Sweet Bird of Youth

PREYING CUCKOOS

Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth is about the ill effects of fame, sex, politics, the fear of age. Geraldine Page’s over-the-hill Alexandra Del Lago is a hipper, looser Norma Desmond—a boozing, bennie-popping, hashish-smoking movie star-turned-shrew who buys the services of Paul Newman’s Chance to soothe her belief she failed in her movie comeback. They end up in Chance’s hometown, where he’s none too welcomed: seems he left his girlfriend (Shirley Knight) in the family way and had to secretly abort. Her father is vicious politico Boss Finley (Ed Begley) who’s sworn out a warrant for loverboy’s castration. Writer-director Richard Brooks, trapped by censorship as he had been with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, couldn’t execute the punishment against Newman in the play (but will be against Mark Harmon in the Elizabeth Taylor TV version), so he gets a beating to destroy his handsomeness. Making up for this Brooks wrote a sequence for Begley and Madeleine Sherwood as mistress Miss Lucy as a full tilter: with sadist glee Begley—who won an Oscar for what’s not a very disguised Huey Long—brutally snaps shut the top and bottom of a Faberge-like Easter egg on Sherwood’s finger, slaps her and holds his hand up to slap her again if she emotes pain, a vision of Jerry Falwell behind closed doors. (Sherwood is ne plus ultra Williams casting: she played to the rafters Sister Woman in the play and movie Cat.) Absolutely no way to believe Page and Newman, yet it’s also true there’s no way not to enjoy how disbelieving they are. Page, in Sydney Guilaroff coifs belying the blowziness of Williams’ original vision based on Tallulah Bankhead’s tawdry confessions, provides some golden opportunities to exalt in what the playwright called her “witchery,” as effectively affected as you could hope for in turning a phrase like “Are you one of those male nurses?” or pronouncing “Chance” with just the right kind of phonied-up patrician emphasis; has a shrewishly haughty laugh; and expertly falls not once but twice in a hotel bar, justifiably earning her second consecutive Oscar nom, the first for Summer and Smoke. Amusing when trying to tape record Page’s confession to drug use in order to blackmail her into keeping her promise to make him a star, and of course looking super-fit, Newman’s age sinks Chance’s dreams; the huge expansion of the character for the film to accommodate his own rising star increases our awareness he’s a tad too old to be convincing as a gigolo. Williams, in a Playboy interview, said the movie was superior to the play; structurally it is, but thematically and artistically they’re both crocks. (As with Cat, no attribution for the score but you’ll hear “Ebb Tide” and a piano version of Bronislau Kaper’s “Invitation”on the soundtrack.)

The remake for TV, adapted by Gavin Lambert with more fidelity to Williams’ atmosphere and afterthoughts (he was considering a major revision) and directed by Nicolas Roeg, had snipers out in force ridiculing Taylor’s Alexandra. Roeg’s wrong to let Taylor stay plumpy—his decision based on the original text, not hers—and her no-neck double-layered outfits and Martha dos gone Sally Spectra out of The Bold and the Beautiful don’t help much. He extracts a better than her usual lazy performance: no appalling accent on words (an annoying habit she picked up during her Burton years); certainly knows how to slur the name Kosmonopolis; no excessive lip-smacking; quite acceptable issuing a sex-on-demand order, and in one scene, sitting in a convertible listening to Mark Harmon, her inner beauty as person comes to the surface. The TV movie’s asset is Harmon. He ain’t no Newman as star power, but much more than an understudy: he stays with the material, making his Chance the only believable character to ever come out of the warped scenario.

Geraldine Page as Miss Alma in Williams’ Summer and Smoke is more controlled than usual, she’s rather pretty in the getups, and you like how she patiently endures her klepto mommie Una Merkl. But the way in which Page performs here isn’t for the movies—the balance between theatrical stylization and the camera’s sometimes-severe tendency to expose artificiality is the major handicap, and director Peter Glenville hasn’t helped because instead of widening boundaries he’s encased them, albeit in a nicely appointed production. What’s missing—and has always been missing—is Alma’s latent sexual drive coming through the refinery. This is one of Williams’ most polite, even conservative treatises about sex and if true he was in a perpetual re-write mode it confirms he was never satisfied in getting to where he wanted to go. The prime example of his quandary is in Alma’s climatic utterances to the man (Laurence Harvey) she thinks she loves, professing a new-found desire for him with such hushed delicacy and with such beautiful modulation by Page (in what is likely and ironically the single best scene of her movie career) the audience stays dumbfounded by what remains absent—measurable lust. (She shows a more convincing case of the hots for her brother played by Dean Martin in Toys in the Attic.) Harvey’s Johnny reinforces the author’s dilemma when he says to Alma he was mistaken in calling her “puritanical ice that glittered like flame” when “now I believe it was flame, mistaken for ice.” No, Johnny didn’t get her wrong the first time. And Alma doesn’t melt when she meets Mr. Kramer, she remains ice.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com