My Romance with Movies: From the 1960s: Sweet Bird of Youth

1962 Drama

From MGM

Directed by Richard Brooks

Starring

Paul Newman

Geraldine Page

Shirley Knight

Ed Begley

Rip Torn

Mildred Dunnock

Madeleine Sherwood

Philip Abbott

Corey Allen

Dub Taylor

James Douglas

Nobody does seedy southern tales better than Tennessee Williams. This isn't his best work nor his most famous but it can stand proud among his finest. The oft-controversial playwright said his play was about the ravages of time and corruption.

His lead character is a boytoy, wannabe actor with an alcoholic, drugged out, faded actress in tow who breezes into his hometown to see his mother and the young lover he left behind when her influential father ran him out of town.

Paul Newman plays Chance Wayne, a man who will do anything to make it as a movie star. He has hooked up with Alexandra Del Lago (a Tennessee Williams-inspired name if there ever was one), who has seen better days on the screen and off, in the hope that she'll be his ticket to fame. In the meantime, he acts as her traveling majordomo. He does the driving, buys her vodka, gets her hash ready to smoke, handles the lodgings, unpacks her clothes, suffers her abuse, scurries for her oxygen, tells her she's wonderful and stands ready at the bedpost. He knows what he's got. He's disheartened when she doesn't even recognize him as she awakens from her boozy slumber. However, she says she recognizes his hands as they rub lotion on her.

Geraldine Page is Alexandra or the Princess Kosmonopolis since she is in disguise. She's still running from the horror of the public humiliation she suffered at the premier of her latest film. Some made fun of her and the lady is clearly not capable of weathering that one. She's been on a substance abuse binge ever since. What we see is a loud, abrasive monster of a woman who feels sorry for herself and takes it out on the one most handy, her lover boy. When Chance calls her a nice monster, she says it's monster to monster.

Chance pops benzedrine (something Williams was familiar with) when he hears his mother has recently died. The doctor who tells him is planning on marrying the very same young woman that Chance has come to town to claim as his own.

That young woman is Heavenly Finley (Shirley Knight), the daughter of Boss Finley (Ed Begley) and brother of Tom Finley (Rip Torn). Heavenly is in the wrong family. Boss is the political kingpin of the town, a crude, vicious, corrupt man who parades Heavenly around as a model of purity and chastity, which seems true, but isn't. Some years earlier Chance was run out of town after Heavenly got pregnant and was forced to have an abortion. Chance hadn't known of the pregnancy. Boss's hatred of Chance is frightening. Boss sees the former country club bartender as an ignorant, horny social climber and nothing more. It matters not that his daughter loves him as much as Chance loves her.

Tom Finley is also a piece of work, a brainless thug who, along with his idiot friends, handles Dad's more unsavory requests. It's very easy to dislike him. About the only one in the story worth liking is Aunt Nonnie (Mildred Dunnock), the sister of Boss's late wife and a woman who adores Chance. She closes the film with a good line that should have been delivered with a baseball bat.

Everyone tries to keep Heavenly from Chance but Aunt Nonnie sees to it that her two favorite people are able to meet. It is difficult since Boss has a private cop watching Heavenly's every move. When they meet again for the first time, she tells Chance that she doesn't want to see him anymore. She does it only to save him from the beating her father and brother have planned for him if he doesn't leave town that night.

Geraldine Page

In the meantime Alexandra gets a phone call from powerful columnist Walter Winchell saying she was, in fact, a great big success in that last movie and she's wanted for more. Now she dismisses Chance as some sort of inconvenience as they prepare to leave town. Then he decides that he must see Heavenly again.

Chance stands in the circular driveway of the Finley mansion and calls out her name. Suddenly Tom and his goon friends arrive and hit and kick Chance in his face, yelling out that he won't be as much use as a lover boy when they finish with him.

Then Heavenly and her father arrive and she flies to the injured Chance. She finally gets the nerve to defy her powerful father and she and Chance head out. Aunt Nonnie has her say and the small-town, southern histrionics come to a close.

The Broadway play of Sweet Bird opened in 1959 and ran for 375 performances. It was directed by Elia Kazan and starred four actors who later did the film... Page, Newman, Torn and Madeleine Sherwood. Richard Brooks had been a contract director at MGM and had previously made Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the studio, also with Newman and Sherwood.

Marlon Brando had wanted to play Chance and usually got what he wanted but the studio insisted upon the Broadway leads. Newman then personally requested Brooks to direct. The actor knew the iron-fisted director would bring his own sensitivity to the movie version and it's exactly what both men felt was needed.

Brooks fumed at the censors although in those days they were certain to take an even closer look at Williams's work, sordid as it was known to be. Brooks had to find a way to placate the censors and yet make a film provocative enough to lure the public. In the play Chance is castrated at the end (although off stage) and there was no way in 1962 that talk of castration was making it onto that silver screen. Oddly, however, they didn't pay any obvious attention to Page smoking hash. Also in the play, Chance and Heavenly do not go off together... she refuses. Of course the studio, if not the public, wanted that happy ending and that meant the pair leave together.

Newman and Knight

Another change is that in the play, Chance gives Heavenly a venereal disease which renders her barren. That most definitely was not going to be heard up on that screen but getting pregnant outside a marriage and having an abortion (although that word is not used) is okay.

There were those, critics and public alike, who found it all a bit aimless, crude and melodramatic. I can get that, too, but I never cared. Here was Williams, Brooks, Newman and Page... what did I care if someone found it melodramatic? Williams didn't do musical-comedy.

What got everyone talking-- and it should have-- is the acting. Remembering that four of these actors were in the play gave them a foot up on their thespian responsibilities to the work. However, the acting of the entire cast is simply terrific.

Newman made an entire career out of playing the likable heel-stud. He had Chance Wayne written all over him. Williams certainly saw it, so did Brooks, so did MGM, so did his fans. He was a fine interpreter of two of Williams's most famous male characters. I suspect he was a little disappointed that the film didn't become the blockbuster that much of his work had attained and would continue to do.

The MVP award must, however, go to Page, an Oscar nominee for her outrageous turn as Alexandra. It was one of her favorite roles, I suspect, as much as anything, because the rather plain-looking actress never looked so beautiful and she thought so, too. Those makeup and hair folks at the Pretty Factory turned her into dazzling.

She has one blistering scene with Torn. It was wonderful seeing them act together since they would marry the year after the film was released and were held up as one of Broadway's premier acting couples. Torn, too, never looked so good. He has a relationship to this project that actors just don't have with their work. Over the years he has played three different characters in this work. In addition to playing son Tom in the film and on the Broadway stage, he played Chance in a road company and when the film was remade for television in 1989 with Elizabeth Taylor and Mark Harmon, Torn played Boss Finley.

Knight, too, was nominated for an Oscar although I don't particularly get that, fine though she was. She barely knew Brooks when he hired her and said he gave her no early instruction on what he wanted other than to lighten her hair and let it grow longer. And let me say once again, she never looked better than she does here.

Ed Begley

Begley, who came to the project new but had worked for Brooks 10 years earlier in Deadline U.S.A., won a best supporting acting Oscar and it is well-deserved.

He engineers a terrifying scene with Madeleine Sherwood playing his floozie longtime mistress. He hears that she has been badmouthing his sexual prowess and during the visit he is kindness personified as he slaps her, tears her new negligee off her body and shuts her fingers in a jewelry case. She will end up exposing his lawlessness to the authorities and replacing Chance as Alexandra's flunky. Her performance as Mae (Sister Woman) in Cat is her best but her turn here is exciting enough.

Mildred Dunnock

Finally there's dear, dear Mildred Dunnock playing the antidote to all these other characters. No one ever played a timid character more strongly than this delightful actress.

Here's a look at the trailer: