And yet "Sad Cafe," like all fictions that are twisted and warped into a shape larger than life, provides great opportunities for actors. I remember seeing the play onstage in New York in the early 1960s, with Colleen Dewhurst and the late Michael Dunn, and being impressed with the largeness of the roles: McCullers and Albee were not timid modernists, straining to eject small pellets of mannered prose, but old-fashioned, even Shakespearean, writers in love with the grand gesture, the flamboyant speech, the crisis in which character is revealed and secrets are unveiled.
Now comes this movie version of "Ballad of the Sad Cafe," made by a British director and an Indian producer. The director is the actor-writer Simon Callow, whose recent book about Charles Laughton reveals his own affection for grandiose performance, and the producer is Ismail Merchant, of "A Room with a View." Their star, in the showboat role of Miss Amelia, is Vanessa Redgrave, 6 feet tall with hair shorn close, so that she seems part woman, part votary of some obscure Southern order.
Miss Amelia has retired for some time to the rooms upstairs over her cafe, and yet she still holds considerable sway over the local backwoods folk, thanks to her skill in healing, and the quality of her moonshine. She is not quite a spinster. She was married for 10 days once to Marvin Macy (Keith Carradine), who has since disappeared, but not before giving Miss Amelia the only serious competition she has experienced in life.
One day Cousin Lymon, a noisy dwarf (Cork Hubbert), arrives in town, introduces himself as Miss Amelia's kin, and starts preparing the way for the arrival of Marvin Macy, much as John the Baptist once performed similar duties in a different story. Lymon is a clown who deflects mockery by performing for folks, and he leaps onto the counter to sing and dance and bring more joy than the Sad Cafe has seen in many a year. Soon he has convinced Miss Amelia to re-open it, and provide the townsfolk with a gathering place.
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