The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1991, dir. Simon Callow) is not a rewarding film. Although it has been some time since I read the Carson McCullers story on which it is based, my recollection is that the story is a plaintive tale of lost love and retribution. The film is actually an adaptation of Edward Albee’s dramatic treatment of the McCullers story. The tone is plaintive and mournful. The film left me cold. It proceeds in robotic fashion to trace the life of a woman, Miss Amelia (Vanessa Redgrave), disappointed in life and in love. We first see her as a face peering out the front door of an abandoned building. The film then backtracks to earlier years, when men would stop on the porch of her general store on the way home from work to buy and drink the moonshine she made at her still. The woman’s face is hard and emotionless, and her hair is cut short, like a man’s. One day a little man, a midget (Cork Hubbard), walks into town claiming to be her cousin Lyman. He entrances her, and he convinces her to open up a café where the townspeople—who never appear to be anything other than bored and lifeless—can come at night to dine and converse. (Who cooks the food? I don’t think the film ever shows anyone cooking. We see people eating only). Lyman learns that Amelia was once married, but she refuses to say anything about her husband when he asks. He becomes fascinated with the notion of her former husband, whose name was Marvin Macy. Just coincidentally, about that time, Macy (Keith Carradine) walks into town, recently released from prison. Another flashback shows us that Marvin had loved Amelia years before, that to win her hand he abandoned his carousing ways and combed his hair. He proposed to her, she accepted, and they married. But soon after they go upstairs for the wedding night, she throws him downstairs and will have nothing to do with him any longer. We can only speculate as to why. Years later, when he returns to town, nothing has improved between them. He is still bitter over how she rejected him. The resolution of the film focuses on the conflict between Amelia and Marvin and Lyman. The conflict climaxes in a brutal fistfight.

The film’s setting is notable for its bleakness. Life in the small Southern town (apparently during the Depression) is so bleak and monotonous that all the men can do is work and drink. I was reminded of the desolate town in the Clint Eastwood film High Plains Drifter (1973). In such a place, the arrival of a stranger, any stranger, is a break from the routine. The arrival of Cousin Lyman, a strange little man who talks incessantly and performs comic routines on a more or less continuous basis, offers relief from their deadening existence.

The still that Amelia operates is on the far side of a swamp. She has to wade through the swamp in hip boots to reach the still, which sits next to a tall rock outcrop. I am unaware of any such geological formations in the Deep South—tall rock walls next to swamps—but maybe some exist.

This film comments not so much on the South—though it does suggest that people in the South are dull and violent individuals who lead uninteresting, benighted lives—as on the nature of gender identification and sexual rivalry. Amelia and Marvin may love each other but they are so incompatible that they cannot bear—or at least Amelia cannot bear—the thought of being touched by the other. Amelia is fascinated with Lyman, who is infatuated with Marvin, who loves Amelia, who loves him in turn but wants nothing to do with him. She’s hurt when Lyman rejects her for Marvin, hurt further by the fistfight in which Marvin beats her senseless while the entire population of the town watches in transfixed fascination.

I may simply have missed the point. Cousin Lyman is certainly the most fascinating figure in the film. Vanessa Redgrave never elevates Amelia to a level that allows us to feel much sympathy or even interest. Keith Carradine seems simply bitter. Rod Steiger as the town preacher seems lost and out of place. The film suggests that life is hard, that people who love one another also make each other miserable, that we are entrapped within socially imposed definitions of gender, that we are simply entrapped in general. It fails to explore these propositions in coherent ways.

The Beverly Hillbillies

A one-note bad joke notable for a fundamental lack of enthusiasm and imagination, The Beverly Hillbillies (1993, dir. Penelope Spheeris) does not improve on the 1960s television series of the same name. Rather, it simply tries to do it over. With Cloris Leachman as Granny and Lily Tomlin as Jane Hathaway, one might think that the film at least had acting in its favor, but all we get from them are earnest pasteboard parodies of roles that weren’t much more than parodies of stereotypes to begin with.

Stereotypes are what The Beverly Hillbillies is about. A Tennessee mountain man, Jed Clampett (Jim Varney) accidentally discovers oil on his land. He becomes an instant billionaire. His cousin Pearl convinces him that paradise is in Beverly Hills, so he moves his family to California, where he hopes to find a new wife to raise his daughter up proper. In Beverly Hills the greedy banker Millburn Drysdale and his secretary Jane Hathaway take the Clampetts under their avid wings. Shady characters plot to steal Jed’s fortune. This was a standard plot of the television series—efforts to bilk Jed out of his fortune, along with such other plots as Jed’s search for a husband for Elly Mae or Jethro’s aspirations to be a brain surgeon or a double-naught spy.

In the television series and the film, hillbillies are simple mountain folk full of virtue, homilies, good intentions, and friendliness. They are always relatively simple-minded (though not stupid) and naïve. Beverly Hills is full of malice and corruption and false, hollow pretensions. Somehow the Clampetts resist temptation and evil of Hollywood life and remain unblemished and wealthy. Like the television series, the film views the hillbillies as a cartoon stereotype—there is no concern with even remotely authentic details, only the broad and careless brushstrokes that identify the stereotype—a hound dog, Granny in her rocking chair, Jed’s ragged hat, Elly Mae’s cut off jeans, banjos, shotguns, moonshine, and so on.

With all its mindless silliness the television series is more satisfying than this film. With an array of minor characters such as Millburn Drysdale’s dithering and embarrassed wife Margaret and their son Sonny, along with all the eccentric relatives who visit the Clampetts, the show was usually entertaining, especially when Jethro or Granny was the center of attention. In the film, Mrs. Drysdale becomes a bland yuppie matron with a poodle, while Sonny is renamed Morgan. In the television show, Sonny Drysdale, played brilliantly by Louis Nye, was one of my favorite characters.

The television show was always making fun and satirizing, contrasting the pretensions of the rich against the earnest good-heartedness of the Clampetts. It carried on the tradition of slapstick social satire of the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers and many others. The film simply imitates the television show, without much vigor or success.