The Balcony

Quite a slow start (after the shocking opening credits), but if you can last until Peter Falk shows up then you will be rewarded. Particularly impressive how this movie fits with the late 60s questioning of authority, nationalism, and conventional morality. I would have sworn it was made in 68 or 69. At times it reminded me of "Zabriskie Point" and "If." Not a great movie on any level, but it has a number of intriguing ideas, some very good dialogue, and standout performances by Falk and Shelley Winters.

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!

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...

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. . . .

The transplanting of Genet's writing to film is odd indeed. It feels strongly allegorical, and it is: it's about a made-up revolution going on in the streets, violent scenes of apocalyptic fighting, where the two opposing forces, the police chief and the leader of the revolution, meet in a brothel where fetishistic sex scenes are enacted. So Genet's play seems at first to be about how sex binds, but it's more a post-modern sort of play, where all is an illusion and we play roles -- in Genet's world, our choices are governed by sex (which the film's comic ending uses to end the conflict through nakedness).

That's all well and good, but the revolutionary aspect doesn't come together too well, because the mocking of people who believe anyone who's presented to them isn't really successful; it's told more than it's dramatized. (Three joes from the brothel who act out their fetish scenes are made to participate in the battle outside as the people they play in the brothel.) The fakeness of the sets (complete with fake horse neighs and jury murmurs for the various acting out of fetish scenes) makes intellectual sense to go along with the fakeness of the rest of it (Winters' closing line is great), but the literal, set-like play, and the lousy stock footage, takes away from the melodrama, I think. It's a little difficult to watch, and the direction isn't very good; the decadence, the threats made by Falk, some of the lines -- it'd work better on the page. But it becomes larger as it goes along, and is successful in an unconventional way.

The strangest moments are the emotional ones, where emotion pierces through the artifice -- which, honestly, is rare, almost limited to the scene where the man licks the prostitute's shoe and she begins to cry, or the one where a prostitute-turned-file-clerk longs to be a prostitute again just for an hour. The most instantly recognizable Genet-like image is the one of Nimoy behind bars, his hairy chest exposed. Nimoy, whose appearance is brief, is very good here; he has the emotion through movement that Falk instead strains for. If Daniel Day-Lewis was doing Columbo in "Gangs of New York," then Falk is doing Bill the Butcher, with his German-Southern accent, mustache, and histrionics.

The three men from the brothel are necessarily flaky -- they seem to be acting in another film. I think the awesome Shelley Winters is the only one who really nails her performance: her recognizable inflection, the effortless "a" pauses in her speech, the svelte hand movements; she's most in tune to what's going on, and she pulls it off beautifully. There's a startling kiss between her and a girl from the brothel that must have been a jolt to audiences at the time; it still seems violent, even though it's done seemingly out of affection. 8/10