YMMV / The Children's Hour

• Adaptation Displacement: The 1960 film is the most popular incarnation.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Was Karen in love with Martha, even a little? There are enough implications that even in-series people are suspicious.
  • Does Mary actually understand the implications of her actions or is she just a kid trying to get out of school and she just mentioned what she heard, not genuinely understanding what it meant? Is Mary an Enfant Terrible for making up the lie or is she a case of Children Are Innocent in that she saw through Martha's facade?
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Not meant to be happy but both the play and movie come off as Downer Endings rather than Bittersweet Endings
• Fair for Its Day: The Bury Your Gays aspects are sometimes questioned these days, but a play from 1934 that presents homophobia as a destructive force and its targets as victims instead of offenders was wild for the time.
• It Was His Sled: Martha's gay, in love with Karen, and she kills herself. This is the most well-known aspect of the movie.
• LGBT Fanbase: It is one of the few films with an explicitly gay lead made prior to the 1970s. Though its use of Bury Your Gays has been criticised, it also has a fanbase amongst people who sympathize with Martha and ship Karen/Martha.
• Retroactive Recognition: Margaret Hamilton appears as a bit character, the maid Agatha, in These Three. Three years later she would star in her most famous role, The Wicked Witch Of The West in The Wizard of Oz
• Values Resonance: For a long time it was thought a case of lesbianism wouldn't have ruined somebody's life in most of present day America (hence why revivals were always played as period pieces), but but in the 2010s and 2020s came a significant backlash against LGBT people in parts of the US, and a viral spread of "grooming" accusations (usually baseless) against teachers and people in similar professions, up to firings. This play may be prime material for a revival in a modern setting.

---