YMMV / Mandy (1952)

• Values Dissonance: The film's focus on speech and Reading Lips as the only way for deaf children to communicate has aged badly. At the time it was believed that sign language was only a system of crude gestures that would prevent children from learning "real" language, and so kids were put through hours of speech and lip-reading drills, even though the most proficient lip-reader can only pick up on a fraction of what a hearing person understands, and kids who tried to sign often had their hands tied down or hit with rulers. This meant that deaf children were deprived of language during a critical period in their brains' development, and the hours of drills meant that they missed out on some of the education and play of normal children, meaning that deaf people gained an undeserved reputation for being slow-witted. It is now known that sign languages are as rich and expressive as spoken languages, and it's best for children to be exposed to any kind of language as early as possible.