DVD/150: THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS STONE (Josė Quintero, 1961)

Acclaimed Broadway director Josė Quintero made one film, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams' first novel.

Ten years after her Blanche Dubois in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, Vivien Leigh delivered another memorable Williams heroine in Karen Stone, a former actress living in Rome after a year of widowhood.

Hiding from friends and having lost her nerve for the stage, Karen drifts through days in an apartment by the Spanish Steps.  She is further unnerved by a young vagabond who seems to be watching her...

Drawn into a circle of wealthy emigres, she meets Magda, an ingratiating German Contessa who procures young men for them, living off their financial gifts.

Knowing of Karen's wealth, Magda introduces her to the charming but shallow Paolo but Karen suspects the truth and keeps him at arm's length.

She eventually succumbs but Paolo treats her with disdain. Karen is again alone but knows destiny awaits her...

Shelf or charity shop?  She had a spring, now she has a shelf.  A bit of an over-looked film, I have always enjoyed it and find it's enigmatic ending haunting. Vivien Leigh had been away from the screen for six years, unlike her character she was being a success on stage, but also suffering from recurring manic depressions that plagued her as well as her divorce from Laurence Olivier.  She gives a wonderfully nuanced performance: lost, rueful, disdainful and desperate and looks glorious, glowing in her Balmain couture.  Sadly Warren Beatty gives a skin-deep performance and is effortlessly outshone by Lotte Lenya, earning her Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress with a performance of glittering malice.  The extraordinary supporting cast include Coral Browne as Helen's friend Meg who knows her too well, Jill St John is great as a sly Hollywood starlet, silent screen actress Bessie Love as Karen's bossy dresser and it was the last film of Ernest Thesiger, best remembered as the eccentric Dr Pretorius in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. 

DVD/150: THE FUGITIVE KIND (Sidney Lumet, 1960)

After the success of CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, Tennessee Williams dusted off his 1940 flop BAND OF ANGELS and revised it as ORPHEUS DESCENDING but it ran only two months.

 

Sidney Lumet directed Williams' film co-adaptation retitled THE FUGITIVE KIND with the explosive pairing of Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani.

 

Things went wrong quickly... they only rehearsed a few times as Magnani was insecure working in English for only the third time and her expected affair with Brando fizzled as he disliked her.

He disliked Joanne Woodward too and his 'method' meanderings threw Magnani who, having learnt her lines phonetically, needed to hear her cue words.

It fell to his friend Maureen Stapleton to upbraid him on his behaviour; Stapleton played a supporting role but had played Magnani's role on Broadway, which made things awkward at times.

 

It proved unsuccessful on release, but holds a grim fascination.

 

Shelf or charity shop?  Shelf (but possibly dangling it's legs over the edge). Having seen Vanessa Redgrave and Helen Mirren both triumph onstage in the role of Lady Torrence, I love Tennessee's Southern Gothic of ORPHEUS DESCENDING where once again he shows the fractured sensitive souls who are overcome by the evil that men do, but Sidney Lumet never really convinces that lives are at stake.  The performances lack a cohesion, probably not helped by Brando's on-set coldness. He was the first actor to be paid £1 million for this role which obviously gave him the clout to be as stroppy as possible; all the more annoying as he never gives an actual performance - his Val Xavier is a collection of muttered asides and mournful stares.  Joanne Woodward occasionally connects as the outcast rich girl Carol Cutrere, her final scene hints at what she could have done. Anna Magnani - although occasionally unintelligible - delivers a performance that is full of fire and pain. Williams' co-written script is at fault as it speeds too quickly to it's fiery denouement, not giving Magnani the chance to vary the tone of her performance. More successful are Maureen Stapleton as the lonely housewife Vee Talbot, RG Armstrong as her cruel sheriff husband (he played this on Broadway too) and Victor Jory as Magnani's sadistic. dying husband.  A missed opportunity.

DVD/150: CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (Richard Brooks, 1958)

A box-office smash, but Tennessee Williams hated adapters Brooks and James Poe for eviscerating his play to appease the censors, especially dropping the plot's central homosexual relationship.

As his family await patriarch Big Daddy's return from a clinic to celebrate his 65th birthday, Maggie wants her husband Brick but he has retreated into alcoholism, viewing her with disgust, still unsure of her involvement in his friend Skipper's suicide.

This unhappiness is exploited by Brick's older brother Gooper and his wife Mae in their attempt to become Big Daddy's successors.

Big Daddy and his wife Big Momma are told all is well but Gooper and Brick find out he is dying from inoperable cancer.

Brick refuses Maggie's pleas to get closer to Big Daddy and when they confront each other about Brick's drinking, he inadvertently reveals that his father is dying.

Ultimately it's Maggie who seizes her moment to triumph...

Shelf or charity shop? Currently residing in the limbo of my DVD plastic storage box, I will keep it to watch Elizabeth Taylor's wonderful performance as Maggie - even more pronounced against Paul Newman's sullen Brick - and Burl Ives' Academy Award-winning turn as Big Daddy, but will always shake my head over the eternal absurdity of what can be said on a stage cannot be said on the screen of the cinema next door.  Also annoying is how in the last moments it is Newman's Brick who put's Maggie's plan into action, not her.

 

Dvd/150: A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (Elia Kazan, 1951)

To celebrate Tennessee Williams' birth day I watched the greatest of the film adaptations of his works, Kazan's A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE which, nearly 70 years later, still grips like a vice.

Released four years after Kazan's original Broadway production, he was reluctant to repeat himself but relented and cast three of his original actors - Marlon Brando as 'Stanley', Kim Hunter as 'Stella' and Karl Malden as 'Mitch' - but had to replace Jessica Tandy with the more famous Vivien Leigh, who had played 'Blanche' onstage in London.

In retrospect, the casting was inspired: Vivien's 'outsider' status against the established bond between Brando, Hunter and Malden echoes the disturbing presence of Blanche in the working-class world of Stanley, Stella and Mitch.

Much has been made since of the opposing acting styles of Brando and Leigh with his gaining the more stature, but even he grew to respect her extraordinary performance.

Shelf or charity shop?  Really??  You even have to ask?  Tennessee Williams' extraordinary words, Harry Stradling's cinematography, Alex North's pervasive score, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden's multi-layered performances, the intensity of Kazan's direction, the electricity of Brando and of course, the gossamer, iridescent, quicksilver, haunting brilliance of Vivien Leigh.

Dvd/150: SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1959)

Tennessee Williams' one-act play is expanded by screenwriter Gore Vidal into a fevered Southern Gothic horror classic (Williams recieved a co-writing credit but did no work on it).

Mankiewicz's overwrought film doesn't do the play justice but it's worth it when you have Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn going at each other, leaving Montgomery Clift's doctor a mere onlooker.

Hepburn is fantastic as the possessive Mrs Venable, offering to bankroll Clift's hospital providing he lobotomize hysterical niece Taylor, the only witness to her son's death "suddenly last summer..."

Taylor looks magnificent and gives us full 'star' acting, but it's in her quieter moments that she really delivers; her manic scenes show off her vocal limitations too much.

Taylor demanded Clift play the doctor but only three years after his near-fatal car crash, he is a hesitant, stumbling shadow of his former self.

For all it's flaws, unmissable!

Shelf or charity shop?  Katharine Hepburn was so disgusted with Mankiewicz's on-set bullying of shaky Montgomery Clift that when he yelled 'cut' on her very last scene, she asked him if that was definitely her last moment on the film, when Mankiewicz said it was she spat in his face.  One to keep but living in the limbo of my plastic DVD box.  It's worth keeping for the crazed cameo of comedy harridan Rita Webb as a knitting asylum inmate!

 

 

SUMMER AND SMOKE at the Almeida Theatre - Body and Soul...

Playwright Tennessee Williams' golden years can be bracketed between 1944 with the astonishing success of THE GLASS MENAGERIE, and the 1963 critical and commercial failure of THE MILK TRAIN DOESN'T STOP HERE ANYMORE - twelve plays in nineteen years which challenged the American theatre to look again at the way those of 'the fugitive kind' survive the cruelties of life and love.

Of those twelve main plays, there are only two I have not yet seen: CAMINO REAL (1953) and PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT (1960) - a rare Williams comedy - because, thanks to the Almeida Theatre, I can now add SUMMER AND SMOKE to my 'seen' list.

SUMMER AND SMOKE premiered on Broadway in 1948, a year after A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, but only ran three months, STREETCAR ran for two years!  It was directed by Margo Jones, who had made a name for herself in US regional theatre and been an exponent of theatre-in-the-round.  She had co-directed the original production of THE GLASS MENAGERIE and she lobbied for the director role on SUMMER AND SMOKE.  However the rehearsal period was very troubled resulting in Williams and the cast losing all faith in her.

Off-Broadway director José Quintero staged a revival in 1952 at the Circle In The Square which was well-received and launched the career of actress Geraldine Page: she won a Drama Desk award and, when she recreated her role in the 1961 film version, was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award.  Williams' returned to the story in 1964, rewriting it as THE ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE but by the time it was staged in the 1970s, Williams was out of fashion and it ran 20 performances.  Amazingly SUMMER AND SMOKE took nearly sixty years to reach London but it only ran for 6 weeks in the West End, unsurprising with the glacial Rosamund Pike in the lead.

But 12 years later, SUMMER AND SMOKE has reappeared at the Almeida Theatre in a re-imagined production which initially threw me but by the interval I was totally hooked.  Director Rebecca Frecknall has come over all Ivo van Hove and has designer Tom Scutt impose an idiosyncratic visual look to Wiliams' play set in pre-1916 Mississippi but the totally stripped-down playing area distills the action to just the actor and the words; the only furniture are nine stand-up pianos that line up in a semi-circle at the back of the stage with their hardback chairs.

Alma Winemiller lives in the incongruously-named small town of Glorious Hill, the highly-strung daughter of the town's straight-laced minister and his demented wife.  She has grown up across the street from John Buchanan, the virile son of the town doctor, and her unrequited passion for him has been unwavering since school when she embarrassed him with a present of handkerchiefs.  Alma's neurasthenia leads her to have breathless palpitations which means she visits the doctor at all hours but Alma and John, while on friendly terms, cannot give each other what they need.  

Alma, a music teacher who holds raggedy literary 'salons', seeks a spiritual connection - she delights in telling everyone she meets that Alma is Spanish for 'soul' - but John is bored with his medical studies and wants life and excitement which he finds regularly in the Latino quarter outside town, especially at the casino on Moon Lake owned by Pablo Gonzales whose daughter Rosa he is involved with.  Alma's choking primness and nervous mannerisms cannot compete with Rosa's lush sensuality and, after a disastrous date at the casino, the die is cast for them.

Dr. Buchanan leaves to help with an outbreak of fever so John throws a wild party at the surgery to celebrate his engagement to Rosa; a jealous Alma contacts his father who returns to angrily confront the drunken Pablo who draws a gun...  an event that leads to Alma collapsing physically and mentally.  By the time she recovers, the momentous summer is over and life has changed forever: John has taken over his father's work, has renounced his former ways and is engaged to Nellie, one of Alma's singing pupils.  Alma realizes that her former attitudes have made her miss out on engaging with life and love:

'The girl who said 'no' — she doesn't exist anymore, she died last summer — suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her.'

By stripping the action of all distractions, director Rebecca Frecknall draws you into the lives of John and, in particular, Alma and, while she cannot make much of Williams' 2nd Act melodramatic plot turn, she elicits strong performances from her cast of eight - I didn't even mind the Director Theatre shtick of the cast plonking the pianos for atmosphere...  Frecknall made the scenes between Alma and John crackle with tension, in particular the Act 1 scene where he listened to her heartbeat then held her wrist to check her pulse was played to a silence from the audience, gripped by the action.

There are some standout performances: Anjana Vasan was vibrant playing the contrasting roles of Rosa and Nellie, Nancy Crane was good as Alma's deranged mother as well as the gossipy Mrs. Bassett, and Seb Carrington was particularly good as Archie Kramer, the lonely travelling salesman who Alma meets in the darkening town park under the statue of the angel; an ending which is left nicely ambiguous... will it lead to Alma engaging in life positively or negatively?

Matthew Needham played the role of John well, you suspect that Williams wrote a sounding-board for Alma to be play against than a fully-rounded character but Needham showed both the reckless side of the bored medical student as well as the chastened older John who assumes responsibility with his father's death.

But the play belongs to the actress who plays Alma and Patsy Ferran is inspired casting.  Her slightly 'other' quality works in her favour here; you totally believe that her Alma is unable to fit in to the straightened society of Glorious Hill and the weight of her repressed home life is excellently suggested.  Ferran's quality of stillness here illuminates her character and she negotiates Alma's journey well, despite Williams' tendency to overdo Alma's misfit itchiness.  Ferran starts the play with an extended asthma-style panic attack which really pitches you into the character - as well as being an endurance test for her right at the top of the show.

Alma sits interestingly between two of Williams' previous characters: the over-protected and shy Laura from THE GLASS MENAGERIE and the neurotic gentility of STREETCAR's Blanche - another teacher who has embraced life too dangerously.

Although the play is not the best of Williams' canon - the obvious repetition of the soul (Alma) and the body (John) begin to clang after a while - I am so glad to have finally see it in a production which shows it off to it's fullest potential.