LADYBUG, LADYBUG

US, 1963, 80 minutes, Black and white.
William Daniels, Nancy Marchand, Estelle Parsons.
Directed by Frank Perry.

Ladybug, Ladybug is a low budget film made by the Perrys soon after their success with David and Lisa, and some years before their other notable films: The Swimmer, Last Summer, Diary of a Mad Housewife. Critics did not treat Ladybug, Ladybug kindly at all and it soon went to television rather than cinemas. Yet, it is an interesting, if unpolished, piece of ban-the-bomb drama, fitting into the spate of films at the time of the Cuban missiles and afterwards - Fail Safe; Seven Days in May; Dr. Strangelove; Panic in Year Zero; These are the Damned.

It is different from these in-so-far as it is set one morning as school starts in an ordinary Mid-Western? U.S. city and the panic button rings. The film involves alarmed teachers and terrified children obsessed by fear of the coming bombs while the ordinary populace goes on with its daily life. The film ends with an emotional plea for peace. Not outstanding but makes for interesting discussion with parents and children.

1. What was the meaning of the title? How did the rhyme apply to the film's situation?

2. Do you think the school setting on an ordinary day made the plot more
realistic and plausible? The boy sent to the headmaster, a parent, the class?

3. The film is nuclear-attack, science fiction of the early 60's. Is it relevant today? Forceful? Why was this so important in those years?

4. What comment on American civilisation did the film make - preparedness for nuclear attack, the drill, alarm systems? Has the situation worsened since 1963, and are these our preoccupations today?

5. How did the film's presentation of teachers, pupils and parents help audiences to identify with the characters and situation?

6. Were the teachers' reactions what you would have expected in this .situation? Should they have believed the alarm was genuine? Did the headmaster make the right decisions in sending the children home? What alternatives had he?

7. How do you think the ordinary citizen would react when he learnt that a nuclear strike would hit within the hour? How would you react?

8. What were the effects on the school staff, the headmaster, secretary, teacher?

9. Why were the sequences with the teacher who walked the children home so important? What else could she have done? How did she reassure the children?

10. How shrewd were the children in working out that the drill was not an exercise but real? How did they cope as a group - the leaders emerging, games and singing?

11. How effective were the sequences of the children arriving home - disbelieving parents, frightened little girl, mother making her children pray, the boy who lived too far away?

12. How did the film build up tension with its cross-cutting from the urgent telephoning to the teacher warning the children to their various homes, to people listening to the reassuring music on the radio (especially the teacher finally getting a lift and her relief in learning the alarm was false)?

13. How important was the climax with the children in the shelter, their fear, unwillingness in letting the girl in, her terror, hiding, the courage of the boy who looked for her?

14. How menacing and ironic was the final scene with the ordinary planes (to the audience) seeming to be death vehicles to the boy, and his agonised plea to stop? Did this effectively point the moral of the film?

15. Was this an effective anti-war film? Did it use children well for its message?