He was considered one of the foremost dramaturgs of the 20th century, a man whose work is alive with muscular, near symphonic language and barely contained vices threatening to blow apart the façade of gentility at any moment. He works won him a slew of awards, including two Pulitzers, a Tony, a Kennedy Center Honor, and an induction into the American Theater Hall of Fame. And unlike some of his contemporaries, his works translated to the screen with remarkable aplomb.
It is not that his plays were inherently cinematic, but that their power resided in the way he wrote lines that spoke louder than the blunter modern equivalents. Put his speeches into the mouths of some of the greatest actors of the era, and their subterranean revelations became the cries of the damned and pained. Think of the ways that Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, and Madeleine Sherwood sank their teeth and emotive powers into dictating and demonstrating the alcoholics, sex addicts, and demented melancholics of his oeuvre.
Released in 2006, Tennessee Williams Film Collection gathers six of the best-known adaptations of his work released by Warner Brothers and MGM between 1951 and 1963. Some of them were written by the playwright himself (A Streetcar Named Desire, Baby Doll – both deservedly Oscar nominated) as Hollywood loved to borrow prestige from older artforms that had gained credibility in the popular culture at the time by hiring them to make their movies. Who better to do both than the man churning out a slew of big hits for the stage whose actors were getting recognition for their complex performances? (Many of them also repeating their stage successes in films and becoming crossover stars.)
I love his work. I love his way with language and character. I love a lot of these movies.
Included in the set is a documentary, Tennessee Williams’ South, which I will not be talking about. Instead, I will focus on the six film adaptations of some of his biggest works, including an adaptation of his lone novella. The movies vary in quality but what ties them together, aside from Williams’ daring, verbose, near symphonic language is a quality of acting that changed the way that we thought of screen acting. Not just in the Method upstarts, but in the ways that more classical or studio-trained figures demonstrated various depths and colors of their talents that had hitherto been unseen.
The six films are*:
A Streetcar Named Desire – Once forbidden – the
revealing director’s cut of Williams’ masterwork! Marlon Brando stars in the
version that’s “a Streetcar for the ages” (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles
Times).
Baby Doll – A sexually charged scorcher: Karl
Malden and Eli Wallach vie for teen bride Carroll Baker.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – “The Cat” (Elizabeth
Taylor) digs in her claws! Paul Newman co-stars in a fiery adaption.
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone – Warren Beatty and
Vivien Leigh love and lash out in a stormy May-December romance.
Sweet Bird of Youth – Paul Newman is a failed film
hunk returned home in this tale of hypocrisy and alienation.
The Night of the Iguana – A fallen priest bids for
redemption. John Huston directs Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr.
* Descriptions taken from the back of the box
Acting in any Tennessee Williams film is always a draw as his characters have a complex, rich inner life, and poetic monologues that gives actors a lot to do. Even in the weakest of these film efforts, there is a pleasure to watching some of the 20th century’s finest film performers work their magic with his damaged, melancholic, troubled sinners looking for mercy. It seems almost unfair that that we go in chronological order and begin with the biggest, best of his film adaptations, 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
A Streetcar Named Desire is widely regarded as one of the films to usher in the then new manner of film acting technique, the Method, and one of the cinema’s most towering figureheads, Marlon Brando. While not his first film performance, he had already debuted in Fred Zinnemann’s The Men the previous year, it was the film and performance that launched him into the stratosphere and made him the default pop icon for this new brand of acting technique. The film remains a large object of critical thought and appraisal, not only for Brando, but for Vivien Leigh, and its prime spot as a marvel of adaptive power.
By now the basic plot of Streetcar should be familiar to even those who have never encountered it: fragile and neurotic Blanche moves in with her sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley where a titanic battle of the wills/egos ensues that all but symbolizes the transforming south itself. Blanche as faded genteel civility while Stanley is the cruder lower-class. The drama that ensues as these two personalities clash, with poor Stella trapped between them, is the bulk of the harrowing, despairing, nearly demented drama.
Seen now, so much of the Method’s striving for naked emotive power, for realism seems as nearly mannered as the more classical style exhibited by Leigh, but it does not affect the overall power or devastation of the work. In fact, it only heightens the words and thematic heft of the material by tapping into the ways in which several characters are playing parts and enacting facades in their interactions with each other. These are characters enacting and deploying emotional pyrotechnics and constant recalibrations at a height and style that would be exhaustive, if not impossible, to keep up in real life.
More so than any of his other films, Elia Kazan seems to understand and deploy the magic of artifice throughout Streetcar. This New Orleans is limited to the dilapidated apartment, smoky courtyard, and the brief glimpse of the outside streets. Other Kazan films like On the Waterfront, East of Eden, or America, America took place in recognizably real places with a near documentary-like sense of geography and specificity. Streetcar is a hothouse of sexuality, clashing egos, and neurosis. It is a claustrophobic chamber piece at heart so any concessions to “opening up” the work or making it more realistic are fundamental misunderstandings of its goals and structure.
Whereas other versions of the material may treat the characters of Blanche and Stanley as co-narrators, this one is told from Blanche’s perspective. We meet her through the fog of a train station looking slightly bewildered and yet indefatigable. Vivien Leigh, an English rose, is immediately captivating. Not only because of her great beauty, but because she is clearly capturing something slippery and elusive about Blanche. Without words, Leigh is already able to conjure up Blanche’s penchant for invention, for rewriting reality to suite her whims and mental state, to project the barely simmering carnality of the character.
Her performance is one of the greatest. A towering achievement where actor and part meet in perfect harmony and generate a tremendous amount of, well, magic. Leigh’s classical acting style wraps around Blanche perfectly. Here is a woman prone to lying and imagining a grander past, a more suitable way of behaving and moving through life. When Leigh’s Blanche is swept away in this illusionary state, her voice is airy and prone to a sing-song cadence. Then it all drops away in an instant and her voice takes on a deeper, rougher texture and her eyes focus in on a rage and torment that recedes the minute she decides to bring back up the veil.
It is a piece of work that is ever evolving throughout the film, sometimes Leigh makes Blanche go in and out of these states between lines or midway through a sentence. The emotional and mental instability of Blanche is always present, but Leigh transforms it into a piece of Brechtian theater. Her Blanche is putting on a show of southern charm and manners to suppress the cruelty and sexual voraciousness lurking just below the surface. Her Blanche’s descent into madness was always predestined, but her sad, wilting magnolia act makes the eventual break somehow crueler.
And then there is Brando stalking like a panther throughout this crummy apartment. From the beginning he is a charismatic figure of sensual appetites and masculine violence. We understand the enthralling pull and hold that he has over Stella, best exemplified in Kim Hunter’s hungry walk down the staircase during the infamous scene of his tortured yelling functioning as a clarion call. He is all sweaty masculinity, child-like in his emotional extremes, and a destructive brute at times.
He is not the glamorous leading man of the movies at that time. Yet he is not quite the “real” person of the legend surrounding this film. But it does not matter as his work remains vital, alive, and disturbingly hypnotic. The twisted dynamics of his relationships is continually exhumed for drama here, and it becomes increasingly disturbing just how much we understand why Stella stays, why Blanche is appalled, and why it was always going to inevitably end in tragedy.
Yet orbiting these two titanic clashing egos are the sad figures of Stella (Kim Hunter) and Mitch (Karl Malden), who are functionally collateral damage in the battles. Stella and Blanche do not immediately scan as sisters as played by Leigh and Hunter, but that seems to be entirely the point. Stella is thrilled by Stanley’s violent outbursts in a sexual way, just look at the ways Hunter plays the morning after scene, and does not long for the gentility, no matter how real or imagined, of her youthful upbringing. It is when Blanche’s pretentions drop that we see the family dynamic at play. What exactly happened to these two at Belle Reve in their childhood to make them turn out this way?
And poor sad sack Mitch, the gentleman caller and one of Stanley’s poker buddies. Malden makes him so immediately likeable that his eventual cruelty is painful. Granted, Blanche’s compulsive lying and delusions, the ways in which she toys and jests with his perceived lack of intelligence and spirituality are reason enough for him to strike back against her. But knowing how desperate he is for companionship and that Stanley merely manipulated him in his perpetual attacks against Blanche makes it feel even more catastrophic. Malden finds each of these layers and moods in the character and reveals them in ways both surprising and touching, like his aggression towards Stanley and protectiveness towards Blanche even after breaking it off with her.
But what to make of that forced Hollywood ending? In the original play, Stella returns to Stanley after sending Blanche off to the mental institution. Here, she believes Blanche’s accusations that Stanley assaulted her, runs off to a neighbor’s apartment, and vows never to return. But we have already seen this situation play out once before. (And implied to happen with regularity by a neighbor.) Do we believe it will be different this time around? I think it is only a matter of time before she goes back down those stairs, full of lust and need, and returns to their dysfunctional martial dynamic.
That is the power of Williams’ words and why they endure. It is not just the poetry but the perverse psychology on display in each of them. A Streetcar Named Desire is justifiably held up as a masterpiece in both stage and screen incarnations. What an introduction to a set containing some of the most famous films based on his works.
Another Kazan directed adaption is up next: 1956’s Baby Doll. Perhaps the most perverse, funny, and blatantly sexual film in the set, Baby Doll was a controversial work in its release and time has simmered some of that to an extent, yet there is still something utterly bizarre about the whole thing. Or perhaps unhinged is a better word as Williams leans into the “gothic” portion of the phrase “southern gothic” to a large extent.
It is also one of the great director’s most underrated and underappreciated works. He manages to balance the narrative’s strange fluctuations between tragedy and comedy while exploring the moral decay and overheated sexuality of the characters with aplomb. Maybe it was because it did not come with the ready-made artistic pedigree of their prior collaboration that Baby Doll’s lurid mixture was met with such an indifferent reception. It remains a work that is only mentioned as second-tier Kazan.
The plot concerns nineteen-year-old bride Baby Doll (Carroll Baker) who keeps her husband (Karl Malden) in a perpetual state of sexual frustration, if not outright objection. They live in a crumbling house with the bank having recently foreclosed on their furniture, Baby Doll’s matronly aunt (Mildred Dunnock) dodders about, and they run a crumbling cotton business. When a rival’s (Eli Wallach) thriving cotton business gets burned down, he suspects Malden and goes about seducing Baker to procure a confession of her husband’s larceny. How all that plays out had the Catholic Legion of Decency clutching their peals in 1956, and the film still has some power to shock.
We do meet Baby Doll as she sleeps in a crib, sucks her thumb, and reposes in a manner that is incredibly suggestive, after all. Malden is at his most unsavory as a man failing on all fronts and desperate to prove what a big man he is, either through business acumen or matrimonial consummation. Preferably both if we are being honest. Then there are the numerous scenes of Wallach’s seduction efforts towards Baker which are sometimes humorous, sometimes discomforting for the threat of sexual violence they pose. The fact that Baker’s character seems to respond to him positively is part of the plot’s salaciousness. Has Malden been cuckolded in more ways than one? It is never made entirely clear.
The film becomes a psychosexual minefield, aided by Boris Kaufman’s cinematography. Does any scene have a stranger pull and power than Wallach invading Baby Doll’s bedroom to ride her toy horse and laugh? Or the ways in which Baker’s character is filmed and framed. Her lax morals and dirty mind are reflected in the messy southern milieu to which she calls home. Her walking around in a slip, covered in dirt does not contain the erotic pull that Elizabeth Taylor’s similar slip wearing seduction scenes do in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She seems a precocious girl teasing her newfound sexuality with the unsavory men around her.
Look no further than the ambiguous ending where the two female characters are left to ponder their fates. Will Wallach make good on his numerous promises to them? What is to become of Malden’s suffering oaf? It is in the climax that the comedy is dropped entirely for potent tragedy. The foolish whims and petty grievances of these characters has backed them into a slow-motion upending of their stasis. It all feels so sad by the end.
Much of the credit must go to the remarkable cast assembled to bring these characters to life. Malden had already shown his affinity with Williams’ world, and Baker demonstrates a Mississippi nymphet who is more aggravating, condescending, and off-putting than erotically alluring the closer you get. But the best in show title belongs to Wallach as he struts, preens, and generally causes chaos throughout. It is the type of role and performance that felt primed for awards contention, but not much came his way. Blame it on the hysteria surrounding the film’s sordidness and wild tone.
1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is not a perfect adaptation of the material as MGM’s house style was more indebted to glamour than psychosexual sordidness, but that somehow works to the film’s advantage. The whole enterprise underscores the material’s driving obsession with surface textures providing a gilded mask for the ugliness of human emotion, trauma, and guilt. It helps that Cat features two of the screen’s greatest performers of Williams’ dialogue: Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman.
Of course, much of this argument the film version is a dilution of the material seemingly forgets that no adaptation of the material made during the 50s was going to grapple with the play’s themes as nakedly as they were on stage. Censorship of the time demanded minor cuts to Streetcar that left some of the eroticism and psychosexual undercurrents felt by the faintest whisper. Brick’s alleged homosexuality was never going to get the big shout, but it is still there creeping between lines and around the edges.
Cat On a Hot Tin Roof tells the story of Brick Pollard, a man trapped by past glories, memories, and his own complicated sexuality, his wife Maggie, a devoted wife whose overheated carnality causes some of the tension in the family at large, most of it with Mae, the prissy and heavily pregnant sister-in-law. They have returned to his familial home for Big Daddy’s birthday, played to roaring and commanding perfection by Burl Ives, who is slowly succumbing to cancer, unbeknownst to him and his wife. Brick’s brother is after the family fortune, but Big Daddy favors the troubled Brick and Maggie.
The film only rarely leaves the house, and those moments are largely in the opening sequences. We are treated to a claustrophobic Southern Gothic drama. It sounds stuffy and stage bound, but it is a treat to watch thanks to the committed performances. It does help that such a stellar ensemble of actors was brought together to bring the material to vivid and rhapsodic life.
Paul Newman’s Brick would be easy to playoff as a sad-sack self-hating probable homosexual, but Newman invests the part with his effortless cool. One of his greatest tricks as an actor was to find ways to play alcoholism that did not rely on the usual grab-bag of mugging and clichés. The Brick we meet is a man trapped by visions of the past, a sneering self-loathing that he takes out on his wife, and a hero worship of his dead friend that scans as something dangerously close to lustful obsession.
Much has been made of the toned-down possible homosexuality in his character, but that element is obviously there. There is an extended sequence late in the film where Newman and Ives argue about Brick’s hero worship for his dead best friend. Much is said aloud, but much more is said in what is skirted around and never directly addressed. Yes, it is toned down, but family members often speak in coded language to one another about large issues that are plaguing the unit. And it truly doesn't take much work to unpack the guarded language and word choices to grasp at what's not being spoken of indirectly.
Actually, that scene may be the finest in the entire film as Burl Ives’ Big Daddy is one of the characters that lingers long in your mind after watching the film. If you only know Ives as the happy-go-lucky narrating snowman from Rudolph, then prepare to be shocked by his volcanic torrents of aggressive swagger. A patriarch prone to thinking himself cock of the walk and immortal based on the mini empire he has created and lords over. Ives won an Oscar this year, but for his villainous frontier patriarch in The Big Country instead. Honestly, a great choice and as equally deserved as his work here would have been. Think of it as a win for a beloved character actor in a stellar year.
But, of course, the image that looms largest over the entire film is that of Elizabeth Taylor’s porcelain beauty in a slip gripping the posts of the bed filled with erotic need. Not only is this the image that often makes its way onto the posters and home video art, but it accompanied many a loving tribute of her career when Taylor passed in 2011. I have often said that the actresses who do the best work with Williams’ prose and characters are those can tap into the volatile, dark, melancholic impulses that threaten to explode from his sensual heroines. They are as glamorous as they are broken.
Taylor’s offscreen life bleeds into her best work, and boy does it ever do so here. Taylor’s beauty queen exterior trembles with barely concealed want and need throughout. Her screaming bitch fits with Madeleine Sherwood’s Mae are delightful, as are her loving, companionable scenes with Ives. But it is the fractured, splintered chemistry with Newman, both of them at the height of their incomparable beauty, that keeps our eyes glued to the screen. Here is Taylor in a role that required her to play tortured, emotionally troubled, and sexually needy while projecting an untouchable beauty masquerading it all. The Taylor of screen legend and Maggie the Cat seem tailor made for each other, and Taylor would go on to do well with further heroines in Suddenly, Last Summer’s neurotic truth-speaker and Sweet Bird of Youth’s screen goddess gone to hell and back.
1961’s The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is not only the lowest point of the set, but one of the worst adaptations of Williams’ work to date. Based on a stage play but on his novella, the only one written during his lifetime, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone has the barebones of a decent film in the right hands. These were clearly not the right hands.
The basic plot follows Karen Stone, a fading stage actress and recent widow, escaping her problems in Rome. She engages in one unfulfilling and meaningless romantic tryst with a succession of younger men, essentially daring the gigolos to harm her through her self-destructive behaviors. The novella is highly enjoyable, tightly written, but not amongst the best of Williams’ work, but still worth a read.
I don’t know what happened between the page and the screen. One of the main problems with the production is that everything is far too glossy and obviously studio made. Not one frame of this looks dingy, dirty, or old enough to be Rome, the backstage of a theater, or anywhere remotely plausible or lived in. It needed the suffocated atmosphere of A Streetcar Named Desire or the claustrophobia and hot house sexual anxiety of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It needed something that felt real or alive, not this limp dick studio backlot.
Where the film should evoke pathos, it elicits laughter. The entire film is a prolonged exercise in accidental camp. So completely mismanaged in tone, so miscast in its major supporting players, so completely abandoning Vivien Leigh to emote and work magic that her performance becomes a damaged jewel. Something beautiful and touching forged under immense pressures and yet still cracked.
Leigh was one of the strongest film actors with Williams’ prose and she manages to find every nuance and subtlety that the rest of the cast and crew seem incapable of grasping. The musicality of her vocal performances is something that needs to be underscored and admired. Her Blanche alternated between a higher, airier dreamy quality then drops down in a smoky, husky tremor. Her Karen Stone doesn’t alternate in so obvious a dichotomy, but she still manages to find unique ways to spin the verbose passages into hypnotic, near orchestral monologues.
Perhaps saying that Leigh stands alone is a bit unfair to Lotte Lenya as a proprietress of gigolos who leaves a solid impression. Hers is a villainous character with a smile like a barracuda and prone to volcanic demonstrations of emotional volatility. For her work in this film, Lenya got her lone Oscar nomination, and I cannot say that it was undeserved. She is quite memorable in a way that is both camp and very good character work proving that sometimes these two qualities are not mutually exclusive.
It is just nearly everyone else orbiting around these two poles that is a disaster. The less said about Jill St. John the better. I have yet to see anything with her that didn’t leave me not only unimpressed but baffled that she was given these opportunities. Well, maybe not her jiggly Bond girl in Diamonds Are Forever before that franchise decided to give female characters better roles more often. And in only his second film, Warren Beatty nearly smothered his career in the crib. He is incredibly miscast as the Italian lothario. Nearly unable to project cocksure quality that his real life exhibited it renders the central conceit unbelievable. Oh, and that has got to be one of the worst accents I’ve heard in some time. I wonder what George Chakiris might have done in the part.
So, who should watch this? Well, fans of Vivien Leigh and nearly no one else. She made far too few films and was never bad in any of them. Her mental health problems in real life often bled into her Williams heroines marking her work as personal and unique. Her Blanche and Karen are not alike to each other, and they are not alike to any other Blanche or Karen I have seen since first watching them. But, oh lord, how the movie lets her down.
We reunite with Paul Newman and director Richard Brooks in 1962’s Sweet Bird of Youth, the movie that deserves much of the scorn that is thrown at Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Despite recycling most of the original Broadway cast for this film adaptation, Sweet Bird of Youth misses the demented melancholia of the work by grafting on a sappy, unnecessary Hollywood ending. This is a pity for several reasons, highest amongst them is the stunningly high caliber of work that each of the actors brings to their roles, no matter how large or small.
Let us begin with the true rhapsody of this film: the lead performances from Paul Newman and Geraldine Page. On paper, Geraldine Page as an aging screen sex goddess may seem like a question mark. Page was a tremendously gifted character actress with a range as wide as an Alaskan prairie. But no one ever really thought of her as a screen siren in the way that, say, Elizabeth Taylor (who later played the role in the prime of her boozy actorly indifference and was sensational) or Vivien Leigh, who would’ve been dynamite in the part. Hell, I wonder what Joan Crawford might have done with it, but it may have been too self-aware for an actress so committed to artifice.
But she tips her performance away from tragedy and into comedy. She imagines Alexandra Del Lago as a vamping, pot smoking, grand dame who sinks her sorrows into booze and kept men. She never tips her hand into making the part or the film feel like a parody. Instead, she manages to find the truth at the center of this slightly ridiculous and outsized personality even managing to find time to make Alexandra’s vocal arias go for broke in ways that shift tones and textures in fascinating ways. At one moment she is down-and-out, nearly a fiery Tallulah Bankhead in detailing her fading movie career then the next she’s high and almost flirtatious at the prospect that her latest movie gamble paid off big time and the offers are coming back in. Despite seeming miscast on the surface, Page delivers one of the greatest performances in a Williams adaptation, ever.
Even better but in an entirely different key is Paul Newman. Here he was at the height of his beauty, not quite the weathered hero of his 70s and 80s work but still clearly embarrassed by just how painfully gorgeous he is. That spark of grizzled losers on the fringe grasping for another chance in the spotlight is evident here in its earliest form. (It would ripen into career-high work in the likes of The Verdict and Nobody’s Fool.) Here he is a washed-up stud that returns to the Florida town he was once driven from in desperation, out of options, and in hope of a second chance.
I could write all day about Newman’s work here, truly one of the greatest pieces of work in his career. His toned and tanned torso and chest on display for Page’s visual consumption while he his eyes recede giving the distinct impression of self-disgust at where he has found himself? Brilliant reactive, silent acting. Even better are the ways in which Newman plays the polluted core of this character in stealthy modes and choices that make his best work. Scenes of him popping pills and constantly drinking to stave off the guilt and desperation of his situation are models of sensory work for an actor. You never see him sweating to pull off the effect, but it still hits you in the gut when he manages it.
It is just such a shame that the rest of the film is not up to their incredible work. Sure, the supporting likes of Shirley Knight (haunted, scarred, and lost in a tragic romantic haze from which she may never awaken), Madeleine Sherwood (trashy, brassy, and in touch with her gold-digging and sexuality in ways that make her a stellar supporting player for the sheer range she displays in these films), and Ed Begley (in his over-the-top Oscar winning splendor as local politician/thug) are all great, but the script succumbs to moralizing their plights in the end. Even worse, this Sweet Bird throws a happy ending (I think that’s what it is supposed to be) towards Newman and Knight’s tragic lovebirds that undermines much of what came before it.
People can complain about previous film adaptations neutering Williams’ material, but they at least managed to sneak it in, or kept the larger scope of the work intact. You could read between the lines and see what was being said without it being said directly. Sweet Bird of Youth spends so much time capturing the personas of Chance Wayne and Alexandra Del Lago then just tosses all that work aside in the final moments surrendering the tortured, melancholy, psychosexual tremors of Williams play for the safety of “and they lived happily ever after.” A damn shame as so much of its smaller, character-based moments captured the poetry of Williams’ best work.
We wrap things up with 1964’s The Night of the
Iguana, a movie that finds John Huston feeling simpatico with a fallen
priest suffering a nervous breakdown and treating his condition with alcohol
and women in a Mexican resort. What is most notable about Iguana is that
in a world populated by rich female roles, this narrative is empowered by a
male, which is unusual for Williams. Granted, this man is surrounded by a half
dozen females that alternately romance and vex him, sometimes both.
Things improve dramatically once we crash into Ava Gardner’s resort and her earthy, seen-it-all portrayal mixes nicely with Deborah Kerr’s prim spinster. Burton and Gardner have a rapport that is quite shocking and imminently watchable. They both go big but always in service of their characters and generate a believable tension and interesting, often on the threat of exploding dynamic that is engrossing. A scene of Gardner frolicking in the ocean waves with her two skimpily dressed cabana boys makes me long for her to have done more work with Williams. She seems like a prime, underutilized actor for his worlds and taps into her autobiography to layer her character here with truth, sensuality, and an exhaustion that is makes you scratch your head over how she didn’t dominate awards notices and critical huzzahs.
Same goes with Burton, a consummate stage and film actor who seemed quite at home in these damaged men delivering reams of words and emotions that stop and start or change course sometimes within the same sentence. His substance abuse problems were legendary and there is clearly some kind of alchemy going on between himself and this part as his sweaty, boozy scenes feel lived-in, and his weariness with attention is authentic given the perpetual spotlight he inhabited during his marriage(s) to Elizabeth Taylor. Like I said before, the best actors for Williams’ work were those willing to tap into their personal lives and traumas to excavate the neurosis and needs of the characters, and Burton does exactly that.
If you’re wondering if you have seen this repressed spinster role from Deborah Kerr before, then yeah, probably. It was a role she played often around this time, but her way with large-scale tonal shifts and finding the right musical inflections in her voice is something to always marvel at. She truly was just one of our greats and always worth a watch. She makes a fun contrast to the near destructive lust and fury of Burton and Gardner with her deep wells of reserve, sacrifice, and emotional intelligence.
On paper the macho likes of Huston adapting and working with Williams seems odd on the surface, but he was one of the greatest literary adaptors of his time. Huston’s body of work is filled with left turns and surprising adaptation choices with the likes of Under the Volcano, Wise Blood, and The Dead coming in his later years. This makes The Night of the Iguana less of a shock when looked at the totality of his films. After all, Huston made an entire film about Freud and his dream theories and psychosexual neurosis, so maybe playing around in the southern gothic decadence of Tennessee Williams makes perfect sense in the end.
Huston crafted a solid B+ movie, maybe not the best of either his films or Williams’ adaptations, but a remarkably solid, entertaining, and highly enjoyable one all the same. 1964’s Iguana would go on to become the final major achievement for Williams. Time was making his work and poetry passe in the way that it does to all major artists. They become the canon that the upstarts work in accordance with and in opposition towards. While his work has never went away, there have been countless Broadway revivals of his major works, he did not dominate the pop culture in the ways that he had once in the 40s and 50s.
What remains are some of the most beautiful, despairing, and interesting plays and films of the 20th century. No one really speaks about the likes of Boom! or This Property is Condemned, for example, with the same sort of reverence as they do the likes of Suddenly, Last Summer or A Streetcar Named Desire. Yet even the worst films based on his work are worth watching just to see incredible actors use their skills to spin out these tragic players. (Yes, I am talking about Burton/Taylor at the height of their decadence going full camp in Boom!)
What does that mean for this box set? Well, honestly, you get a lot of bang for your buck with it. Three out-and-out classics, two very good films, and one dud. That is a high batting average and a great primer for the playwright’s work. You get two of his three biggest works (only The Glass Menagerie is missing), two minor ones, and a try at adapting his novella. Watching Paul Newman, Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Geraldine Page, Burl Ives, Marlon Brando, and so many others deliver some of the best work of their careers is always worth two hours of your time.
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