Watch Tea and Sympathy For Free

Sorry, this movie sucks

hyped garbage

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Although 'Tea and Sympathy" is extremely dated it is a very valuable social document. My biggest problem is the age of the cast. Most of the"schoolboys" seem to be over 20 years of age. Even John Kerr, in his starring role seems several years older than the 18 years he is supposed to be. I came to this film after seeing the 1958 musical "South Pacific" for the first time ever, in which John Kerr plays Marine Lieutenant Joe Cable. He is my idea of an admirable young man of innate integrity - handsome, dignified, the epitome of the most noble type of young American serviceman. 'Tea and Sympathy' is clearly a stage play in essence, but that's the mode in which I choose to enjoy it. The world of today (2016) is awash with LGBT knowledge of gay realities, but in the 1950s, clearly, nobody understood much about such things and Hollywood was terrified of the subject. One good result of this is that, given the Tom Lee character is not even slightly gay, John Kerr - super-straight in real life - is perfect casting! Deborah Kerr plays her role as the Housemaster's understanding wife with great verve. I bought a region-free DVD online - The remastered edition from Warner Brothers Archive. (Warnerarchive.com)

I was touched by this excellent film about a sensitive young man, Tom attending his tenth college reunion and reflecting on his difficult freshman year. He attended a school that his manly father attended before him. Tom was a talented tennis player and singer with ambition to follow a "different drummer" - to be a folk singer; a calling of which his father disapproves.Tom's father, his fellow students and professor/house father bully and gossip about Tom for such things as sewing with the professors' wives and playing tennis rather than participating in more manly things. They call him names such as Sister Boy. Tom is not gay, but a sensitive virgin who has yet to find himself. He has a longing for true love in a world of macho mean men with their locker room bragging. The neglected wife of the professor/house father alone understands and sympathizes with Tom.This movie reminds us that bullies are small minded people who have always been around and unfortunately probably always will. Hopefully, the bullies of the world and those who don't fit into the so called "in crowd" will see themselves in this film and become better as they learn from the film.In my opinion, the world would be a most boring place to live if everyone were the same. This film is a great lesson on understanding others. I want to watch it again soon and share it with friends and family.

Tea And Sympathy offers a rare chance to see the three Broadway leads of Robert Anderson's play repeat their roles. Although they didn't finish the 712 performance run, Deborah Kerr, John Kerr, and Leif Erickson all do a fine job on the screen. Tea And Sympathy actually won two Tony Awards for Anthony Perkins and Mary Fickett who replaced both the Kerrs in the Broadway run.It goes without saying that if the film were done today, it would be a lot more frank about the characters. John Kerr would be more definitely bisexual and Leif Erickson would have his issues more openly discussed.John Kerr is a sensitive kid who doesn't quite fit into the gender roles that back in the Fifties were pretty rigid. At the boys prep school he attends, the other kids call him 'sister boy' and tease him pretty bad. The only one who notices his plight with any degree of concern is Deborah Kerr who lives in his dormitory with her husband Leif Erickson. Deborah was married once before to a young man killed in the war and John reawakens something of her feelings. In the end she gives her all to John.Sadly Leif Erickson's performance is sadly overlooked when discussing Tea And Sympathy. He comes across at first as the usual jock lout, but it goes quite a bit deeper than that. The Code did not permit a more open performance, but Erickson's is one of the best examples of a self hating latent gay man I've ever seen on film. Notice the only time he really comes alive is when he's with his boys doing all the imbecilic rite of passage things that are encouraged in society back then and in some cases still are. In the end Deborah realizes that she really doesn't mean anything to Erickson, although the tacked on ending is something of a cop out.Another performance that stands out is that of Edward Andrews who is John Kerr's father. He and Erickson unite in the fact that they want young Kerr to butch it up and start taking up more masculine endeavors.In these days of the suicides of young gay youth hitting the national media, with government finally taking notice of the problem, Tea And Sympathy takes on a frightening relevance. The characters from the Fifties will be immediately recognized by many today, most especially the young who are going through exactly what John Kerr is.

Here we are in 2008, and the pendulum of sexual misunderstanding has swung both ways now, in a few generations. Once, homosexuality was despised. Now, increasingly, homosexuality is advocated as an enlightened preference. Propagating the human species is not a priority in what is perceived as an era of over-population. Besides, we have test tube babies today, and cloning people is probably already being practiced behind closed laboratory doors.What has remained the same in the past 40 years, however, is that people regard sex, in whatever form it takes, as the main priority of life. The pharmacies can't keep enough Viagra on the shelves."Tea and Sympathy," is only 'dated' for those people who don't realize that both the play, and the film, deal with the subject of love. Love is not sex. Sex is not love. You can have love without sex. You can have sex without love.Perhaps, in some future era of civilization, if we don't blow ourselves up first, the time will come when caring so much for another person that you are willing to sacrifice your future for him, or for her, is more than a Quixotic fantasy. Actually, this has been the cultural ideal on and off for centuries. Ancient Greece and Rome glorified sex and demeaned marriage, as our role models seem to do; and their orgy palaces fell into ruins in the dust of time. Later, in the Middle Ages, the troubadours sang of romantic, idealized love. By the 1600's, as the incredible book "Don Quixote" humorously demonstrates, chivalry was already dead, a laughing-stock, totally divorced from reality. In Victorian and Edwardian England, sexuality became schizophrenic - incredible debauchery existed side-by-side with the kind of love story personified in the lives of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on Wimpole Street.The two World Wars of the 20th-century despoiled and degraded many lives, on a wide scale never before seen in history. The film goddesses of the Silver Screen could play a whore one week, and a nun the next. Schizophrenia continued to reign, alive-and-well.But now, we are immersed in a pornographic dream.From that standpoint, of course "Tea and Sympathy" is dated. Some commentators here on the film even go so far as to entirely make up scenes which never occur in the movie, right out of the whole cloth of their own fantasies. No, in the last scene Laura never unbuttons her cardigan; and Tom never fondles her breast. More proof that people claim to see things that don't exist simply because they expect to see them. Even 'eyewitnesses' to major news events often don't really know what they're talking about.If this is a cult film for homosexuals, it is because they see what they want to see in the movie, and not what exists. Clearly, Tom Lee is smitten with Laura long before the film starts, just as his first love was a blond schoolteacher when he was only twelve. Laura's line to his roommate: "Maybe Tom is deeply in love" could only apply to Tom's feelings toward herself.What is to be learned from Maxwell Anderson's sensitive writing, as well as from Tennessee Williams' best work, is that love is the main thing, and that we choose those whom we love because they meet our psychological and emotional needs, and many times we are not even consciously aware what those needs really are. Reynolds, for example, although he was certainly ambivalent in his sexuality, still truly wanted a good woman to be his wife, which is why he married Laura and fully loved her in his own way; but he also needed patient help right from the start, whereas Laura was slow to realize his dilemma and, being admittedly a selfish woman at times, nursed her own hurts as their relationship deteriorated, quite apart from Tom's involvement at all. Her husband ended up a broken man, not because he was a frustrated, repressed homosexual, but because he had failed the love of his life and couldn't trust himself not to do the same again with another mate.In "Tea and Sympathy", and in reactions to the film for the past decades, we see how the norms of society can entrap all of us, at both ends of the spectrum.