Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (Broadway Theatre Archive)
Katharine Hepburn, one of the great American actresses, stars in this film  adaptation of one of the greatest American plays, Tennessee Williams'sThe Glass Menagerie. Hepburn plays Amanda Wakefield, a faded  Southern belle now living in a small urban apartment, where she suffocates  her two children--her restless son Tom (a very young Sam Waterston) and  her painfully shy daughter Laura (Joanna Miles)--with her incessant  mixture of insistent cheer and guilt. After much prodding from Amanda,  Tom finally brings home a friend from his workplace, in the hopes that he  might strike up a romance with reclusive Laura. The result is one of the  sweetest and most heartbreaking scenes ever written. Hepburn's steely will  and sudden vulnerability make her ideal for the domineering mother, but  the entire cast--including Michael Moriarty as the "gentleman caller"--is  superb; Moriarty and Miles deservedly won Emmy awards for their  performances.--Bret Fetzer