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| The Children's Hour Photo: 1961 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved |
San Sebastian Film Festival will dedicate the retrospective of its 73rd edition to US screenwriter Lillian Hellman, who worked alongside filmmakers including William Whyler, Arthur PEn, William Dieterle and George Roy Hill.
Hellman, who also wrote plays and novels, was born in 1905 and died, at the age of 79 in 1984. The retrospective will encompass all of her work for the big screen, which ranged from the Thirties through to the Sixties.
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| Retrospective will be dedicated to Lillian Hellman Photo: Courtesy of San Sebastian Film Festival |
Among the films screening are Wyler's The Little Foxes (1941), starring Bette Davis, which had a screenplay based on Hellman’s own play and starring Bette Davis and The Children’s Hour (1961), by the same director, starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. Other entries will include The Chase (1966) by Arthur Penn, which considers widespread violence and racism riddling the society of the southern United States, written by Hellman based on Horton Foote’s novel with a cast featuring Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda and Robert Redford.
Hellman had made her movie debut as a screenwriter in 1935 with Sidney Franklin’s The Dark Angel, a romantic melodrama following the emotional after-effects of the war. Her career in the cinema ran parallel to her theatre work and the writing of several books of memoirs alternating fiction and reality.
Ideologically speaking, her relationship with detective novelist Dashiell Hammet was crucial. Committed to leftist beliefs and to the American Communist Party, he is strongly present in one of Hellman’s volumes of memoirs, Pentimento (1973). The work was taken to the cinema by Fred Zinnemann in Julia (1977), starring Jane Fonda as Hellman, Jason Robards in the role of Hammett and Vanessa Redgrave playing Julia, the writer’s childhood friend, with whom she reignites her friendship in Vienna during the harsh days of the Nazi rise to power. Her third autobiographical novel, Scoundrel Time (1976), follows the days of the witch hunts and the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1999, actress Kathy Bates directed the TV movie Dash and Lilly, set around the relationship between Hammett and Hellman.
The retrospective will be accompanied by a book considering her work. The festival runs from September 19 to 27
