, but I was really drawn to Child’s Play once I read the excerpts included in the yearbook. Unlike the 1968 Project X, which was never a high profile project to begin with, Child’s Play was a potentially “big” feature with an A-list director (Sidney Lumet), two fairly famous stars (Robert Preston and James Mason) along with a then trendy up and comer (Beau Bridges), plus it was based on what was then a recently very successful Broadway hit. And yet, exactly like with Project X, Child’s Play simply seemed to have disappeared into thin air after its brief theatrical exhibition.

The early seventies were awash in psychological horror thrillers, the own sometimes bastard stepchildren of Rosemary’s Baby. The biggest of these was undoubtedly The Exorcist, which came out just a little while after Child’s Play bombed around Christmas of 1972, but there were several other notable films done in this era which played upon the audience not knowing quite what was really going on, including the vastly underappreciated Robert Mulligan adaptation of Thomas Tryon’s chilling novel The Other, and the more mundane 1973 film version of Night Watch, based on a play by Lucille Fletcher, who had written Sorry, Wrong Number decades previously (Fletcher was also married to iconic composer Bernard Herrmann for a time). Child’s Play plies the same territory as many of these pieces, depicting a struggle between good and evil where the audience doesn’t exactly know who is the good guy and who is the villain.

The two main roles in Child’s Play are Joe Dobbs (Robert Preston, a last minute replacement for Marlon Brando, who would have been badly miscast in the role), a genial English teacher who is adored by all the schoolboys, and Jerome Malley (James Mason), a martinet disciplinarian who teaches Latin and has earned the derogatory nickname “Lash” for good reason. Into this fray enters young gym teacher Paul Reis (Beau Bridges), a former student at the academy and a personal protégé of Dobbs’. Malley is clinging to his Senior Class job basically to spite Dobbs, who wants the position, but he is also becoming increasingly erratic and paranoid, insisting Dobbs is orchestrating events to make him look bad and in fact drive him crazy. In the meantime, a series of gruesomely violent escapades leaves several of the kids badly disfigured or otherwise injured.

Robert Marasco’s play was a model of ambiguity, and for the most part screenwriter Leon Prochnik does a good job of mirroring the source material’s two sided presentation. Is Dobbs actually orchestrating a series of calamities at Malley’s expense, or is Malley only a doddering old man crumbling under the stress of seeing his mother die? Are the kids under the sway of a Satanic force or something decidedly more mundane, if no less diabolic? While the film attempts to have its cake and eat it, too, offering a prosaic wrap up that offers a straightforward denouement which is then followed by a brief and ambiguous coda, the actual motives at play here never really make a lot of sense if one pauses long enough to actually think about them.

What Child’s Play has in spades is mood. Lumet excels at claustrophobic films and he frames the interior of the looming Catholic school with a brooding intensity. He also draws a career high performance out of James Mason, who is both hideously vicious and also unbearably vulnerable, sometimes within the space of a breath. Matching him every step of the way is a rather unexpectedly brilliant Robert Preston, who turns his legendary portrayal of The Music Man's gregarious "snake oil salesman" Harold Hill on its head and delivers a lugubrious, increasingly frightening performance.

There’s a moment in Robert Mulligan’s The Other when a major conceit is unveiled, and suddenly everything that has gone before is seen in a new light. Child’s Play attempts to get there in a somewhat more pedestrian manner, but it does it too late in the film to ever deliver much shock value. The problem with having a good versus evil scenario play out with only two main characters is you know going in either Character A is good and Character B is evil, or vice versa. Producer David Merrick, who was best known for being a relentlessly ruthless Broadway producer, started his brief film producing career with Child’s Play (he had also produced the original Broadway production), and one almost wishes he would have thrown one of his infamous temper tantrums to demand that the film more closely hew to the play’s original tone of deliberate ambiguity.

Child's Play Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Child's Play is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. While the elements here do show some minor signs of damage, with occasional white specks and flecks dotting the landscape, overall this is a remarkably clear and precise presentation for a film of this vintage, and one that luxuriates in such dark lighting most of the time. Lumet and his DP Gerald Hirschfeld favor extreme close-ups, which benefit the film's fine object detail in this high definition presentation. Colors are nicely saturated and accurate looking. There are some niggling concerns with inadequate shadow detail and actual crush in a couple of extremely dark sequences, two things that are somewhat exacerbated by a sometimes fairly grainy looking presentation, but this is another nicely filmic looking transfer from Olive that doesn't appear to have undergone any serious digital tweaking in any way, shape or form.

Child's Play Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

No, that isn't some bugaboo in Child's Play's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track that is causing all those weird sounds to emanate from your home theater system. Child's Play came in for some critical brickbats at the time of its release for a somewhat odd decision by composer Michael Small and the sound design team to incorporate all sorts of weird clicking and thumping noises throughout the film. Most of these, like soft bongos or congas, are nicely interwoven with Small's evocative score, but in a couple of scenes, the listener is awash in frankly bizarre sounding effects that might lead some to believe there's someone out of frame talking in that African tribal language Xhosa where the speaker makes all those weird clicking noises in the backs of their throats. Fidelity here is fine, if nothing spectacular, though it should be noted that amplitude is somewhat variable, and fluctuates at various points, including a long sequence toward the end of the film where it's considerably diminished.

Child's Play Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements of any kind are offered on this Blu-ray.

Child's Play Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Child's Play is a largely very effective chiller, one that walks a nice tightrope where the viewer can see things two ways. Unfortunately things fall apart toward the end, with a kind of Lord of the Flies devolution into anarchy and then a moody, if unclear, wrap up. But the film is worthwhile despite its flaws for its two brilliant lead performances. Mason is uncannily neurotic throughout the film (watch how he hunches his head down into his shoulder in most scenes) and Preston has what is arguably his most nuanced role in his latter career. Lumet's direction is appropriately claustrophobic and disturbing. Child's Play isn't a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, but it has its moments. Recommended.