Monday, March 17, 2008
Tennessee schmaltz
By Edward Copeland
With the exception of Elia Kazan's film of A Streetcar Named Desire, has there been any truly good film adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play? I can't say definitively that that is the case but after suffering through 1961 film of Summer and Smoke, I certainly hope there hasn't been a worse one.
Despite some fairly good performances (including Oscar nominees Geraldine Page and Una Merkel), Summer and Smoke is practically a convention for bad Southern accents. Page, a reliably good actress, is fairly mannered and bad except for late in the film, when her repressed spinster character undergoes a change that makes her interesting.
Merkel is solid throughout as Page's bonkers mother, though her character just seems to vanish late in the film with no sense of what happened to her. Perhaps Peter Glenville's film did address this, but the movie is so bad and dull that I could only watch it in fits and starts, so I might have missed something when I zoned out.
The tale seems to be stitched together from many of Williams' usual interests: crazy moms, stern fathers (in this case both a doctor and a minister) and a callow cad. Laurence Harvey gets the cad role, playing the son of a town's noble doctor (John McIntire). Harvey's John Buchanan Jr. followed in his father's professional footsteps, but he's a reprobate with a strong taste for lust and liquor, especially for the fiery daughter of a local "house of sin" (played by Rita Moreno, the same year she won the Oscar for West Side Story, but she really doesn't get much to do here.)
Page is the minister's daughter who lives next door and can't face her own desires for the young doctor and his lifestyle. I've never seen Summer and Smoke on stage, but I assume it's been de-fanged as most film adaptations of Williams' plays were.
Still, when you see the films of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Sweet Bird of Youth or even Suddenly, Last Summer or Night of the Iguana, you can still read between the absent lines to some extent.
Watching Summer and Smoke, I have a hard time imagining how the play could be much better except possibly on the acting side. It's just a Southern fried mess.
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Labels: 60s, Geraldine Page, Kazan, Laurence Harvey, Tennessee Williams
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