Episode 39 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn stars in an Edward Albee play that's not Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and does her first television interview.
A Delicate Balance appears, for its first hour at least, impenetrable, impersonal, and pretty dull. The supposedly welcoming home is bathed in cold overhead light, which gives everyone a corpse-like pallor and unreadable eyes. The house’s occupants are equally dispassionate. Agnes and Tobias maintain a polite-if-precarious balancing act with each other while living with Claire (Kate Reid), Agnes’s alcoholic sister. Their daughter Julia (Lee Remick) is an empty nester’s nightmare, a grown woman-child on the eve of her fourth divorce.
Slowly then suddenly, the truly bizarre occurs and the film picks up. Two family friends, Harry and Edna (Joseph Cotton and Betsy Blair), have been scared out of their house by a nameless terror, and they refuse to leave Julia’s room, a fact over which Julia quickly flies into hysterics. What starts as a breach of etiquette becomes an existential quandary. Can fear infect like a disease? What rights can friends and family claim from you? What does it say about you if you throw your friends out?
Katharine Hepburn's last Albee play and first television interview after the jump...
The whole cast turns in great performances. Joseph Cotton and Betsy Blair are unsettling. Lee Remick’s regression into childishness is matched only by Kate Reid for sheer energy. As Agnes, Kate is cold and cordial and could be mistaken for bloodless. Agnes, wife and mother and hostess, defines herself as the “fulcrum” who maintains the balance of the family by shunting emotions. She shares no chemistry with Paul Scofield, a black hole of charisma. Their incompatibility works because Tobias and Agnes stay together out of routine and shared sorrow. However, there are hints of macabre tension simmering. When Tobias tells the story of a cat he had killed after it stopped loving him, Agnes’s leopard-print dress springs to mind. Kate’s best scene comes near the end, when she marshalls her family like Patton before his troops in an effort to get the invading friends out. But whether the fear leaves once the friends do may prove a different matter.
A Delicate Balance was an experiment by Ely Landau--along with three other films--to sell subscriptions to small theatrical films. Landau’s idea didn’t work, but Kate’s begrudging agreement to promote it gave us one of the first interviews we had with the intensely private actress. Over two nights in October of 1973, Dick Cavett interviewed the great Katharine Hepburn. You’ll have to excuse their dressed down appearances, as Kate announced almost at the spur of the moment during a walkthrough that they should do the interview right then.
“Do you want to hear the long story of my life? I assume that’s why I’m here.”
Kate is alternately coy and candid, and seems to enjoy trapping the starstruck Cavett in his own questions. At the end of two nights, Katharine Hepburn had successfully rewritten her own history in glowing terms. No mention of Box Office Poison or difficulties with Spencer Tracy, only Katharine Hepburn, lady pioneer, overcoming obstacles and succeeding without vanity. Well, maybe a little vanity:
How do you like Kate's first interview? Curmudgeonly and wary or candid and witty?
Previous Week: The Trojan Women (1971) - In which even Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave cannot save a 3,000 year old stinker.
Next Week: The Glass Menagerie (1973) - In which Katharine Hepburn takes to TV to show that Laurette Taylor can eat her heart out.