Themes: Fantasy Life, Prostitutes, Political Unrest
Main Cast: Shelley Winters, Peter Falk, Lee Grant, Peter Brocco, Jeff Corey
Release Year: 1963
Country: US
Run Time: 87 minutes
Plot
The denizens of a sordid brothel become embroiled in a bloody coup in this arty political satire adapted from the Jean Genet play. Shelley Winters stars as the cathouse's madam, a stern woman who supervises the fantasy role-playing of her beautiful employees and their well-heeled customers, including the local police chief (Peter Falk). As various whores and their johns dress up like judges, penitents, bishops, and generals, a revolution rages outside in the streets. The leaders of society -- including the queen -- are done away with by an angry mob. Soon, the madam and her compatriots find themselves ordered to impersonate the slain bigwigs in order to restore law and order. Shot in black-and-white by cinematographer George Folsey and producer/director Joseph Strick, The Balcony features a number of future stars in its cast, from Ruby Dee and Lee Grant to Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy would go on to produce and star in Deathwatch, another Genet adaptation. Unlike the later film, Genet was actually involved in the film version of The Balcony, collaborating with Strick on the original treatment but leaving the final screenplay to poet and novelist Ben Maddow. Strick acquired the rights to The Balcony from Genet only after failing to mount another literary adaptation, of James Joyce's Ulysses. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
Review
Jean Genet's oeuvre isn't meant to entertain or even engage on the level that most fiction does. More provocation than anything else, the French dissident's writing encompasses a long series of attacks on political corruption, bourgeois moralism, and the humdrum aesthetics of the cultural status quo. Even more so than his novels, Genet's plays rely on ritualized action and schematic symbolism to expose the hypocrisy of cultural institutions. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in the play The Balcony and its 1963 cinematic adaptation. Directed by Joseph Strick from a script by Genet and Ben Maddow, The Balcony presents a world in which costume and gesture determine identity. Here, the inmates can take over the asylum by merely impersonating the doctors. This being a Genet scenario, of course, the inmates are actually whores and johns and the asylum is society itself, as embodied by a deliberately unspecified country in the throes of a madcap revolution. Viewers expecting light satire, let alone characters with which they can identify, won't find much to like about the film. But audiences in tune with cinema's less naturalistic, more polemic possibilities will find The Balcony an intriguing document of its time -- and an interesting companion piece to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
Shortly after its release, the film was negatively reviewed by the New York Times critic, Bosley Crowther,[2] and was favorably reviewed in Variety, "With Jean Genet's apparent approval, Joe Strick and Ben Maddow have eliminated the play's obscene language (though it's still plenty rough) and clarified some of its obscurations. The result is a tough, vivid and dispassionate fantasy."[3] Following the release of the DVD recording in 2000, Karl Wareham also reviewed it favorably. "'The Balcony' is recommended for those who like an enigma of a film, one that tugs at your subconscious long after the titles fade. It’s a film that reaches to the very heart of why our society works in the way it does, and presents unrelenting questions and dilemmas."[4]
