Truly Dreadful Film

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Directed by Richard Brooks (Elmer Gantry (1960)), who also wrote the screenplay for this Tennessee Williams play, this above average drama with Paul Newman in the title role features Ed Begley's Academy Award winning Supporting Actor performance (on his only nomination). Geraldine Page received a Best Actress nomination, and Shirley Knight (The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960)) received her second Best Supporting Actress nomination.Paul Newman plays a former young stud who returns to the Southern town of his youth after years of failing while attempting to make it as an actor in the movies. He's got a former, frequently drunk and/or high, aging actress (Page) in tow. As her gigolo and driver, he's still trying to use her to get what he wants in the film industry, trading on his looks and sex for her connections. Once home, however, he seeks out his former girlfriend (Knight), who happens to be the daughter of the biggest man in town, and one of the biggest in the whole state, Tom 'Boss' Finley (Begley). Finley more or less ran Newman's character out of town all those years ago and, with help from his son Tom Jr. (Rip Torn), won't hesitate to do it again. I won't spoil the reason why, nor reveal what happens in the end. Though neither is pleasant, it's the kind of delicious just desserts that Williams always has for his flawed protagonists. Begley is terrific as the hypocritical moralist, and Page is a kick, especially after her character regains her self- confidence. Madeline Sherwood plays 'Boss' Finley's mistress and twice AA Supporting Actress nominee Mildred Dunnock plays his sister.

A movie dedicated to the proposition that life is written for the winners but lived mostly by the losers, "Sweet Bird Of Youth" would appear likely to be a depressing spectacle, but viewers will find much to enjoy and get caught up in.Tennessee Williams wrote plays that flew close to the sun. Three managed to become time-honored masterpieces. Others failed spectacularly. "Sweet Bird Of Youth" is neither of those, but an otherworldly Southern Gothic soap opera served up with outrageousness and humor. It suffers from Williams' penchant for symbolic excess; the central star-crossed lovers are named "Chance" and "Heavenly" and come together in a place called "St. Cloud." Still, it pulls you in with its outrageousness and humor and keeps you with the passion of its dialogue and performances.Chance Wayne (Paul Newman) left St. Cloud to make a name for himself and win the approval of his rich girlfriend's family. "This here is America," he was told. "Today you're nobody, tomorrow you're somebody." Now he's back in town, the paid escort of a big star on a big bender. No one is that happy to see him, especially the girlfriend's powerful father, Boss Finley (Ed Begley).Director Richard Brooks creates a film of heightened unreality, filling the screen with vibrant color and faces ever flush with anger, love, or strain. His cast, many like Newman recruited from the original Broadway play, follow a similar aesthetic, their performances big and somewhat stagy. Compare Newman here to his more subtle work in bookend productions like "The Hustler" and "Hud," and you will see how much he pushes his big scenes here. But "Sweet Bird Of Youth" demands that kind of over-the-top-ness of cast and crew.It's an ungainly production; its biggest character having nothing to do with the main story. That character is the big Hollywood star Chance took into town with her: boozy but proud Alexandra Del Lago. Geraldine Page plays her as a Judy Garland manqué: We even hear "Over The Rainbow" playing as Chance carries her into a hotel that becomes the film's central locale. Page alternately decries her lost youth and bosses Chance around with randy gusto, a fascinating performance that delivers a lot of nice comic moments as well as recognizably human ones.You can also see Del Lago as Williams himself, in the way she bites and claws to stay at the top, finding unsafe solace in beach boys and drink and pills and what Chance calls pot but she prefers to describe as "Moroccan hashish." Her insecurity is at the heart of the film, even if it is only an echoing device for the main plot, in which Chance tries to salvage what he can of his fleeting youth with lovely Heavenly (Shirley Knight, who delivers a nicely grounded performance to balance out the scenery chewers around her) from Boss F and his unhinged son (Rip Torn, who is delightfully nasty and bizarre)."Sweet Bird Of Youth" plays at extremes and gets too caught up in its core message. But Brooks does well by his source material, making sure we get a wide range of emotions to make up for their lack of depth. A lot of criticism directed against the movie is directed at its final scene, which foregoes Chance's grislier and more downbeat fate in the play. It may have been a sop to 1962 conventions, but I submit a harsher ending would have made the film all but unendurable, not because it would have been shocking but too downbeat after all that lovely black humor preceding it.In the end, what you get instead here is something ruminative but fun, not a showcase for Williams at his best but one that shows how terrific he was at writing big performances. Begley lights up the screen with his big eyebrows and his hypocritical inveighing about chastity, while Newman in his physical prime simmers effectively as the striver still chasing that big break, accurately described by Del Lago as "silky smooth, hard gold."I doubt Williams quite got what he would have liked here, from the play or from the movie. But watching this on television some years later, strong drink in hand, one can imagine him echoing one of Del Lago's classic lines as she looks over the shirtless Chance: "I may have done better, but God knows I have done worse!"

Playwright Tennessee Williams has said he slept through the 1960s. He's still awake here, though maybe a bit groggy."Sweet Bird of Youth" is full of juicy parts and vicious scenes. Paul Newman is a young man who has been traveling around -- New York, Hollywood -- seeking to cash in on his good looks, so far without success. This vision of mortal splendor was imparted to him by Boss Finley, Ed Begley. Finley is not called "Boss" for nothing. He's insinuated himself into one powerful political office after another in this Southern state and now runs it as his personal fiefdom. The state police serve as his body servants.Years ago, love was growing between Newman's character, Wayne Chance, and Begley's daughter Heavenly, played by succulent blond Shirley Knight. Love is a fine thing and all that, but to Begley it was an irritant because Heavenly was a débutante whereas Newman was some kind of BUSBOY at the local hotel. You and Heavenly want to get married and that's great, Begley tells him, but you got to go out and conquer the world first so's to be worthy of her. Hollywood and New York, that's the ticket. Speaking of tickets, here's a one-way to New York and a hundred dollars to go with it. Now seek your fortune, and good luck to ya. You come back now, sometime in the distant future, you hear?Dumb Newman accepts the bribe and is off on a quest for the Holy Chalice. He returns to St. Claire once in a while to see Heavenly on the sly and during one of these visits he impregnates her before leaving to continue his pursuit of fame, which by now has acquired functional autonomy. Like Duddy Kravitz, he still believes he's doing it for someone else but he's mistaken.Basically, this film is the story of his final visit. Everyone in town warns him to stay away from Heavenly and get out of town. Never mind that he's dragged the famous but aging movie star Alexandra Del Lago, Geraldine Page, into St. Claire with him, along with her Cadillac and her money. We feel sorry for her because she's on the run from her latest movie, which she believes to have been a failure, and Newman is exploiting the hell out of her, but she's exploitative and narcissistic herself and exploits him back. This raises an interesting question. If a woman orders a man to make love, and he's ashamed of himself, can he still do it? I always could but, I mean, how about Newman's character? The plot get pretty complicated and I don't want to get into it in any detail. Besides, it's been modified to suit a more general audience. I remember seeing the theater marquis in New York with Newman playing the same part on the stage. I didn't get to see a performance but I read about it. Gee, that was a long time ago. I feel antediluvian.The film's writer and director, Richard Brooks, is sometimes thought of as a man who castrated Tennessee Williams for the movie audience, what with the homosexual theme of "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof" being further submerged, and then this one, in which the world "castration" is particularly apt. But then, in the 50s, you could only push the envelope so far.Boss Finley's goons bash Newman's face in so he'll never be beautiful again. But does it matter? You bet it doesn't. Newman and Knight run off happily together. Geraldine Page discovers her latest movie wasn't a disaster at all but the greatest hit in the history of the entire planet and she skids off in her Cadillac, happy as only a vicious lover of self can be. Word of some skeletons in the Finley closet are made public and the voters and higher authorities reject him and Begley winds up ruined. This is what is known as a "happy ending" in the trade.Newman is something of a bastard in this film and the part is within his range, just as "The Hustler" and "Hud" were, but it's still one of his more lackluster performances. Geraldine Page's character is over ripe and she makes the most of it. The hysteria is delicious. Shirley Knight is just adequate. But Ed Begley is great -- toothy, overbearing, treacherous, sadistic, barking out orders to massacre people in between the hollow and flagrantly phony greetings. His girl friend, Madeleine Sherwood as "Miss Lucy," matches him in her determine spite.

This well-acted screen version of the Tennessee Williams play makes for entertaining viewing, but it's hopelessly marred by an overly-censored ending that dilutes the story of much of its power.I've never seen or read the original stage version, and I didn't know how the film's ending differed from the original until after I'd watched it (I only knew that it had a happier ending imposed on it), but even I could tell that the film didn't end the way Williams had originally intended. Paul Newman plays Chance Wayne (how's that for a subtle choice of name?), a small-time loser who has dreams of making it big in Hollywood. He's returned to his home town with a zonked out famous actress in tow (played by Geraldine Page). His plan is to blackmail the actress into giving him a movie contract, and then take off for Hollywood with his long-lost love, Heavenly (more subtlety), played by Shirley Knight. Heavenly's father, however, the monstrous political boss Tom Finley (Ed Begley, repulsive), wants better things for his daughter and will stop at nothing to prevent Chance from having his way. This is Tennessee Williams, not exactly the go-to playwright for happy endings, so we know all of these personalities have to be heading toward some sort of tragic conclusion, with a few skeletons jumping out of closets along the way, except that in this version, nothing really all that bad happens: Chance gets to run off with Heavenly, and Begley is told off in the film's final scene by one of the film's minor characters.Oh well....I shouldn't have been surprised. Other than Elia Kazan's "A Streetcar Named Desire," I haven't yet seen a filmed version of a Tennessee Williams play made at the time Williams was actually writing that comes close to doing his work justice, making me wonder why Hollywood wanted to make movies out of his plays at all.This film's not a total wash though. To compensate for its cowardice, it does offer a number of superb performances, many of the actors recreating the roles they originated on stage. Page is probably the standout, no surprise given the juiciness of her role. Her turnaround near the film's end, when this helpless, wasted actress transforms into a more than capable beast of the Hollywood jungle, is one of the movie's highlights. Newman is very good too as Chance. I always respected Newman for his willingness to play unflattering characters and not take the easy route of the glamorous pretty boy. Shirley Knight and Ed Begley are serviceable. Begley, as usual, is nearly unwatchable, but that's appropriate for such a gross character. Rip Torn, Madeleine Sherwood and Mildred Dunnock appear in smaller roles.Richard Brooks provides the capable if undistinguished direction.Grade: A-