The Ballad Of The Sad Cafe - The Merchant Ivory Collection

Three Academy Award winners—Vanessa Red grave, Keith Carradine, and Rod Steiger—are the stars of this extraordinary 1991 film, directed by British actor Simon Callow. The Ballad of the Sad Caf, based on the Carson McCullers novella and 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 caf and controls the locals through 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 reappearance of the husband she rejected on their wedding night.