The American Film Theatre

Back in the 1970s, producer Ely Landau tried a bold experiment of taking prominent, mostly modern playwrights, and producing more minimalist versions of their plays as movies. Tickets for these movies would then be sold together, like buying a subscription to a stage theater or the ballet or opera. This project, called the American Film Theatre, only lasted two years and produced about a dozen movies in all. Among them is a version of Edward Albee's play A Delicate Balance.

The leads here are Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield. They play a married couple, Agnes and Tobias respectively, who have made it in life and are living an upper middle class life in suburban Connecticut of the generation of American prosperity that followed the second World War (the play was first produced in 1966 and the movie was released in late 1973). The sort of older couple who would stay in on a Friday night and enjoy the fruits of their life of hard work. Or, at least it seems they've made it.

Unfortunately, Agnes has a sister Claire (Kate Reid) who drinks too much and has been in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous and has as been rather less of a success at life. As a result, Claire lives with Agnes and Tobias. I imagine it can't be much fun for Tobias, but then they're at an age where life it more about a pleasant enough routine than fun. They can settle down to a nice dinner before enjoying the weekend.

At least, they can until a couple of neighbors and best friends knock on their door. Harry (Joseph Cotten) and Edna (Betsy Blair) are a married couple who seem to have just as good a life as Agnes and Tobias. But somehow, suddenly, they've both decided they're going to have a midlife crisis at exactly the same time. The two have reached the conclusion that they're terrified of... something that they can't quite figure out what it is. Except that whatever it is, they know they can't live in their current house. So they're just going to knock on Agnes and Tobias' door and move right in. And Agnes and Tobias are willing to let them do this because they're such good friends and have enough spare bedrooms to do so. It's a turn of events that makes no sense in any sort of real life, but there you are.

Things go from bad to worse. Agnes and Tobias have an adult daughter, as well as a son who died some time back. The adult daughter, Julia (Lee Remick), has made an even bigger mess of her life than her aunt Claire, and has just announced she's getting a divorce from her fourth husband. So she's coming back to her parents' place since she needs a place to stay. And dammit, Harry and Edna have her room. So there's a lot now for everybody to bicker about and talk in unnatural stage dialogue.

I suppose that the material in A Delicate Balance is the sort of stuff that might work well on the live stage where you've got a live audience to play off of and play to with communal reactions. And I can certainly see why stage actors would read a script like this and jump at the chance to develop characters. But it's material that's decidedly not going to be to everyone's taste, as well as material that doesn't translate to film as well as other plays do. So definitely some people are going to like it. I'm just not one of those people.

Hotel New Hampshire

Another of those movies I had sort of heard about when it first came out ages ago, but obviously never got to see because I was much too young when it was first released was The Hotel New Hampshire, based on a novel by John Irving. It finally showed up on TCM some months back, so I recorded it and only recently got around to watching it.

The movie opens up with a sort of introductory sequence of the parents in the Berry family (Beau Bridges and Lisa Banes) telling their kids yet again the story of how they met. Before World War II, they were working at a hotel and also at the hotel is an Austrian named Freud (Wallace Shawn, and this isn't Sigmund) who has a bear in what is not quite a sidecar. Freud goes back to Europe and survives the war, while the couple obviously gets married.

In the main action of the movie, it's the late 1950s or so, and the couple has five kids. Three of them are high school aged, and going to the same private school where Dad works. Frank (Paul McCrane) is gay; John (Rob Lowe) and Franny (Jodie Foster) share an incestuous love for each other; Lilly is a neurotic who thinks she's never going to grow any bigger; and Egg is the little kid. The Berrys are bullied at school by the richer kids, with the jocks going so far as to rape Fanny. (Seriously, and the movie is supposed to be more comedy than drama even if the rape scene is decidedly not comedy.)

And then one day Dad gets the idea to open a hotel since he teaches at a boarding school and the parents are going to have to have someplace to stay. So they buy an old Catholic girls' school and set about renovating it, eventually calling it the Hotel New Hampshire. They also bring in Grandpa (Wilford Brimley) to live with them. At the hotel, the three eldest kids use the public address system that the school had to eavesdrop on the various rooms, including listening to people having sex, including John when he loses his virginity with one of the maids.

The Berry family continues to have quirky adventures, such as a dog having to be put down and Frank wanting to learn taxidermy so he can stuff the dog; that move however backfires pretty seriously. John takes up weightlifting, which is just an excuse to get him out of his shirt more and have him be even more sex-obsessed. All of these adventures come to and end, however -- are at least become a decidedly different set of adventures, when Dad receives a letter from Freud. Freud has gone blind and is trying to manage a Pension in Vienna and suggests that perhaps the Berrys could come over and take over the place.

Amazingly, they drop everything and do, and wind up at a place that's functioning as a brothel on the top floor, while also being home in the basement to a bunch of Communist revolutionaries who are perfectly willing to undertake a bombing campaign.

For me, the problem with The Hotel New Hampshire is that it's way too quirky for its own good and trying to jam way too much stuff into the movie. I haven't read John Irving's original book, but from the reviews I read this movie is considered to be a pretty faithful adaptation of something that's not a particularly cinematic book, which is why the movie has the problems it does. Never mind the iconoclastic treatment of certain topics, either. I'll also add that as a measure of the complexity of the movie, there are a couple of main characters I haven't even mentioned.

At the same time, because of the quirky nature of the movie, there are going to be people who absolutely love The Hotel New Hampshire. So definitely watch and judge for yourself.