''The Ballad of the Sad Café'' is a 1991
Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic is an artistic subgenre of fiction, country music, film and television that are heavily influenced by Gothic elements and the American South. Common themes of Southern Gothic include storytelling of deeply flawed, disturbing or ...
drama film directed by
Simon Callow
Simon Phillip Hugh Callow (born 15 June 1949) is an English film, television and voice actor, director, narrator and writer. He was twice nominated for BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his roles in ''A Room with a View'' (19 ...
in his
directorial debut
This is a list of film directorial debuts in chronological order. The films and dates referred to are a director's first commercial cinematic release. Many film makers have directed works which were not commercially released, for example early work ...
,
[ and starring ]Vanessa Redgrave
Dame Vanessa Redgrave (born 30 January 1937) is an English actress and activist. Throughout her career spanning over seven decades, Redgrave has garnered numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Television Award, tw ...
, Keith Carradine
Keith Ian Carradine ( ; born August 8, 1949) is an American actor who has had success on stage, film, and television. He is known for his roles as Tom Frank in Robert Altman's film ''Nashville'', Wild Bill Hickok in the HBO series '' Deadwood ...
, and Rod Steiger. Its plot follows Amelia, a moonshiner in rural 1930s Georgia
Georgia most commonly refers to:
* Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia
* Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States
Georgia may also refer to:
Places
Historical states and entities
* Related to the ...
whose lonely life is interrupted by the arrival of two men: First, her long-lost cousin, and later, her former husband recently released from prison.
A co-production between the United States and Canada, the film's screenplay was written by Michael Hirst, adapted from the Edward Albee play, which in turn was based on a novella in a collection of short stories of the same title by American writer Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, '' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter'' (1940), explores the spiritual isolation of misfits ...
. The film was entered into the 41st Berlin International Film Festival
The 41st annual Berlin International Film Festival was held from 15 to 26 February 1991. The festival opened with ''Uranus'' by Claude Berri. The Golden Bear was awarded to Italian film '' La casa del sorriso'' directed by Marco Ferreri. The ret ...
.
Plot
In 1930s Georgia
Georgia most commonly refers to:
* Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia
* Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States
Georgia may also refer to:
Places
Historical states and entities
* Related to the ...
, Miss Amelia is a lonely, eccentric moonshiner who dominates her small farming community, selling moonshine to locals and acting as the town's makeshift doctor. While she is liked by some, others find her brusque nature unbecoming. Late one night, a hunchback
Kyphosis is an abnormally excessive convex curvature of the spine as it occurs in the thoracic and sacral regions. Abnormal inward concave ''lordotic'' curving of the cervical and lumbar regions of the spine is called lordosis. It can result ...
ed dwarf
Dwarf or dwarves may refer to:
Common uses
*Dwarf (folklore), a being from Germanic mythology and folklore
* Dwarf, a person or animal with dwarfism
Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities
* Dwarf (''Dungeons & Dragons''), a humanoid ...
named Lymon arrives at Amelia's mercantile, claiming to be her long-lost cousin. Amelia is skeptical of Lymon's claim, but comes to believe him when he presents a tattered photograph of them together as children. Amelia invites Lymon to stay with her indefinitely. Locals in town swiftly begin rumors that Amelia has boarded the stranger and subsequently murdered him. The charismatic Lymon invites the locals into Amelia's mercantile and entertains them, assuaging their fears.
Amelia welcomes Lymon's company, and quickly grows fond of him. Lymon convinces Amelia to turn her business operation into a café for the locals, ingratiating both him and Amelia into the community. One night, Lymon interrupts a Ku Klux Klan meeting and is threatened by the members. Later, Amelia is unnerved by the news that her ex-husband Marvin Macy has been released from the state penitentiary and is returning to town, but she does not elucidate the details of his wrongdoings to Lymon.
Marvin arrives in town and meets with the Reverend Willin for advice before going at Amelia's café and asking to remarry her. Amelia defiantly accepts the marriage as well as Marvin's numerous advances to win her over, including his bestowing her his plot of land, but remains staunchly emotionally uninvested in him and throws him out of her home. Marvin angrily breaks into Amelia's café one night armed with a shotgun, and the two get into an argument. Amelia grabs the gun, throwing it and causing it to discharge on the floor.
Meanwhile, Lymon grows fascinated by Marvin and emulates him, while Marvin and Amelia continue to quibble with one another. Marvin is insouciant and demeaning to Lymon, though their interactions with one another breed jealousy in Amelia. Amelia attempts to poison Marvin by serving him poisoned grits
Grits are a type of porridge made from boiled cornmeal. Hominy grits are a type of grits made from hominy – corn that has been treated with an alkali in a process called nixtamalization, with the pericarp (ovary wall) removed. Grits are of ...
in her café, but Marvin refuses to eat the food. The rest of the patrons look on as Amelia accidentally eats a portion of the poisoned food herself, making herself ill.
With the townspeople having grown weary of Amelia and Marvin's ongoing feud, they stage a public fight between the two in the café. Amelia and Marvin violently punch one another repeatedly as the townspeople observe the spectacle in varying states of awe and horror. The lengthy fight ends in Marvin defeating Amelia, leaving both bloodied and battered, and Amelia exits the café, sobbing. That night, Marvin returns to the café and vandalizes it, with Lymon joining in.
Cast
Production
Development
Actress Vanessa Redgrave
Dame Vanessa Redgrave (born 30 January 1937) is an English actress and activist. Throughout her career spanning over seven decades, Redgrave has garnered numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Television Award, tw ...
championed screenwriter Michael Hirst's adaptation of the Edward Albee play (which itself was based on the novella by Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, '' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter'' (1940), explores the spiritual isolation of misfits ...
), and her involvement in the project was integral to it receiving funding.[ Director Simon Callow found Albee's original play "too talkative" for the medium of film, and as a result, Hirst's screen adaptation features less dialogue.][
]
Casting
Redgrave was cast in the role of Amelia from the production's outset.[ In preparing for the part, Redgrave made certain alterations to the character's appearance and manner:
]Willem Dafoe
Willem James Dafoe (; born July 22, 1955) is an American actor. He is the recipient of various accolades, including the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, in addition to receiving nominations for four Academy Awards, four Screen Actors Guild Awards, t ...
was considered for the part of Marvin, but demanded a salary too high for the film's budget.[ Keith Carradine was cast in the role instead.][
]
Filming
Principal photography took place in the summer of 1990 in Spicewood, Texas, near Austin, as well as in Seguin,[ on a budget of $3 million.][ In order to perfect a Southern American accent from her native English accent, Redgrave studied with George Burns, an English professor at the ]University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,07 ...
.[ She added, "Not only that, eorgeknew how to wiggle and flap his ears, and he made an electrical device that, placed behind Cork Hubbert's ears, produced a wiggle for the camera that convinced all spectators that Cousin Lymon could flap his ears."][
]
Release
The film had its premiere at the New Directors/New Films Festival
The New Directors/New Films Festival is an annual film festival held in New York City, and organized jointly by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center
Film at Lincoln Center, previously known as the Film Society o ...
in New York City on March 28, 1991, before being released in the United States on May 8 of that year.[
]
Critical reception
''The Ballad of the Sad Café'' was met with mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert praised the film, awarding it three out of four stars and writing: "All of this is about as believable as those breathless '' Dateline America'' reports you read in the British trash press about snake-worshipping cults in Louisiana Sunday schools. But it plays well, if you can dismiss from your mind any remote expectation that the behavior in the film will mirror life as we know it. And Vanessa Redgrave, imperious and vibrating with passion, makes a proud, sad Miss Amelia."
Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby (July 27, 1924 – October 15, 2000) was an American film and theatre critic who served as the chief film critic for ''The New York Times'' from 1969 until the early 1990s, then its chief theatre critic from 1994 until his death in ...
of ''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' was less enthusiastic about the film, writing: "Miss Redgrave was, is and will always remain one of the greatest actresses in what's generally referred to as the English-speaking theater. She is so great, in fact, that when she goes off the track, as she does here, she continues to barrel forward with the momentum of a transcontinental express train that will not be stopped. The spectacle takes the breath away. ''The Ballad of the Sad Cafe'' is that kind of movie. It's not silly as much as it's majestically wrongheaded. It's a movie in which all options have been considered at length before the worst possible choices have been made."
Peter Rainer of the ''Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the U ...
'' praised Redgrave and Carradine's performances, but criticized the film's visual elements, writing: "If Callow had approached the McCullers’ material with a visual lyricism to match the lyricism of her prose, he might have come up with a more energetic movie. But Callow doesn’t have the movie-making skills to put his magic across. He falls back on a stock catalogue of cliches: clouds passing across a full moon, branches trembling in the wind, and so on." Clifford Terry of the ''Chicago Tribune
The ''Chicago Tribune'' is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (a slogan for which WGN radio and television a ...
'' made similar criticisms, noting that, "On the page, ''Ballad'' flows as leisurely as a Georgia stream in August, but onscreen the end effect is that of sheer somnolence. While McCullers' story pulls back from the blend of Gothic menace and perversity, the motion picture by its very nature is obliged to underline it."
''The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
''s Hal Hinson
Hal Hinson is an American film critic who wrote for ''The Washington Post'' from 1987 to 1997. As of July 2015 he has 887 reviews collected on the website Rotten Tomatoes. Hinson has been cited as a critic who is unpopular with his fellow critic ...
also criticized the film's adaptation to the screen, noting that, "On some dark, subterranean level, McCullers was thrashing out her bloody vision of emotional dysfunction and the impossibility of love, but Callow can't approximate the author's gift for sadomasochistic spelunking; he leads us into her dank caves, but once he gets there his flashlight goes dead."[ He summarized the film as "mostly an irritating exercise in mystification; it's murky nonsense, but Redgrave's presence is a guarantee that the nonsense is shot through with genius."]
Home media
SVS/Triumph Video released a VHS edition of the film on 16 June 1992. The film was released on DVD
The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind ...
as part of the Merchant Ivory Collection in January 2005. The Cohen Film Collection released a newly-restored Blu-ray
The Blu-ray Disc (BD), often known simply as Blu-ray, is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released on June 20, 2006 worldwide. It is designed to supersede the DVD format, and capable of st ...
edition on 6 December 2022.
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ballad Of The Sad Cafe, The
1991 films
1991 directorial debut films
1991 drama films
1990s English-language films
American drama films
American films based on plays
Canadian drama films
Films based on plays
Films based on short fiction
Films based on works by Carson McCullers
Films directed by Simon Callow
Films set in Georgia (U.S. state)
Films set in the 1930s
Films shot in Texas
Merchant Ivory Productions films
Southern Gothic films
1990s American films
1990s Canadian films