 List Price: $19.98 
Amazon.com: Paul Newman directed this poetic, sunlight- and memory-drenched film version of Tennessee Williams's classic memory play. The casting is surprisingly adept, considering that several of the performers would seem to be too old for their roles. John Malkovich plays Williams's stand-in, Tom Wingfield, a dreamer who lives with his domineering mother Amanda (a luminous Joanne Woodward) and his fragile, limping sister Laura (Karen Allen). Mom wants nothing more than to marry off shy-flower Laura and keeps bugging Tom to bring home a guy. So he corrals coworker James Naughton for an evening--and Amanda treats it as though Naughton's signed up for the nuptial short-course. Woodward is alternately touching and harridan-like as this smothering mother who means well, while Malkovich is perfect as the would-be writer longing to break free. And Allen brings surprising strength to the role of Laura. --Marshall Fine Customer Reviews: Rating: 
Date: 2007-08-19
Dealing with Severe Social Isolation
This is a somewhat sad story. A woman and her adult daughter Laura live an extremely reclusive life, and do so in a dark, cheerless flat. Perhaps the most memorable part of the story is when a gentleman caller comes. He wants to go out with Laura, to whom he says: "Did anyone tell you that you are beautiful?" Upon learning that she has never dated, he says: "That's all the more reason that you should go."
Rating: 
Date: 2006-10-14
SUPERB!!! When will it be available on DVD?
This is the best most intelligent version of St. Tennessee's GLASS MENAGERIE I've ever seen! There is great humor and tenderness in this version, alonside the heartbreak. The direction by Paul Newman is subtle and insightful, the artful cinematography by the great Michael Ballhaus gives every scene layers and layers of meaning, and the acting is astounding. John Malkovich's Tom is achingly brilliant (the semi-literate lump Christian Slater playing Tom/Tennessee on Broadway was absurd) and bursting with resentment and anger and creative potential; Joanne Woodward perfectly inhabits mother Amanda's well-meaning but at times smothering narcissistic love and sing-song nagging and melancholic nostalgia; and then the revelation is Karen Allen (who knew?) whose wounded resigned Laura cannot achieve her mother's ambitions or her brother's cultural curiousity, but who compassionately loves these two human volcanos despite everything.
I love these characters---Tom, Laura, and Mother Amanda---and I want to be with them again and again, despite how heart-breaking they are.
I only wish this version of GLASS MENAGERIE, which gives oxygen to William's poetry and lets it breathe and live inside us all the more powerfully, will become available on DVD soon! Rating:
Date: 2006-05-19
Deeply moving---unquestionably the best film version.
The depth of feeling manifested in the acting on display here easily trumps both the (wildly miscast)Gertrude Lawrence and the (vastly overrated) Katherine Hepburn versions of this celebrated play.
Though everyone involved (on both sides of the camera) does a first rate job, special accolades are due to Joanne Woodward, who is perhaps the first actress to really understand Amanda, since the role's originator--Laurette Taylor.
The pathos in Miss Woodward's delineation of the character is almost unbearable on some occasions, as in the famous jonquil soliloquy, in which she conveys, with hushed voice and beatific eyes, a sentimental recollection for lost time (and lost love) that is not only wholly personally convincing, but also manages to imprint her sentiment onto the audience with all the deja vu of Proust's madeleine.
Her Amanda is never less than fully persuasive.
And Mr. Malkovitch, in his final address to the camera, ("blow out your candles Laura") achieves effects of the same high order, with emotions so confiding, intimate, and genuine that he leaves viewers of any sensitivity as heartbroken as he is.
All told a devastating achievement not to be missed by admirers of Mr. Williams.
Rating:
Date: 2005-12-10
A guarded and bridled Menagerie
This production, directed by Paul Newman, is a good one, though lacking in power. It's as if Newman had decided that this classic Tennessee Williams play, with its searing emotional conflicts that constantly ebb and flow, was too familiar now - so something else was attempted. The emotions seem filtered out, purculated down to work against something deeper in us.
In most productions of this play, when the emotions have played out before us we watch and react with the actors; here we are expected to THINK about what the actors are SUPPOSED to be emoting. We are forced to see this movie from a distance, across an intellecualized gap: it's movie making as an intellectual exercise rather than an emotional one - almost a misuse of the medium. Joanne Woodward plays the mother; Karen Allen is the shy, lame daughter; and John Malkovitch is the son. All the actors perform admirably, but the results are too restrained and safe, not bold and daring. Rating:
Date: 2005-01-01
A Splendid Adaptation
Of the numerous interpretations of this play that I've seen on stage and screen, this is the best--a strong statement considering the many excellent actors who've been attracted to Tennessee Williams's powerful characters (e.g. Katherine Hepburn and Sam Waterston). John Malkovich seems to have been born to play Tom, the artist torn between familial duties and wanderlust. Malkovich's intense and percussive style is an ideal match for Williams's play, in which the text and its poetry dominate. His performance in this role is the most convincing of any I've seen, and avoids the pitfall of allowing Tom to become too morose and self-absorbed. Joanne Woodward is also perfect as Amanda, who, though deluded, narrow, and even stupid, holds her family together through her unique mixture of courage and desperation. Karen Allen and James Naughton also capture what I think Williams must have intended in the characters Laura Wingfield and the gentlemen caller, and the two generate real chemistry in the pivotal scene with the glass unicorn. This is a must-see for anyone interested in American theater.
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