A Year With Kate: A Delicate Balance (1973)
Wednesday, September 24, 2014 at 1:30PM Episode 39 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn stars in an Edward Albee play that's not Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and does her first television interview.
A Delicate Balance appears, for its first hour at least, impenetrable, impersonal, and pretty dull. The supposedly welcoming home is bathed in cold overhead light, which gives everyone a corpse-like pallor and unreadable eyes. The house’s occupants are equally dispassionate. Agnes and Tobias maintain a polite-if-precarious balancing act with each other while living with Claire (Kate Reid), Agnes’s alcoholic sister. Their daughter Julia (Lee Remick) is an empty nester’s nightmare, a grown woman-child on the eve of her fourth divorce.
Slowly then suddenly, the truly bizarre occurs and the film picks up. Two family friends, Harry and Edna (Joseph Cotton and Betsy Blair), have been scared out of their house by a nameless terror, and they refuse to leave Julia’s room, a fact over which Julia quickly flies into hysterics. What starts as a breach of etiquette becomes an existential quandary. Can fear infect like a disease? What rights can friends and family claim from you? What does it say about you if you throw your friends out?
Katharine Hepburn's last Albee play and first television interview after the jump...
The whole cast turns in great performances. Joseph Cotton and Betsy Blair are unsettling. Lee Remick’s regression into childishness is matched only by Kate Reid for sheer energy. As Agnes, Kate is cold and cordial and could be mistaken for bloodless. Agnes, wife and mother and hostess, defines herself as the “fulcrum” who maintains the balance of the family by shunting emotions. She shares no chemistry with Paul Scofield, a black hole of charisma. Their incompatibility works because Tobias and Agnes stay together out of routine and shared sorrow. However, there are hints of macabre tension simmering. When Tobias tells the story of a cat he had killed after it stopped loving him, Agnes’s leopard-print dress springs to mind. Kate’s best scene comes near the end, when she marshalls her family like Patton before his troops in an effort to get the invading friends out. But whether the fear leaves once the friends do may prove a different matter.
A Delicate Balance was an experiment by Ely Landau--along with three other films--to sell subscriptions to small theatrical films. Landau’s idea didn’t work, but Kate’s begrudging agreement to promote it gave us one of the first interviews we had with the intensely private actress. Over two nights in October of 1973, Dick Cavett interviewed the great Katharine Hepburn. You’ll have to excuse their dressed down appearances, as Kate announced almost at the spur of the moment during a walkthrough that they should do the interview right then.
“Do you want to hear the long story of my life? I assume that’s why I’m here.”
Kate is alternately coy and candid, and seems to enjoy trapping the starstruck Cavett in his own questions. At the end of two nights, Katharine Hepburn had successfully rewritten her own history in glowing terms. No mention of Box Office Poison or difficulties with Spencer Tracy, only Katharine Hepburn, lady pioneer, overcoming obstacles and succeeding without vanity. Well, maybe a little vanity:
How do you like Kate's first interview? Curmudgeonly and wary or candid and witty?
Previous Week: The Trojan Women (1971) - In which even Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave cannot save a 3,000 year old stinker.
Next Week: The Glass Menagerie (1973) - In which Katharine Hepburn takes to TV to show that Laurette Taylor can eat her heart out.
Reader Comments (14)
I can't wait for Glenn Close and John Lithgow in this play. Tony number four?
There's that wonderful, self aware quote by Close about how she's sometimes confused with Meryl Streep, but never on Oscar night. Mer Bear could say the same about Glenn on Tony night. I still love that when Glenn won her first Globe (for another Hepburn role) the first thing she did at the podium was ask Meryl if she had her permission to accept an award. TOO real.
Hayden - I'm looking forward to it as well! I think Close will do things with the role Hepburn didn't, as Hepburn did things that Jessica Tandy (original Broadway cast) didn't. Hepburn's Agnes doesn't show weakness, but there's room in the script for a less guarded performance.
Previews start in October, so I hope some New Yorkers can report back here with reviews.
I've seen the interview before on a marvelous DVD set of Cavett interviews. It's a great interview even with the re-imagining of certain parts of her history. That wasn't really surprising, what star doesn't reinvent themselves over time? She still came across as a fascinating person, opinionated and witty.
A Delicate Balance is a chilly film but the material doesn't lend itself to much of any other sort of interpretation. What a great cast though, Kim Stanley was initially cast as Claire but had a nervous breakdown shortly after filming started and had to bow out at which point Kate Reid, an actress with her own set of emotional troubles, stepped in. She's very good here so it worked to the film's advantage.
I also really liked Lee Remick's work, even though her patrician beauty was clearly not a result of the marriage of Hepburn and Scofield with whom she shared not the slightest resemblance but then neither did the two Kate's.
Better than The Trojan Women and Madwoman but still not a great piece of cinema. Next week's Menagerie is a definite improvement.
@Hayden - W O W those are some icy bitters coming from Ms. Close. I can't believe it!
I loooove that interview. As herself she sounds so much like Susan Vance it's absolutely disarming.
Ely Landau's The American Film Theater was a very daring concept. All 14 films in its two seasons featured star-studded casts and great directors. One of the films, The Man in the Glass Booth (1975), got Maximilian Schell a Best Actor nomination for the Oscar.
Such a great play! Leaves you thinking for days. I guess it's one of those plays that will never quite work as movie.
I'm sure Glenn will be great, but Lindsay Duncan may steal the show. That woman really can act.
P.S. Kate Reid, what a lovely actress too!
I really enjoyed the '96 Broadway revival of this play with Rosemary Harris as Agnes, George Grizzard as Tobias, John Carter as Harry, Elizabeth Wilson as Edna, Elaine Stritch as Claire, and Mary Beth Hurt as Julia. Another very unique take on Agnes. (All the actresses in this production were amazing to watch.)
Peggy Sue - I confess I'm most interested in Rose Byrne. I want nothing but good things for her, and I'd love to see what she can dig from the otherwise despicable Julie.
Paul Outlaw - Elaine Stritch AND Rosemary Harris? I can't even imagine. Did you have a favorite, or were you blinded by amazing actressing?
I believe Martha Plimpton is playing the role of Julia.
Anne Marie: I love all four of those actresses, but my long-standing attachment to Mary Beth Hurt should have given her the edge. However, Rosemary Harris (whom I had never seen live before) blew me away. Very subtle and nuanced, but still "big" enough for the stage. (And Stritchie was, well, Stritchy. Typecast but brilliant.)
Peggy Sue - You're right! Even better. I love Martha Plimpton. So glad she's keeping up an interesting and varied career after Raising Hope.
I saw the '96 revival too, and Paul Outlaw is right. Rosemary Harris was truly stunning. I loved Grizzard, too, but the whole cast was great.
I thought that Tony Richardson wasn't really very inspired when it came to directing this film/play. They didn't have a large budget and that may be part of the problem.
When it comes to the cast, Hepburn probably comes out the best Although I thought there was some strong work from Kate Reid. Joseph Cotten was a little disappointing.
Peggy Sue - Regarding the cast for Broadway, I completely agree with you about Glenn Close and Lyndsay Duncan. Duncan is a brilliant actress, (probably best known for the HBO Rome series) she can be heartrendingly, breathtakingly real.
Anne Marie - The Dick Cavett interview is just a diva polishing her image, but she is far more witty and surprising than most. I loved it then, and still admire how playful she was.
I am looking forward to "The Glass Menagerie" which was a better adaptation of a stage play.
Probably nobody's reading this anymore but here are my two cents: Lindsay did Glenn's "dangerous" role on Broadway, maybe London too; and Rosemary did Katharine's "Lion."
Grizzard was the one to grab the Tony but the ladies were magnificent.