A film by Simon Callow
Three Academy Award™ winners – Vanessa Redgrave, Keith Carradine, and Rod Steiger – are the stars of Merchant Ivory Productions’ extraordinary 1991 film, directed by British actor Simon Callow. The Ballad of the Sad Café, based on the Carson McCullers novella and the Edward Albee play, is both a grotesque black comedy and a prime slice of Southern Gothic set in a poverty-stricken rural community dominated by the curious, androgynous character of Miss Amelia. A forceful personality with a mysterious past, she runs the town’s only café and controls the locals through the careful distribution of her own secretly brewed “hooch,” But Miss Amelia’s eccentric existence is threatened with the arrival of a hunchbacked dwarf who claims kinship with her, and by the reappearance of the husband she rejected on their wedding night.