Rent The Glass Menagerie (1973)
3.8 of 5 from 62 ratings
1h 44min
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- Long ago abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield (Katharine Hepburn) dominates her children with her faded gentility and exaggerated tales of her Southern belle past. Her son Tom (Sam Waterston) is now the family's breadwinner but longs to be free from the shackles of his family. Her disabled daughter Laura (Joanna Miles) is painfully shy and withdraws into a dream world to escape her feelings of inadequacy. Amanda decides the only future for Laura is to find a husband for her. The arrival of Tom's friend Jim O'Connor (Michael Moriarty) as a potential suitor leads the family situation to crisis point.
- Actors:
- Katharine Hepburn, Sam Waterston, Joanna Miles, Michael Moriarty
- Directors:
- Anthony Harvey
- Producers:
- David Susskind
- Writers:
- Stewart Stern, Tennessee Williams
- Aka:
- Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie
- Studio:
- Metrodome
- Genres:
- Drama
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Reviews (2) of The Glass Menagerie
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Hepburn here is the lace hanky totin' , grande old dame somewhere in the south, never shutting up as she spouts well out of date gentilities to two adult children in the household.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.
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A Triumph - The Glass Menagerie review by CH
Look through the hefty volume of Tennessee Williams's Collected Stories and you will find some more familiar as the classics he made from them for stage and screen. Among these is this one. Possibly his very best and perhaps often staged because it has but four characters - and, if dominated by the mother, Amanda, it shares the workload among them.
Down on her luck, which collapsed with her husband's departure, Mrs. Wingfield is reduced - with grown-up son, Tom, and daughter, Laura - to a small apartment in late-Thirties St. Louis. Himself with an eye now on escape, Tom works in a warehouse while trying to do what he can for Laura whose spirit is further blighted by crippled feet, a situation in ironic counterpoint to the jazz-band 78s which she puts upon the turntable to her mother's irritation.
Such music is of course forbidden while Amanda telephones readers to persuade them to renew their lapsed subscriptions to a magazine. As she decribes the plot of a forthcoming serial, rarely have aspiration and reality been as finely deliniated as here, in her own saga. This is something harrowingly compounded by Tom's match-makingly inviting to dinner a colleague whom Laura knew from schooldays. For those who do not know the play, say no more - except that this cast is superb. That not only includes Katherine Hepburn (her gesturing manner makes one wonder if Maggie Smith ever took the part). No matter that Sam Waterston's haircut is more redolent of the Seventies when this was made - in Buckinghamshire - for television. He is the ideal buttress to Joanna Miles who, like Katherine Hepburn, transforms her appearance for gentleman-caller Michael Moriarty.
There are other films of this play but they are now elusive. This one certainly makes for the closest that one's sitting room can come to one which takes up a stage set in which some of the eponymous, shelf-haunting creatures need replacing from night to night. Of course, their human counterparts are, if anything, more fragile. Tennessee Williams did not shy from symbolism any more than his admired D. H. Lawrence: at their peak, both could merge it with reality.
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