Three Oscar®-winners – Vanessa Redgrave (Julia), Keith Carradine (Nashville) and Rod Steiger (In The Heat Of The Night) – are the stars of Merchant Ivory Productions’ extraordinary 1991 film directed by British Actor Simon Callow (A Room With A View, Four Weddings and a Funeral). The Ballad of the Sad Café, based on the novella by Carson McCullers is both a grotesque black comedy and a prime slice of ‘Southern Gothic’ set in a poverty-stricken rural community dominated by the curious, androgynous character of ‘Miss Amelia’. A forceful personality with a mysterious past, she runs the town’s only café and controls her locals through the careful distribution of her own secretly brewed ‘hooch’. But Miss Amelia’s eccentric existence comes under threat from the unheralded arrival of a hunchbacked dwarf, who claims kinship with her, and by the reappearance of the husband she rejected on their wedding night and who has come back to wreak vengeance on the woman he once tried to love.
Film Crew
- : Ismail Merchant
- : Paul Bradley
- : Michelle Houston
- : Richard Robbins
- : John Foster
- : Andrew Marcus
- : Marianna Elliot
- : Simon Callow
- : Gary Marcus
- : Michael Hirst
- : Carson McCullers
- : Walter Lassally
Technical Information
- Couleur
- English
Keywords
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Eccentric and endearing, The Ballad Of The Sad Café is an idiosyncratic study of complex relationships that is about as far removed from soap opera dramatics as you could possibly hope for. For those that are positively craving to see a grown woman kiss someone who only comes up to her navel - and, let's face it, who isn't? - this is most certainly the film for you.
Boasting great cinematography and enough quirks to keep even the most critical arthouse film lover enthralled, The Ballad Of The Sad Café will never leave audiences short of interest.
Film 4 -
[The film] 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. I suppose there was once a time when "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" was thought to contain truths about life as lived. I can no longer relate to it that way. It now plays more like a prose opera, in which jealousy and passion inflame the characters, who are trapped in the sins of the past. To see the movie for its story is an exercise in futility. But it works well as gesture and flamboyance, a stage for outsize tragic figures.
Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times
