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| A DELICATE BALANCE (1973) |
An Ely Landau Production, An American Film Theatre Release
Technicolor, 132 minutes
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CAST
Agnes: Katharine Hepburn
Tobias: Paul Scofield
Julia: Lee Remick
Claire: Kate Reid
Harry: Joseph Cotten
Edna: Betsy Blair
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CREDITS
Director: Tony Richardson
Producer: Ely Landau
Executive Producer: Neil Hartley
Associate Producer: Henry T. Weinstein
Scenarist: Edward Albee
Based on the Play by: Edward Albee
Photographer: David Watkin
Art Director: David Brockhurst
Editor: John Victor Smith
Wardrobe: Margaret Furse
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SYNOPSIS
The entire action takes place over a period of 36 hours in an upper-middle-class Connecticut family house. A middle-aged couple, Agnes and Tobias, make do with an accommodative marriage in which "delicate balances" must always be observed. Living with them is Agnes's alcoholic sister Claire, and they are joined by their daughter Julia, a veteran of four broken marriages who has become totally jaded and disillusioned with life, and takes it out on those around her. Into this forlorn environment come yet another couple, Harry and Edna, who have fled from their own house because something there has aroused in them an inexplicable terror. Agnes and Tobias, who have been friends with them for many years, are caught between a desire to be hospitable and a need to maintain their family's privacy.
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CRITIQUES
"Today Albee seems diminished by time as does his rhetorically florid, hollowly bitchy world. [Director] Richardson aggravates matters with a heavyhanded approach that deprives the play of the wit and theatricality Alan Schneider used to levitate the Broadway production. Robbed of currency and comedy, Albee's nattering family - Katharine Hepburn's imperially
crotchety grande dame, her ineffectual and dry-as-dust husband (Paul Scofield), her drunken maiden sister (Kate Reid) and hysterical, oft-divorced daughter (Lee Remick) - has become a household of superlative bores."
- Paul D. Zimmerman, Newsweek, 1973
"Edward Albee has never allowed other writers to adapt his plays for film (Ernest Lehman's credited script for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was actually dumped in favor of the original text), and wisely so: his dialogue, with its antiphonies, violent crosscurrents, and meticulous stops and stresses, is hard enough for actors to master, let alone writers emulate. Consequently, the only other film of Albee's work is this stuffy 1973 production by the American Film Theatre. Paul Scofield and Katharine Hepburn star as a New England couple hosting their flaky grown daughter (Lee Remick), Hepburn's drunken sister (Kate Reid), and two old friends (Joseph Cotten and Betsy Blair) in the grip of a nameless fear. The players are marvelous but ill served by Tony Richardson's leather-bound direction; a single video camera pointed at a stage performance would have been more electric."
- J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader
"Albee's powerful, coruscatingly brilliant study of tribal rites among the New England jet set. It is also first and foremost a stage play, utterly dependent on direct confrontation between actors and audience, verbal in origins, drawing-room in setting and, on the surface, eminently static. Richardson (as is the norm in this American Film Theatre series) settles for 'filming' the proceedings, and only succeeds in evaporating the tension and the clarity of the original. That said, the cast on show is unbeatable. They make the whole grinding affair bearable, but you'll still get a stiff neck."
- Steve Grant, Time Out
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COMMENTARY TRACK
"I've been a big fan of his [Paul Scofield] for a long time. He has a keen eye but he's not as noisy as I am. I'm insubordinate."
- Katharine Hepburn
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HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY
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Katharine Hepburn, Paul Scofield
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Lee Remick, Katharine Hepburn
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On the set: Katharine Hepburn, Joseph Cotten, Betsy Blair, Tony Richardson
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