The Story of Esther Costello

Another actor who has several movies that wound up on my DVR without being part of any particular tribute is Italian actor Rossano Brazzi. This time, the movie that features him is The Story of Esther Costello.

As you might guess, Brazzi does not in fact play Esther Costello. Nor does the female lead, Joan Crawford, although we get to see Crawford quite a bit before we get to see Brazzi. We first get to see Esther herself. In a prologue scene, it's 1948 Ireland in one of those dirt-poor villages, and Esther is playing with a couple of boys. Esther has found a cellar where a cache of explosives from either the war of independence from Britain or perhaps the civil war that followed remains hidden a quarter century on. The kids must be too young to read, or else they'd know that these are dangerous explosives and not toys to be played with. But they're stupid, and one of them pulls the pin on one of the grenades. In the resulting explosion, Esther's mother is killed as, presumably, are the two boys.

Fast forward to 1953. Margaret Landi (Joan Crawford) is a childless American woman who is apparently rich enough to travel to the village where she grew up, and even buy chocolates for the village children. The parish priest, Fr. Devlin (Denis O'Dea), informs her there's one more child, which is how Margaret gets introduced to Esther (Heather Sears). In the accident, Esther became deaf-blind, and is living in squalor with an alcoholic granny. Margaret is horrified, and decides that she's willing to become the child's guardian and take her over to England and then the US, where there are schools that teach the deaf-blind how to use their sense of touch to learn Braille as well as finger-spell and things like that.

It's a lot of work, but Esther is a good student and eventually reaches the point where Margaret it willing to bring her to a school assembly at a school for children with all five senses for a talk about overcoming hardships. One of the girls is overcome by emotion, and it's there that the idea is born, in part with help from newspaper reporter Harry Grant (Lee Patterson) who has already met Esther. Esther's could be an inspiring story, and that inspiration could be used to raise money for other deaf-blind people. Those schools need quite a bit of money, after all.

Margaret decides it's a good idea, and has good intentions, so she takes Esther around and parades her to large audiences as the donations start pouring in. And then Margaret sees a check she'd rather not see: it's signed by one Carlo Landi (that's Rossano Brazzi). Carlo is Margaret's estranged husband, the sort of man who cheated on Margaret and likely cheated his clients in whatever work he did, to the point that for the first half of the movie I was expecting Margaret's husband to be in prison.

Carlo works his way back into Margaret's life, although it's also a bit of a ruse. Carlo sees all that money coming in, and figures it's a good way for all of them to live a life with at least some luxury in it. Or, at least, a good way for Carlo. He has the idea of bringing Esther back to Europe and going on an extended engagement tour, lying as well about how much money is coming in so that he can skim some of it off. You'd think Margaret might have figured this out by now.

She eventually does figure it out, as does Harry, who wants to rescue Esther from all this because he thinks he's in love with her. But there's the question of what it would do to Esther if she found out that people around her whom she trusted are basically scamming her. And if that's not enough, the story takes a plot twist just in time for the finale....

The main idea of The Story of Esther Costello dealing with charities scamming gullible people, isn't a bad one. And for the most part The Story of Esther Costello really isn't a bad movie. But it does have some plot holes that do bring it down a peg or two. One is the plot's requiring that Margaret be a bit too dim to figure out that her husband just wants to scam people again. She's incredibly quick to bring him back into her life. And really would a charity of that size be run by only one or two people, especially someone like Margaret who had no experience doing such things?

Still, overall, The Story of Esther Costello is definitely one that's worth watching.