The Ballad Of The Sad Cafe

The Ballad Of The Sad Cafe

The cultural significance of “Sad Café” is immense; it is based on a novel by Carson McCullers and a play by Edward Albee. Still, it often sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit. McCullers was an extremely gifted member of the Southern Gothic school who built off Faulkner’s work and painted the South as filled with grotesque heroes and villains in a steamy environment full of sex, scandal, vice, secrecy and unhealthy family secrets. If she were to return to the South today and find out that shopping malls and skyscrapers have replaced people sipping moonshine down in the incestuous rural hollow, she would be very disappointed.

Like all fiction that becomes distorted into something larger than life, “Sad Cafe” provides great opportunities for actors. I remember seeing the play on stage in New York City in the early 1960s with Colleen Dewhurst and Michael Dunn. It made me realize how big these roles are: neither McCullers nor Albee were timid modernists trying to squeeze out small pellets of mannered prose but rather they were old-fashioned Shakespearean writers who loved grand gestures, flamboyant speech and moments when characters reveal themselves during crises.

Now comes this movie version of “Ballad of Sad Cafe,” made by British director Simon Callow (who recently wrote a book about Charles Laughton) and Indian producer Ismail Merchant (“A Room With A View”). Vanessa Redgrave stars as Miss Amelia 6 feet tall with close-cropped hair that gives her an ambiguous look reminiscent both southern women-hood and some obscure sectarianism from those latitudes.

For some time now Miss Amelia has been living upstairs over her cafe where she still holds considerable sway over local backwoods folk due to her healing skills combined with quality moonshine production abilities not quite spinster since being married for ten days once to Marvin Macy (Keith Carradine), who has since disappeared without giving anybody else serious competition ever since he appeared on earth.

One day Cousin Lymon arrives in town noisy dwarf played by Cork Hubbert introducing himself as Miss Amelias kin while preparing way for Marvin Macy’s arrival just like John The Baptist did before birth Christ somewhere else long ago around two thousand years ago or so. Lyman is a clown who deflects mockery through performance art thus jumping onto counter singing dancing bringing more joy than sad café has seen many years soon convincing Amelia reopen establishment provide gathering place townsfolk.

It’s clear that Lyman half loves marvin who arrives on schedule stops fiesta dead tracks with his laconic manner ironic guitar solos history emotional warfare between miss Amelia townspeople astonished baffled cheered depressed cue watch hungrily miss Amelia marvin macy edge towards inevitable showdown bare knuckle fight.

This is no more believable than “Dateline America” stories about snake-worshipping cults in Louisiana Sunday schools that you read in the British trash press. But it 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.

There was once a time when I suppose “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe” was thought to contain truths about life as lived. I can no longer get it that way. It now plays more like a prose opera, where jealousy and passion inflame characters who are stuck in past sins. To see the movie for its story is an exercise in futility but it works well as gesture and flamboyance, a stage for outsized tragic figures.

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