The Balcony

Jean Genet's great surrealist comedy was filmed, brilliantly in 1963, by Joseph Strick and is thought to be among the first American art-movies. It's certainly not commercial and Strick makes few real concessions to the medium. It's stage-bound (sound stage-bound?)and no mistake and probably all the better for it and the translation, (it is scripted by Ben Maddow), is first-class.

Set, fundamentally, in a brothel which is more a 'house of illusion' in an unnamed country during a revolution it's about artifice and role-playing, power games for the under-privileged. When the real Minister of Justice, Archbishop and General are killed three of Madame Irma's customers take on the roles under the guidance of the real Chief of Police, (Peter Falk). Nothing really happens and nothing is really resolved. 'You can go home now', Madame Irma tell us, the audience, after the revolution appears to be quashed. Everything is an illusion.she assures us, even real life.

This may well be Genet's best work and Strick and Maddow do it proud. The performances are first-rate. Shelly Winters is particularly fine as the bisexual Madame Irma and Lee Grant is often astonishing as her assistant and part-time lover Carmen. (When this movie came out Grant had yet to make much of an impression on the big screen). Although miscast, Peter Falk handles his speech to the crowds beautifully. Daring in its day, (we have foot fetishism and a lesbian kiss), the film quickly disappeared from the circuits despite very favourable reviews and today is seldom seem. But it is still a classic and really should not be missed.

The Balcony is the stuffy sort of film that the American industry once thought was 'art', even as the effects of the nouvelle vague began to filter through suggesting otherwise. A provocative play by a continental author (Jean Genet), full of prestigious and soon-to-be-illustrious names (Shelly Winters, Peter Falk, Lee Grant, Leonard Nimoy, et al), shot in crisp black and white (duly nominated for an academy award), music by a genius (Stravinsky) spiced up with cinema vérité news footage and laced with sexual-political overtones, how could it not be? Contemporary reviewers obviously went along: "This film is a remarkable achievement from any point of view. All in all ... not to be missed" (The Guardian). "..first choice for the year among American films" (Daily Telegraph), and so on. Unfortunately now the results seem less impressive. It's stagey, full of self-conscious dialogue played self consciously, and determinedly un-cinematic. Watching the rather turgid results these days the viewer is more likely to wonder what went wrong.

Director Strick virtually made a career out of determined literary adaptations: following the present film came Ulysses, Tropic Of Cancer (1970) and Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man (1977). He made documentaries too, but it was with the former that he strived most to be culturally meaningful, even if the results were never first-rate. The Balcony was the first such outing, and perhaps the least impressive - a production in which, as others have noticed, his literalness as an adaptor hinders rather than encourages the transfer to big screen. As Genet amply demonstrated in his masterpiece Un chant d'Amour (1950), artistic significance can often be best created by the most indirect and poetic means - a process that the director might have here, with benefit, remembered.

Set in a brothel, Strick's film takes place within a city wracked by (unspecified) revolution. Oblivious to the upheavals happening outside, the power-deprived customers of the whorehouse are sold illusions of power, living out their fantasies before the women as such characters as judges, bishops and generals. Things change though, when one of the madam's (Shelly Winters) occasional lovers, the Chief of Police (Peter Falk) asks for help. First, it's for her to impersonate the Queen, then for her clients to help end the revolution by acting out those roles they had only played in fantasy. They succeed admirably in those parts they have acted out for so long; explosions devastate the city. Then, they too are deposed by a new revolution...

The result is an uneven and somewhat tedious melange of humour, surrealism, melodrama and socio-political comment. There are important parallels to be drawn between the immoralities outside and inside the brothel, but in the event the balance is rather laboured, while many of the observations remain rootless. While Genet's play undoubtedly must have worked in its original theatrical incarnation, plonked down here amidst a rout of American thespians determined to see it done justice, its edge is fatally blunted by studio compromise, the result frequently, boredom. Naturally the work of a homosexual former social outcast and thief would have suffered in any American adaptation at this time, as cultural sensibilities were so different. His brothel, supposedly serving the "wildest ambitions and fantasies of its clients" is here without either real fantasy or wildness, in a film that desperately seeks genuine politicization to sink its teeth into, but merely chews around the edges of 'significance'. It might have been a brave project for the time, even daring, but the obscure dullness of it all today is unforgivable.

Stravinsky's music intersperses the action, but being a selection of existing pieces plonked down in situ rather than an original score - in fact, the composer never wrote one - its divertimento clarity only points up how glum and obscure much of the action is which it supports. Jerry Fielding's adaptation of A Soldier's Tale for Straw Dogs (1971) shows how some effective arranging might have been done, but one supposes Stravinsky had the casting vote on this occasion and was presumably happy with the result. Winters is fatally miscast as Madame Irma, the 'lesbian letch' who runs the show, entirely missing the sophistication her role demands. Other members of the cast act out their roles with appropriately straight faces, but only Peter Falk retains lasting credit, lending his part something of the intensity it demands.

No less a talent than Fassbinder also struggled, perhaps surprisingly, with a Genet adaptation when he directed the unsatisfactory, though considerably more watchable, Querelle in 1982. Outside of Genet's own film, perhaps the most memorable adaptation of his work also stars Shelly Winters, this time freed from the millstone of cultural obligation: the cult item Poor Pretty Eddy (1973, wrongly given by IMDb as a second version of The Balcony) which, in its own bad taste way is probably a 100 times more subversive than Strick's establishment effort...

This is absolutely NOT a film for the theatrically illiterate or anyone who cannot accept a film which is less than realistic and into the exploration of the fantasies film is supposed to look at (dare we admit it is stage influenced - but not stage bound?). Those who simply want a mindless night at a "fun" film had best look elsewhere, but for anyone who has a mind and enjoys using it, who knows what Existentialism is, or who enjoys really good acting in demanding texts, the 1963 adaptation Ben Maddow made of Genet's 1959 draft of THE BALCONY in consultation with the original author is close to a "must see." Moving smoothly from the horrifying stock footage of the wartime rioting as the Germans were withdrawing from Paris and radicals were wreaking vengeance on "collaborators" (representing an unnamed country in revolution) through shots establishing a very young and handsome Leonard Nimoy as a revolutionary the film quickly settles into the studio produced isolation of a prominent brothel where clients can act out any fantasy and Genet can use these fantasies to examine the nature of power and relationships - even for a moment drawing back the tenuous curtain separating fantasy and reality.

Top billed Shelly Winters as the madame may never have given a better, subtler performance, and the later all to irritating (as television's Columbo) Peter Falk gives a performance of sustained intensity as a man who thinks he's in charge of his destiny - very reminiscent of the best Twilight Zone work.

All too often overlooked in the uniformly solid cast are Ruby Dee (between her stage triumphs in PURLIE VICTORIOUS and A RAISIN IN THE SUN and recreating them on film) as a woman on trial, Jeff Corey (a versatile character actor with over 200 movie and TV credits including everything from Perry Mason to Star Trek) as "the Bishop," Kent Smith (with a resume akin to Corey's but possibly best known as Peter Keating in the movie of THE FOUNTAINHEAD) as the "General" and famously Blacklisted Lee Grant (just coming off that painful period) as one of Ms. Winters' "girls." Despite the brilliance of all concerned, the film has had its problems It was made at a time when, even if independent films could get around the political bigotry of the previous decade, they were still not immune to the pressure of a sexual puritanism which had a major studio first force a damaging rewrite then refuse to issue an important Billy Wilder film (KISS ME STUPID) under its own name because it appeared to endorse infidelity. The screenplay of THE BALCONY is, on many levels, "tamer" than the stage version. The castration of a character is eliminated as are most homosexual references and exposed skin is kept to a minimum, and it may have been still further Bowdlerized in regional release, but the essential ideas are there for any with the wit to explore them.

If you're up to it (and many viewers will recognize that Rod Serling clearly was), this is a journey through time and space - and one's mind - well worth taking.

I admit that the movie is a little slow at times, but the plot and the circumstances, and the celebrities in this film are enough to make it worthwhile. The power struggle scene between Leonard Nimoy and Peter Falk seems to be almost homo-erotic. And seeing Shelley Winters kiss another woman. Too much! This movie is one of my favorites!

I really was expecting a "skin flick" based on its lobby cards when I first saw this film adaptation of Jean Genet's "The Balcony" in the summer of 1963, but I was definitely in for an awakening -- rude perhaps but definitely an awakening.

I recommended the film to the owner of Gainesville, Florida's independent movie theater based on the original road show I had seen; however, I had to eat my words when he was only able to book the bowdlerized version that was available for distribution only a few short months after the film's original release. Perhaps too many people had been lured into theaters by the lobby card promise of a "skin flick" and were upset when they were greeted with a film that actually made the audience think for a change.

I rented the DVD today and watched the uncut version of "The Balcony" for the first time since that original viewing some 43 years ago. I took notice of the grainy stock footage used in most of the exterior scenes and compared them with the crisp images of the interior of the TV studio sound-stage, Madame Irma's house of illusions, and I wondered if this might not have been deliberate -- reality is actually grainy and slightly out of focus while our fantasy world is crisply delineated but still patently phony as when Peter Falk as George, the Chief of Police, breaks through the kraft-paper door or when the rocks -- in the Leonard Nimoy as Roger fantasy -- oscillate when touched.

Shelley Winters was ideal as Irma; I cannot think of another actress working in 1963 who could have done better in the part. The rest of the cast was also exceptional.

One note concerning another comment about Peter Falk's accent being Southern and German -- surely this was said in jest? Falk's accent was a combination of his native New York accent and a put-on Latin American/Spanish accent if it was anything. Again, that mixture of accents was in keeping with the part and with the fantasy.

"The Balcony" was definitely worth watching again some 43 years after I saw it during its first run. Will I still think so if I watch it after another 43 year interim? I think I probably will. . . .