A wonderful dramatisation of the work and everyone giving a super performance, although I felt that Malkovich had a somewhat dispassionate edge to his. The drama demands every attention to the script which pays off beautifully, despite the slow-moving storyline.
This was of course done forty years ago, and expectations were a bit different, but Anthony Harvey also directed Hepburn in the Lion in Winter a few years before and that turned out pretty well other than a some British overly stage actorish speeches.Tom's opening address to the audience is cut, although his concluding one was not.
Alongside 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' (my first Tennessee Williams play and perhaps my personal favourite) and 'A Streetcar Named Desire', 'The Glass Menagerie' is one of Tennessee Williams' most famous works and all three of them deserve their high reputations. When it comes to the emotion, the most emotionally poignant in my mind has to be 'The Glass Menagerie' plus we have the complex characters and powerful realistic dialogue that Williams was known for.
It could have been a very nice screening of one of the greatest Tenneessee Williams's plays however it all went terribly wrong at the very end. The end which is quite sad, dramatic was turned into a typical candy sweet Hollywood ending where everybody receives what was dreaming of.
When I first saw this on television and didn't know the play, I couldn't believe that it was scripted - the performances are so engaging and real.Having seen other productions on stage and film, and directed the brilliant gentleman caller scene, this remains the gold standard production.
I'm a wannabe writer who would sacrifice my firstborn for one tenth of the talent Tennessee Williams gave us over his amazing career as a playwright. I love Amanda and Blanche and Maggie and Baby Doll and all those incredible, erotic literary women he lovingly created and left to us to enjoy.
I just viewed this movie and have to agree fully with jslack-2 from Granstburg, Illinois. I've played Tennessee Williams myself (Laura in THE GLASS MENAGERIE and later in my career Blanche in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE) and I think Newman really got to the "core" of Williams with this production.
Early in the story, a loquacious Amanda (Katharine Hepburn) and her two twenty-something children, Tom (Sam Waterston) and Laura (Joanna Miles), are eating dinner in their dining room. In her long-winded, nervous chatter, Amanda abruptly notices that son Tom is eating too fast.
While, as has been said more than once, 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' is my favourite Tennessee Williams play (also my first), 'The Glass Menagerie' is another one of his best and perhaps the most poignant. It is very much vintage Williams, with a compelling story that has a lot of emotion and bold themes, complex characters and realistic dialogue that hits hard (even if very talky) and a fair share of powerful scenes (he sure knew how to write hard-hitting endings.
