Three Academy Award-winners - Vanessa Redgrave, Keith Carrradine, and Rod Steiger - are the stars of Merchant Ivory's Productions' extraordinary 1991 film, directed by British actor Simon Callow. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, is based on the Carson McCullers novella and the 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 cafe and controls the locals through careful 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 by the reappearance of the husband she rejected on their wedding night.