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.

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.

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.

[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.