Edward Albee’s (1973) screenplay of his (1966) Pulitzer Prize-winning play “A Delicate Balance” begins with a very long declamation from Katharine Hepburn’s character, Agnes, I thought I was going to be in for a very long 133-minutes of talking heads in close-up. Hepburn/Agnes still seemed stilted to me in her (mercifully shorter) closing speech, but in between her opening and closing speeches other, better actors have barbs and exclamations of anguish to hurl around the large suburban house in which the play is set.
Things become more interesting when Agnes disappears upstairs and her heavy-drinking sister Claire (the great Canadian stage actress Kate Reid) appears and converses (rather than declaiming to) Agnes’s husband, the long-suffering breadwinner Tobias (the great English stage actor Paul Scofield). Claire is able to goad Agnes into being unpleasant, if not into questioning for a moment her moral superiority to everyone else in the world. The sisters bring out the worst in each other, which is entertaining for theater audiences, if less entertaining for the audience of their fellow characters.
Agnes soon has the chance to condescend to her daughter Julia (Lee Remick), who returns home after the failure of her fourth marriage, and to play hostess to her closest friend, Edna (Betsy Blair) and Edna’s husband who is Tobias’s closest friend, Harry (Joseph Cotten). That couple became suddenly terrified at home and come to stay with Agnes and Tobias (… and Claire and Julia; they have barricaded themselves into Julia’s room before she shows up). They are uninvited and not really welcome, but as inexorable as old age (they well may be metaphors for the challenges of aging). “Time happens to people,” as Agnes puts it. She and Tobias accommodate their friends and talk around the great wound in their relationship, a son who died young and whom Tobias vehemently died would have grown up to be a “fag.”
The camera does not leave the living room, study, and dining room of the house: there is not attempt to “open up” the play with exteriors (even to follow Harry and Edna out to their car, as Harold Pinter’s adaptation of “The Homecoming” follows Vivien Merchant out for her walk in another of the American Film Theatre productions). Though a chamber movie of a chamber play, “A Delicate Balance” is not visually dull. There is not a lot of camera movement, but visual focus shifts (in and out of deep focus), and there is a reasonable mix of medium and close-up shots. There are hardly any shots of the whole ensemble framed as by a proscenium.
The repartee is not as vicious as in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”. There is as much pain, but none of the characters have the rage of George and Martha in Albee’s most memorable play (filmed masterfully by Mike Nichols with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton). Claire has the analytic acumen (and the alcohol intake) to match them but does not have a firm enough position (being a guest in her sister’s house) to scorch the earth around her.
The two men attempt to get by on bonhomie while the women strafe each other. Paul Scofield and Joseph Cotten both bring off major speeches. Lee Remick gets to act out the most, though Claire has the best lines and/or Kate Reid fires Albee’s lines better than any of the others. (She had played in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” on-stage.)
The movie captures on film some superb performances and memorably barbed dialogue. Tony Richardson’s oeuvre contains a number of memorable performances and little visual ingenuity, let alone innovation. “A Delicate Balance” is one of his better movies. It is also one of the far too few records on film of Kate Reid and Paul Scofield in major roles or of Edward Albee’s work.
©2018, Stephen O. Murray
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