The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Vanessa Redgrave, Keith Carradine, and Rod Steiger star in Merchant Ivory Productions’ extraordinary 1991 film directed by the British actor Simon Callow. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, based on the novella by Carson McCullers and the play by Edward Albee, 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 cafe and controls the locals through the careful distribution of her own secretly brewed “hooch.”