HotToastyRag In Sweet Bird of Youth, Paul Newman reprises his stage role in Tennessee Williams's play. If you've never seen a Tennessee Williams story, or if you're not used to play-to-movie adaptations, this isn't the best one for you to start with. It's very wordy, very slow, and very obvious it was written for the stage.Newman plays his specialty: a bad boy who comes back to his hometown and stirs up trouble. If you're a fan, you won't be disappointed by his performance. He's been away, trying to make it as a Hollywood actor, and when he returns, he brings a has-been, booze-soaked older actress with him. Geraldine Page plays her specialty: just shy of crazy. She vacillates between losing her mind and taking the audience down with her, and realizing how pitiful she is and gaining the audience's sympathy.A young and beautiful Shirley Knight enters the picture as the girl Paul Newman left behind. She's sweet and lovely, and ironically named Heavenly. For those of you who know Tennessee Williams, you know this story will be tragic. The dramatic setup is intense, and the title hints at sadness. It's not the best movie, and at times it's hard to watch, but if you like this genre, you'll want to add Sweet Bird of Youth to your list.

SnoopyStyle Wannabe actor Chance Wayne (Paul Newman) returns to his hometown St. Cloud with drunken former film star Alexandra Del Lago (Geraldine Page). Dr. George Scudder tells him his mother died recently and that he's marrying his ex-girlfriend Heavenly (Shirley Knight). Corrupt political boss "Boss" Finley (Ed Begley), father of Heavenly, forced him out of town years earlier. Tom Finley Jr. (Rip Torn) is the tough violent muscle.It's based on a Tennessee Williams play and has that sweaty old south feel. The dialog crackles. There are some great lines. The language is tough. There is some interesting stuff with Newman and Page. However early scenes struggle with their relationship. It does get more and more interesting as it goes on. However there is a good chunk in the middle that needs to be cut back. The power is elevated every time Ed Begley and Rip Torn push their way around. Rip is electric threatening Del Lago. Geraldine Page is acting very close to the edge but she's a great diva. This is a fine southern melodrama.

jzappa While setting about Sweet Bird of Youth, be fond of the good fragments before the sum total. There are charming notions in which to take pleasure here: The superior pages of a screenplay modified from Tennessee Williams's play, Ed Begley's crooked village official, and above all Geraldine Page's boozy, embittered, failed movie star. Nonetheless, other than those, the film is a damp melodrama. Richard Brooks tailored and directed this pulpy adaptation of Tennessee Williams's dystopian sensationalist script that's told by and large in sporadic flashbacks that fill the mysterious blanks of the present-day battle of molds.Williams's story, and this is essentially Williams's movie, has the central character, a blonde, blue-eyed, hunky ladies' man played by Paul Newman, in a hotel room in a sweaty, humid, miserable town in Florida, while aging actress Geraldine Page sleeps in the bed. She settles on giving the manly man a leg up for a career in acting. Later on, we determine that he has returned to patch things up with a girlfriend whom he gave a venereal disease, much to the passionate fury and embarrassment of Boss Finley, her father and a commanding political official.This decent but forgettable filmed reading inelegantly adjoins Williams's reflections on the potentially unbearable certainty of our past with affected and glaringly scripted dialogue that is meant for stage and not screen. Williams's lyrical tinges and involvedness are stabilized, and the damaged characters firmed to caricatured fonts, however eloquent and articulate ones.Via alterations and amendments, Knight's dilemma is unquestionably implied as an abortion, the sensational shock of Newman and Page's "contract" are minimized, and when Rip Torn's character alerts powerless Newman that he's about to take away "lover boy's meal ticket," what ensues is nearly laughably construed as misleading.Then again, each person we see visibly acting all the way through the words does a pleasant chore of it. Newman's stage-sharpened buoyancy in the role is subdued but by no means staggers. Begley's hamming does intensify the vigor in a gloomy exercise whose gloom could have been stronger. Additionally of note are Madeleine Sherwood as Boss' vindictive mistress.

James Hitchcock "Sweet Bird of Youth" came towards the end of Hollywood's Tennessee Williams cycle of the fifties and early sixties, being preceded by such films as "A Streetcar Named Desire", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "Suddenly Last Summer", and closely followed by "Period of Adjustment" and "Night of the Iguana". Indeed, Williams is an author whom I know better from the cinema than from the theatre; he lacks the following in Britain that he enjoys in his native America, and performances of his plays here are infrequent. ("Sweet Bird…..", for example, was not performed in London's West End until 1985, nearly 30 years after it was written).The main character is Chance Wayne, a drifter who returns to his Southern home town. He left the town several years ago with high hopes of becoming a Hollywood actor, but he has enjoyed little success, and has ended up as a gigolo, preying on lonely older women. (His name is highly significant. Wayne is a "chancer", one who lives by his wits and enjoys taking risks. The surname at this period would have evoked the great Hollywood star John Wayne, but Chance has had none of his namesake's success).Wayne's latest conquest is a film star named Alexandra del Lago. Alexandra was once beautiful and highly successful, but is now ageing, addicted to drugs and alcohol, lacking in self-confidence and terrified of losing her looks. Wayne is only interested in Alexandra because he wants her to use her influence to advance his stalled acting career; his main purpose in returning home is to rekindle his love affair with his former girlfriend, Heavenly. Heavenly is the daughter of the local political boss Tom Finley, a Huey Long-style politician, who maintains a grip on State politics through corruption and strong-arm tactics. It was Finley who forced Wayne to leave town after he got Heavenly pregnant, a pregnancy which was terminated by abortion.The emotional, passionate nature of many of Williams' characters made his plays very popular with film-makers, but in the fifties the American theatre tended to be more liberal than the American cinema as regards the portrayal of sexual themes, and a number of his plays were somewhat bowdlerised when turned into films. "Sweet Bird of Youth" is no exception. The reasons why Finley ran Chance out of town are not the same in the two versions; in the play he infected Heavenly with a venereal disease, something unmentionable in Production Code Hollywood. (Pregnancy outside marriage and abortion were quite controversial enough). The ending is very much softened compared with the one Williams originally wrote.Paul Newman plays Wayne in the same cool, nonchalant, laid-back style which characterised a number of other his roles. (It was Steve McQueen who earned the nickname "King of Cool", but Newman could have been a pretender to his throne). Several of these were also drifters, such as Cool Hand Luke or Ben Quick in "The Long Hot Summer". For me, however, the real stars of the film are not Newman but Geraldine Page as Alexandra and Ed Begley as Finley. Page (who was nominated for "Best Actress") was excellent as the drunken, self-pitying junkie, and perhaps even better at the end of the film when Alexandra recovers her self-confidence after discovering that her latest film has proved an unexpected success. Begley certainly deserved his "Best Supporting Actor" award for his portrayal of the ranting demagogue Finley; the one nomination which rather surprised me was "Best Supporting Actress" for Shirley Knight (Heavenly), as she did not seem to have all that much to do."Sweet Bird of Youth" is not quite in the same class as some of the other entries in the Williams cycle, such as "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (which was also directed by Richard Brooks and also starred Newman) or "A Streetcar Named Desire" with its four towering performances in the leading roles. It perhaps represents a rather conservative style of film-making, looking back to the fifties rather than to the stylistic revolution of the late sixties. (After "Night of the Iguana" in 1964 Hollywood was to fall out of love with Tennessee Williams). It is, however, well-made and well-acted, and still remains enjoyable today. 7/10