Rent The Glass Menagerie (1973)

It's a classic - The Glass Menagerie review by BN

OK it's supposed to be a classic from a 1944 play by Tennessee Williams. Several film versions have been made, the one here made in 1973, one in 1950 with Gertrude Lawrence and Jane Wyman as mother and daughter, and 1966 with Shirley Booth and Barbara Loden as same, then a newer version directed by Paul Newman in 1987 with his own wife Joanne Woodward and Karen Allen.

Kate Hepburn here is the lace hanky totin' , grande old dame somewhere in the south, never shutting up as she spouts well out of date gentilities to two adult children in the household. I never bothered to find out why the son was there, but honestly I switched off halfway as I could no longer stand KH's screeching voice with its fake southern accent slipping every now and again. Maybe I'm missing something profound here, it's supposed to be a story about an angst ridden mother desperate to marry off her painfully shy (& sexually repressed) crippled daughter to A Man Who Came To Dinner, but she's stuck in a time warp, trying to maintain stiff moral codes through her ingrained southern gentility whilst shouldering the shame of being abandoned long before by her husband, but for me eventually the dialogue was like nails clawing down a blackboard.

I even have a Poundstore copy of the romantic comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938) with Kate and the always excellent Cary Grant and although the storyline is kooky and frenetic, I realise it's the same - Kate spends the whole movie screeching in the same way even thought she's at least 30 years younger in that one. I always thought she was wonderful and the snappy dialogue in it clever and witty, but gradually I'm realising in most of her films, she's pretty well always the same...a bit of a whiner or a Moaning Minnie.

No offense Kate, but I may give yours a bit more of a wide berth in future. Luckily on Cinema Paradiso I can just package it up, send it back, and get the next one.