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(More customer reviews)Having just watched the 1973 television production of "The Glass Menagerie" I have now seen every Katharine Hepburn performance she ever did on film or television. From "A Bill of Divorcement" to "This Can't Be Love" I now have everything on tape (yes, even "The Iron Petticoat"). This was Hepburn's first television performance and she was working with Anthony Harvey, who directed the actress in her third Oscar winning role in "The Lion in Winter." Hepburn had seen Laurette Taylor's exquisite performance in the original stage production of "The Glass Menagerie," and had long considered Tennessee William's "memory" play to be an American classic. Even though she is the quintessential Connecticut Yankee, Hepburn trotted out an affect Southern accent and tackled the role.
The play is essentially a gigantic flashback told by Tom Wingfield (Sam Waterston), who is now a merchant seaman in a distant port recalling the final days he spent in the family home in St. Louis with his mother, the faded Southern belle, Amanda (Hepburn), and his painfully shy sister, Laura (Joanna Miles). Stuck in a dead end job at a shoe factory and constantly going to the movies to escape his mother, Tom wants to be a poet. Laura, made physically ill by any attempt to go out and function in the real world, has retreated to her imagination and her titular collection of glass animals. Amanda is constantly talking about the old days on Blue Mountain, browbeating Tom for his lack of incentive, or hustling subscriptions for "The Lady's Home Companion." When his mother badgers him into finding a "gentleman caller" for his sister, Tom brings home Jim O'Connor (Michael Moriarty) from work. Even better, Jim is the boy the Laura had a crush on in high school, although she certainly never would have said anything at the time. But in a Tennessee Williams play, no good deed goes unpunished.
The centerpiece of the play becomes the scene between Laura and her gentleman caller. The scene is remarkable in that it is certainly unconventional to give two characters so much time on stage alone like this. Suffice it to say that on the basis of this extended scene both Morairty and Miles won a pair of Emmy awards each, for Best Supporting Actor/ess in a Drama and Supporting Actor/ess of the Year (the Emmys have had their fair share of strange awards over the years). Hepburn was nominated for Best Lead Actress in a Drama while Miles received a nod in the Supporting Actress category.
This version of "The Glass Menagerie" has the virtue of sticking to the play's original conclusion, which is not what happened with the 1950 film adaptation with Gertrude Lawrence, Jane Wyman, Arthur Kennedy, and Kirk Douglas. It seems that Hollywood always felt a strong urge to make Tennessee Williams' plays more upbeat on the silver screen. Once you get past her accent, Hepburn's performance is as nuanced as you would expect, and the rest of the cast more than hold their own. Given that their paths would almost cross on "Law & Order," it is ironic to find Waterston and Moriarty together in this production.
Kudos to the Broadway Theater Archive for preserving these fine performances on tape and many others as well. There just are not as many televised plays as there used to be in the old days, and it is great to see that many lost treasures are again becoming available to us as lovers of the theater.
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Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (Broadway Theatre Archive) (1973)After what producer David Susskind called "the longest wooing for a part in a lifetime of dealing with stars," four-time Oscar winner Katharine Hepburn (On Golden Pond) made her television dramatic debut as the indomitable, overbearing matriarch, Amanda Wingfield, in Tennessee Williams' poignant 1945 memory play, which reteamed her with director Anthony Harvey (The Lion in Winter). "The Glass Menagerie" portrays a mother whose preoccupation with her past as a Southern belle and her unrealistic dreams for her children's futures threaten to smother her painfully shy daughter (Joanna Miles) and her aspiring writer son ("The Killing Fields'" Sam Waterston). Michael Moriarty plays the gentleman caller whose visit offers false hope and disrupts the family's precarious balance. 1973-74 Emmy Awards - Best Supporting Actor, Michael Moriarty; Best Supporting Actress, Joanna Miles.
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