"My husband ... got me out of the bin!" -- Meryl Streep in Plenty (dinner party scene, part 1)

Susan Traherne, outraged at the invasion of Egypt in 1956, lashes out at her husband (Charles Dance), a British diplomat, and his colleague Sir Leonard Darwin, played by John Gielgud. Based upon the stage play by David Hare, directed by Fred Schepisi, 1985. Music by Bruce Smeaton. Watch the conclusion of this scene here:    • "Now ... everything is up for grabs!"...  . (I would have preferred to post the entire scene as one clip, but Youtube flagged it as a copyright violation.)

David Denby: "[Streep] has one great scene--a dinner party during the Suez crisis, in which she is smashingly dressed in a black strapless gown and her neck looks snaky and powerful, darting this way and that as she rakes the guests and her husband with her scorn for Britain's declining power. She can make neurosis disturbingly sexual...." -- New York, September 30, 1985

Stephen Schiff: "[A]n icily brilliant performance."

David Thomson: "With Hare's text, and Meryl Streep's very brave performance, Schepisi showed us a woman helplessly drawn to terrible, dangerous gestures... Plenty seemed to me at first a failure... But I cannot get the film out of my head, and I'm still not sure how much of that comes from Hare, Streep, or Schepisi. My only answer so far is that there are three profound, unstable talents, drawn toward difficulty and discomfort." A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 3rd Edition, 1994-- entry on Fred Schepisi

Read more about Streep's performane at https://streepplenty.blogspot.com

(Ad disclaimer: I do not own the copyrights to the film, and do not know what ads they will run with this clip. Due to copyright claims, this scene from a dinner party is split into two clips. The link to the second clip is above.)