Richard Brooks (1962)
In terms of settings and plot, this Tennessee Williams play might seem relatively adaptable to the screen and the Florida locations are realised well enough. The problem is that Richard Brooks, who did the adaptation as well as directing, hasn’t edited the text to take account of what cinema can express by means other than words. Brooks seems almost to have added words to a theatre script that’s already long on talk. If the play verges on the ridiculous, the picture is comfortably over the edge. Sweet Bird of Youth is an extravagant thematic stew about: (1) the vulnerability of beauty and pleasure, and the ways in which time and human agency succeed in destroying them; (2) how people use and buy each other, with money/sex/political power/the lure of fame – and their various permutations. The main channels for communicating these ideas are a handsome gigolo-loser (first name Chance); a neurotic, drug- and alcohol-addicted, I-used-to-be-big Hollywood actress; a corrupt and violent right-wing demagogue; his beatifically lovely daughter (Heavenly); her weakly vicious brother; her maiden aunt; and the politician’s aging mistress. One of the fascinations of Tennessee Williams is that a profusion of bad ideas can actually enhance his plays. Melodramatic clichés, once they’ve come through the blender of his unusual sensibility, may emerge as a concoction that seems both original and definitive. Characters who are essentially stereotypes, undergoing the same process, may be individualised through his powerful identification with them. One of Williams’s limitations is in the range of character types that he can identify with in this way. He has a genius for animating desperate, disappointed middle-aged women but many of the men and the younger woman in his plays seem relatively alien to his imaginative sympathies. They remain ideas rather than people, unless they are the products of autobiography (like Tom and Laura Wingfield) or except where the talents of the actor in the role (Brando as Stanley Kowalski is the paradigm) can bring the character fully to life.
Unreal (or unrealised) characters predominate in Sweet Bird of Youth – and are more sharply exposed as such by adaptation of the material from stage to screen. This is especially the case with Chance Wayne. This is an unusual Paul Newman performance in two ways: first, because he’d already played the role on stage; second, because as a screen performance it doesn’t work. To Williams, Chance is an embodiment of male physical beauty and the supreme bringer of joy when he gives his body to someone. (In the film, the grievous bodily harm done to Chance is to disfigure his face – after which Brooks tacks on a momentary, perfunctory happy ending. In the play, it’s castration.) Williams also seems to see Chance, possibly because of his physical glory, as essentially decent – too decent to succeed in a cruel and venal world or even to carry through his feeble plan to blackmail the on-the-skids actress. The part is imprecisely written. Sometimes Chance is supposed to be an inarticulate innocent. Sometimes he spouts aperçus on the human condition as fluently as the next character (Williams spreads these around). All this makes life difficult for Newman. He does more than completely satisfy the physical requirements of the role. He combines human believability with effulgent star quality in a way that makes it baffling that Chance hasn’t made the big time. Newman had a gift for interpreting men of limited intelligence – often not verbally. The lapidary lines sound particularly phony with him delivering them because you know that smooth articulacy isn’t natural to either the character or to Newman, when he’s playing a man like Chance. And the acres of verbiage get in Newman’s way more generally: he is so complete a screen actor that you know he doesn’t need to keep talking to express character. He sounds as if he’s speaking lines and doesn’t believe most of them. There are moments when he takes up a striking, false position (as when he learns of his mother’s death) that looks like something he developed for the stage role and has to fall back on here. Still, a Paul Newman performance that’s an interesting failure is more worth watching than the successful performances of most other actors (and Newman’s own uninteresting successes like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid).
As Alexandra del Lago (alias the Princess Kosmonopolis), Geraldine Page is also reprising a stage part but it’s not one of those performances that looks to have been worked out in the theatre and seems too practised and shrivelled on screen. Page has superb technical skills, and while you’re kept aware of her technique here, much of what she does feels freshly inventive. The Princess is an example of how Williams’s dynamic empathy with a character can transform the garish clichés of which she or he is composed into something not exactly believable but certainly compelling. (The Princess is allegedly based on Tallulah Bankhead, a friend of Williams.) The abundant wordage is much less of a problem for Page – partly because you can accept that the Princess is a flamboyant talker and partly because Page’s brilliantly varied and rhythmical line readings keep the lines alive. The upturn in the Princess’s fortunes is ludicrous (the picture which she assumed to ring the death knell on her career and sent her into hiding turns out to be a smash hit); but Page’s playing of the telephone conversation in which she receives this incredible news is justly celebrated. Whether it’s through her daring as a performer or something in her screen presence (or both), Page connects very satisfyingly with the volatility of the character. (I saw Lauren Bacall in the play at the Haymarket in the mid-1980s. Leaving aside the fact that she’s a very limited actress compared with Page, it was Bacall’s core of sanity that made her essentially unconvincing in the role.)
Shirley Knight is touching as Heavenly – but this too is a hollow character (and another who’s occasionally required to break off from the way she normally speaks to impart insights on behalf of her creator). As Boss Finley, Ed Begley gives a very enjoyable performance. The fact that it’s so enjoyable illustrates the limits of the performance and the role – Boss is evil in theatrical quotation marks – but Begley was probably right to play the part with brutal relish rather than take it entirely seriously. (It was surely what won him a surprise Oscar as Best Supporting Actor – the Academy wouldn’t have given him the award if he’d been genuinely disturbing in the role.) The more Boss grins, the more murderous the look in his eyes. As his son, Rip Torn is maybe too evidently aware of the florid absurdities of the material but he has developed an ingenious smile that seems to slide away from his face under pressure. Contrasting as it does with Begley’s menacing rictus, Torn’s smile perfectly conveys why the son-will-never-be-the-bastard-his-father-is. Madeleine Sherwood – in a very different role from Maggie the Cat’s fecund nemesis in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – is Boss’s mistress, Miss Lucy. Mildred Dunnock is Aunt Nonnie.
12 November 2008
