Deaf-initive movies to look for

While browsing a website called alldeaf.com recently, I noticed that someone had posted a request for titles of movies with deaf or hearing-impaired characters. “I know Children of a Lesser God and Mr. Holland's Opus, and one or two others,” said a woman named Holly. “But anybody else got some names of movies with deaf people or about deaf culture?”

Off the top of my head, I’d add The Miracle Worker, the play about Helen Keller and her sign-language teacher, Annie Sullivan, that has been providing great actresses with wonderful, challenging roles for more than 60 years, and I’ll never forget Love Is Never Silent, a made-for-TV film I reviewed when it first aired in 1985. It’s about a young woman torn between going out on her own or staying with her deaf parents, who depend on her to hear for them.

I also flashed back to The Late Show, a 1977 comedy-drama with Art Carney and Lily Tomlin in which Carney’s character, an elderly detective, stops to turn off his hearing aid before firing his .38 at a fleeing villain.

Few others came to mind. I had a vague memory of another old TV flick, What the Deaf Man Heard, but when I looked it up, it’s about a guy who just pretends to be deaf.

Turns out, however, there are actually quite a few more.

On the website signia.com, I found a list of 10 recommended movies (https://www.signia-hearing.com/blog/ten-movie-characters-with-hearing-loss/),  among them Wonderstruck and A Quiet Place, both featuring Millicent Simmonds, a deaf actress who signs. But the list also seemed like a stretch, including as it did Bradley Cooper’s character in the recent A Star Is Born remake, a rock star with tinnitus, and Robert Redford’s character, an aging career criminal, in The Old Man & the Gun. “He is shown with a hearing aid, confirming that he has hearing loss,” says the capsule review.

 Wikipedia has a much bigger list of movies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_featuring_the_deaf_and_hard_of_hearing) that’s probably close to all-inclusive. It reminded me of movies I’d seen, such And Your Name Is Jonah, a poignant 1979 TV drama about a child believed to be autistic but later discovered to be deaf, and it alerted me to a bunch of movies I’d never heard of and that are not likely available on DVD, much less for streaming.

 Oscar-winner Anthony Quinn starred in a 1973 spaghetti Western about a deaf gunfighter, Deaf Smith and Johnny Ears. No joke.

Deafula (1975) is the first vampire film in which the bloodsucker communicates in ASL. Who knew?

And then there’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), described as “a South Korean thriller film {that} features a deaf man working in a factory who then becomes involved with illegal organ transplantation, kidnapping, and murder.” Excuse me a minute while I update my Netflix queue .

What’s missing from the list, unless I somehow overlooked them, are films in which deafness or hearing impairment is more than a plot device or a character gimmick – i.e., a detective’s quirky trait, like Kojak’s bald head or Columbo’s rumpled trench coat.

As Miriam Nathan Lerner noted in a film survey in M/C Journal: A Journal of Media & Culture, “Films with deaf characters often do not focus on the condition of deafness at all. Rather, the characters seem to satisfy a role in the story that either furthers the plot or the audience’s understanding of other hearing characters.”

Wouldn’t it be great if producer backed a movie that actually gives the audience a sense of what it’s like to be deaf or seriously hearing impaired, that for at least part of the running time lets the audience hear – or not hear – like the protagonist"?

It would be a challenge, no doubt, for a director, an actor or actress, and for sound technicians and designers. But wow, what a revelation it could be for people who hear perfectly and can’t begin to imagine the alternative.