USA. 1972.
Crew
Director – John Korty, Teleplay – James M. Miller, Based on the Novel by Zenna Henderson, Producer – Gerald I. Isenberg, Photography – Edward Rosson, Music – Carmen Coppola, Special Effects – Ken Phelps, Art Direction – Jack DeGovia. Production Company – American Zoetrope.
Cast
Kim Darby (Melodye Anderson), William Shatner (Dr Curtis), Chris Valentine (Clement Francher), Diane Varsi (Ballancy Carmody), Dan O’Herlihy (Sol Diemus), Laurie Walters (Karen Diemus)
Plot
Melodye Anderson accepts a new job as a teacher in the remote town of Bendo, which is hidden from the rest of the world in a placid valley. As she sets up school in the disused church, Melodye finds that the town’s children come with strange strictures forbidding them from games or music and where they must walk by shuffling their feet. As she seeks to challenge their ways, she is startled to find that the townspeople have great psychic powers. As she digs deeper into the community’s secrets, she learns how they are alien refugees from a dying planet who have been stranded on Earth.
This a tv movie adapted from the works of Zenna Henderson (1917-83). Henderson was a schoolteacher in Arizona who at one point ended up teaching in one of the Japanese internment camps during World War II. Henderson began publishing in 1951 and was one of the few woman writers of this period. Her most famous works were the stories of The People, a small town of alien refugees, which began with Ararat (1952) published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She published a further fifteen stories between then and 1980s. The stories were brought together in two collections Pilgrimage: The Book of the People (1961) and The People: No Different Flesh (1966).
This is a film based on Zenna Henderson’s stories, in particular the third story Pottage (1955). It was produced by the American Zoetrope, the production company of Francis Ford Coppola, and Coppola is listed as an executive producer. To place this in context, The People aired in January of 1972, while The Godfather (1972), which placed Coppola’s name on the map as a director, premiered two months later the same year.
Director John Korty (1936-2022) had emerged with several indie films in the 1960s and after this directed several celebrated tv movies, Go Ask Alice (1973) and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974). Korty fell into George Lucas’s orbit and directed the obscure Lucas-produced animated film Twice Upon a Time (1983) and the Ewok tv movie The Ewok Adventure/Caravan of Courage (1984). Almost all of Korty’s work was in tv, including multiple episodes of Sesame Street (1969- ). He also made other genre works such as the tv movies The Haunting Passion (1981), They (1993) and Ms Scrooge (1997).
The People comes from the Golden Age of TV Movies, a period during the 1970s when US tv was producing unique and original genre content that has never been matched by any other era. The film sets up an archetypal Sinister Small Town – although this is more a town of secrets as opposed to one where sinister happenings are going on. In fact, when revealed, the aliens are quite benevolent. Indeed, it is not hard to draw a parallel between The People and the Amish – they even have not dissimilar forms of 19th farming dress code.
John Korty directs with a subtle magic. There is mystery built up around the children and their peculiar behavioural habits. This slowly starts to open up with Chris Valentine reading Kim Darby’s mind about her breakup with her boyfriend and then levitating up into the air. There is a quite magical scene later on in the show with Chris Valentine and one of the girls circling together up around the tops of the trees, some forty feet off the ground.
It is a film with a genteel approach and lack of dramatic conflict that would never get made today. And that’s not to get into its advocacy of non-curriculum teaching methods. Almost certainly a modern writer who had been fed the film school dogma on creating conflict would pump up the drama in some way, create some sort of threat probably with the group about to be discovered or place Kim Darby at threat. Instead, we get a very genteel, placid film where the resolutions and drama come out of the discovery of magic and in the community accepting the necessity of change.
Kim Darby was then mostly known as playing the young lead in True Grit (1969). The headline name of the day would have been William Shatner, caught in a lull between the end of Star Trek (1966-9) and the launching of the Star Trek film series, who plays an affable veterinarian. For all that, Shatner is not on screen much – a couple of scenes and then turning up again towards the end, ending on a hint of romance with Kim Darby. Another well-known face of the day, Dan/Daniel O’Herlihy, who plays the community patriarch, is on screen even less.
Trailer here