Introduced by Tom Wingfield as a memory play, it is based on his recollection of his disillusioned and delusional mother Amanda and her shy, crippled daughter Laura. Amanda's husband abandoned the family long ago, and her memory of her days as a genteel Southern belle surrounded by devoted beaux may be more romanticized than real. Tom is an aspiring writer who works in a warehouse to support his family, and the banality and boredom of everyday life leads him to spend most of his spare time watching movies in local cinemas at all hours of the night. Amanda is obsessed with finding a proper "gentleman caller" for Laura, who spends most of her time with her collection of glass animal figurines. To appease his mother, Tom eventually brings Jim O'Connor home for dinner, but complications arise when Laura realizes he is the man she loved in high school and has thought of ever since. He dashes her hopes of a future together when he announces he is engaged. Infuriated, Amanda lashes out at her son for raising his sister's hopes and Tom leaves, never to return to his family.
Janet Maslin of The New York Times called the film "a serious and respectful adaptation, but never an incendiary one, perhaps because the odds against its capturing the play's real genius are simply too great. In any case, this Glass Menagerie catches more of the drama's closeness and narrowness than its fire ... [It] starts out stiffly and gets better as it goes along But quiet reverence is its prevailing tone, and in the end that seems thoroughly at odds with anything Williams ever intended."[3]
Desson Howe of The Washington Post observed, "Acting is definitely the trouble in Menagerie. There's an awful lot of it here." He praised Karen Allen's performance and criticized Joanne Woodward's. On Paul Newman's direction, he wrote, "by filming this play in straightforward manner ... Newman emphasizes the artificiality of theater and distances you from the play".[5]
Variety called it "a reverent record" of the Williams play "one watches with a kind of distant dreaminess rather than an intense emotional involvement" and cited the "brilliant performances ... well defined by Newman's direction."[6]
As of December 2022, it holds a 75% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 12 reviews.[7]
