A DELICATE BALANCE (Tony Richardson, 1973)

“We’re not a communal nation, dear; giving, but not sharing, outgoing, but not friendly.” — Claire, well-named, in Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance

 

After Ingmar Bergman turned him down,* playwright Edward Albee chose Tony Richardson to direct A Delicate Balance for Ely Landau’s American Film Theater series. The 1966 tragicomedy had won Albee the Pulitzer Prize. It spins off a situation that is absurd, indeed, Absurdist. In suburban New England, Tobias and Agnes are a well-to-do couple who have struck a “delicate balance” in their longtime marriage amongst various elements, including their competing notions of who’s in charge, the long-ago instance of infidelity that the victim suspects, and the loss of their son. Suddenly they find themselves beseiged: another couple, their longtime best friends, show up at their house unannounced and move in, having been driven out of their own home by the terror that the accumulated disappointments in their life let in. Weighing the claims of their own comfort, friendship and family (Agnes’s alcoholic sister, Claire, already lives with them, and their daughter, Julia, is moving back in after the breakup of her third marriage), Tobias must decide whether to admit Harry and Edna permanently, especially given the terror, the “plague,” they bring with them, which is bound to upset his and Agnes’s “delicate balance.”

This brilliant play, which among other things tests to the limit the American illusion of self-determination, is very funny and deeply moving—and, for the most part, beautifully staged and acted. Without doubt, it isRichardson’s finest film; Katharine Hepburn as Agnes, Paul Scofield as Tobias, Kate Reid as Claire, and Joseph Cotten giving the performance of his life as Harry are all marvelously touching. The co-opting of Tobias’s crucial decision unleashes piercing irony, and the closing irony that Agnes’s final utterance conveys** sounds out a bottom beneath what had seemed the lowest rung of Hell-on-Earth.

 

* Albee much admired Bergman’s theatrical staging in Stockholmof Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

 ** Albee, apparently, would have preferred that Agnes herself express the closing irony; but Richardson is right: the irony, exposing Agnes’s own terror and her hypocrisy, belongs to the piece, not to the character. Agnes’s restored complacency chills to the bone.

 

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MARY OF SCOTLAND (John Ford, 1936)

In addition to being a great actress, Katharine Hepburn was one of the most beautiful women to appear on-screen; and nowhere else is she quite so beautiful as she is in Mary of Scotland, based on Maxwell Anderson’s play, where (following Helen Hayes, for whom the part had been written) she plays Scotland’s ill-fated Mary Stuart, for whom “Mary’s Comet” was named: the “falling star” that scarred the heavens when this rightful claimant to the throne of England was put to death by Elizabeth I, whose grip on power trumped the illegitimacy of her position. Elizabeth Tudor had her second cousin beheaded because Mary ruled “too close” to her own throne.

What explains Hepburn’s extra measure of beauty in this particular film? For starters, for whatever reason(s), the befreckled Hepburn never suffered the pastiness that bedeviled the appearances of some other actresses, Joan Crawford and Shirley MacLaine among them, whose freckles were buried under a blanket of white-out makeup; Hepburn, somehow, always looked natural, her makeup restrained, light, even. This could not have been the case; but it seemed to be. Beyond that, she was more beautiful than ever in this particular film because John Ford directed it. We all know that Ford was enraptured by her, infatuated; he believed he was deeply in love with her, and indeed he may have been. It makes an incredible difference when we watch an actress through a director’s adoring gaze—think Dietrich as envisioned by Sternberg (1930-1935); Stanwyck, with that glow that Capra gave her (1930-1933); Bette Davis as Julie in Wyler’s Jezebel (1938). In every view of her in Mary of Scotland, Kate Hepburn sets our hearts to racing and takes our breath away. She is as gorgeous here as Garbo or Elizabeth Taylor ever was.

Hepburn’s role arrived to her from the play already considerably softened; Anderson’s Mary Stuart is Elizabeth’s victim more than she is Elizabeth’s fierce opponent—and, of course, her own victim, too, for loving James Hepburn (a relation?), the Earl of Bothwell, whom she married: the last of her three husbands, and the one of them she did love. This marriage to a Protestant—Mary herself was Catholic—eroded the loyalty and support of Catholic subjects, who already felt threatened by the inroads made into Scotlandby John Knox and his loathsome Presbyterianism. Whatever the actual Mary’s designs on power, her motto in Anderson’s version might be, “Most for love.” In Ford’s version, which his feelings for Hepburn guided, this became “All for love.”

Indeed, Hepburn softened Mary beyond the softening that Andersonhad already applied. In the confrontation between Elizabeth and Mary in Mary’s prison chamber hours before her beheading (historically, a meeting that never took place), Elizabethpleads with Mary to renounce the English throne and thus spare her own life; Mary, however, will not budge. Instead, she taunts Elizabethwith a glimpse into the future: the “Virgin Queen” will have no heir, and Mary’s son, James, will succeed Elizabeth. In fact, Mary utters two lines of unmitigated taunt and vehement triumph: After referring to the fact that she (unlike Elizabeth) has known a woman’s love for a man, she crows, “Still I win [despite my execution]!” Even in such a line as this, Ford’s Hepburn doesn’t budge from her deepened softening of Mary, whose delivery registers more irony than malice or spite. Not for the last time, Hepburn—whose courage did not match that of Stanwyck or Bette Davis—held herself back from the abyss of a character’s grimmest or most convoluted aspect. Thus in Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942), the first of her films with Spencer Tracy, she more or less ignores the premise of the romance and, later, marital relationship, to wit, that her (again gorgeous, but calculatedly sexy) Tess Harding manages to enforce her own rules between them by seducing Sam Craig into silence whenever it seems she might not get her own way. Hepburn goes through the motions but never explores the grotesque implications of such contemptuous behavior. Likewise, in The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, 1968), where she plays Eleanor of Aquitaine, when Eleanor instructs her son Richard to seduce his former lover, who happens to be the King of France (“Promise him anything”), for her own advantage in her quarrel with her spouse, England’s King Henry II, Hepburn betrays not the slightest sign that she grasps the line she is delivering, that she knows what she is asking Richard to do. Hepburn rarely courted unpleasantness in the roles she enacted, perhaps a lingering result of her youthful discovery of the body of her brother, whom she adored—an apparent suicide.

Whatever its “softening,” Hepburn’s Mary Stuart is among her greatest performances, perhaps surpassed in her filn career only by her dazzling, uproarious Susan in Howard Hawks’s darkest comedy, Bringing Up Baby (1938) and her staggering, soul-shaking Queen Hecuba in Michael Cacoyannis’s film of Euripedes’ The Trojan Women (1971). Her Mary Stuart is a seamless blend of gracious personality, stirring characterization and intuitive insight. Not until John Huston’s The African Queen fifteen years (and nearly as many films) later would she be so convincing and compelling in a romantic role.

Ford was not pleased with this film, which tanked at the box office; since his relationship with Hepburn bit the dust (in later years Hepburn denied that the two of them had been lovers), Ford may have felt that he compromised its rich historical material in his pursuit of the radiant redhead. Although it is vastly superior to such Fords of the same period as Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and Four Men and a Prayer (1938), Mary of Scotland has taken a lot of hits over the years. No one can deny that Ford’s staging of its few “action scenes” is stagy and clumsy, and the purging of Anderson’s blank verse in Dudley Nichols’ adaptation was probably a mistake; nevertheless, this is an estimable work, mature, engrossing, very moving. Hepburn is nothing short of shattering, and Fredric March is robust and vulnerable as Bothwell—the film’s best performance. Douglas Walton is very good as Darnley, Mary’s namby-pamby weakling of a second husband (Mary and Bothwell, here, escape all suspicion of his murder) and, from the Broadway cast, Moroni Olsen is a hoot as that slimeball Knox, who, some may insist, loomed as a more credible figure than this film suggests. Ford may have been Hollywood’s foremost atheist, but the culture of Irish Catholicism was deep in him, regardless of the absence of his faith.

The final shot is strange and powerful: enrobed in early morning darkness, Mary/Kate ascends to the scaffold to meet her fate, the camera withdrawing and withdrawing to hold her image in the frame. No matter how quickly he wanted to get through with the shoot, John Ford couldn’t let this woman go.

 

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THE TROJAN WOMEN (Mihalis Kakogiannis, 1971)

Resonating in its own time as an indictment of the ugly, brutal U.S. intervention in Vietnam, The Trojan Women is Greek filmmaker Mihalis Kakogiannis/Michael Cacoyannis’s faithful rendering of Euripedes’ play about the aftermath of the fall of Troy into Greek hands—from the perspective of the ruined city’s women, who are led by Queen Hecuba, now all of them headed from rage, loss and grief into slavery.
     Indeed, Hecuba herself embodies the loss that war inflicts, having lost both her husband, Priam, and their sons (“I saw them fall under Greek spears”), as well as their daughters insofar as both have been (differently) compromised by becoming spoils of war. Additionally, Hecuba loses her grandson, a little boy from whom the Greeks fear retribution if he is allowed to live and grow up. This is the son of Hector and Andromache.
     Katharine Hepburn (best actress, Kansas City critics) is magnificent as Hecuba, projecting outrage, fierce grief, and massive dignity. This performance towers over the mediocre ones which brought Hepburn Oscars in the 1960s, each in a dreadful, stupid eyesore: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967); The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, 1968). Although certainly better (thanks mostly to Euripedes; Kakogiannis has used the Edith Hamilton translation) (Hecuba: “The ways of Fate are the ways of the wind”), neither is The Trojan Women an especially good film; for one thing, Kakogiannis fails to bring it to any sort of life. For the most part, his film is stiff and stilted, with inserted bits of flourish—Kakogiannis himself edited—that strain for effect, such as the subjective shot of the child’s drop to his death from a cliff from the perspective of the Greek messenger who has administered, by order, the fatal push.
     Irene Papas (best actress, National Board of Review) plays Helen of Troy, who incited the war that has cost other Trojans so dearly; it is a small, unpleasant role.
     It is Hecuba who articulates a theme that echoes throughout ancient Greek tragedy: “Count no man happy, however fortunate, before he dies”—for there is still time for a downward reversal. The same is true for a woman. Hecuba’s farewell utterance: “Carry me on to the new day of slavery.”
     Thus ends one of Hepburn’s strongest performances.

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THE LION IN WINTER (Anthony Harvey, 1968)

Ungainly to the point of being anti-rhythmic, poorly written while incessantly congratulating itself for lofty wit, ineptly acted by leads and near-leads, The Lion in Winter will forever be remembered as the mess that scandalized and undid the New York Film Critics Circle. (When this god-awful piece of trash won the group’s best English-language film prize, the group revised its rules so no such outcome could ever again occur.) Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn—he, swerving between heartiness and nastiness; she, swerving between crybabyness and nastiness—play England’s King Henry II and his imprisoned French queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, briefly together again to celebrate Christmas 1183 with their greedy, power-hungry sons; inserts of the drafty castle’s vicious pets assist those too dim to otherwise gauge how nasty these royals, and one other (France’s young King Philip), be. The worst performance—well, how does one judge? Hepburn’s Oscar-winning Eleanor, because she threatens to drown everyone else with her eternal blubbering? Anthony Hopkins, who redefines the future Richard Lion-Heart as the stereotypical Queer and Chicken-Heart? Nigel Terry as pouty, unkempt, self-pitying John who one day will become Robin Hood’s Nemesis-in-Chief? Mediocre though she may be, Jane Merrow—who? Jane Merrow—gives the best performance as Princess Alais, Philip’s nubile sister, who sleeps with Henry and aims to marry, well, one of the boys.
     Note that, while Richard is homosexual as a matter of orientation, Philip is so as a matter of stealth and strategy. You can’t trust a frog no-how!
     James Goldman’s adaptation of his own lousy play picked up an Oscar, as did John Barry’s portentous score.

SUMMERTIME (David Lean, 1955)

David Lean’s touristy Summertime, adapted from Arthur Laurents’s play The Time of the Cuckoo, cancels almost everything it gives us, with this bit overturning that bit. The finale is one place where this odd procedure works: American secretary Jane Hudson, on holiday in Venice, capitulates to martyrdom and moralism by abandoning her married Venetian lover, with whom (offscreen) she has known the greatest happiness of her life, only to hope that he shows up at the train station for her departure, which he does, and she waves poignantly, the camera at her back, which is incredibly far out the open window, implicitly foretelling that she will be looking backward now, to her moment of bliss, for the rest of her life. Lean (best director, New York critics) has visually orchestrated a terrific ending.
     But nothing so becomes this ending than that it finally comes; for Summertime in the main is a silly, calculating soap opera, contradictory in its moods largely because Lean never determined whether he was aiming at comedy or something else. It is possible that the play, a flop with Shirley Booth in the lead role in the original Broadway production, provided him with little guidance. He certainly has little luck with his own star, Katharine Hepburn, who, although poised and familiarly tremulous, grates with her grimacing as well as with absurdly fluctuating vocal levels and an artillery of neurotic tics. Hepburn’s Jane is both measuredly sane and certifiably batty. One cannot overlook that Jane Hudson is the name that pulp-novelist Henry Farrell would give the abusive, demented former child star in his 1960 What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
     The on-location film’s real star is color cinematographer Jack Hildyard; but Lean inflates nearly every outdoor shot and should have used black and white.

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