Category: Theatre Adaptation

Our Town (1940)

An attempt to take an unfilmable play to the screen doesn’t really work but has its moments

Director: Sam Wood

Cast: William Holden (George Gibbs), Martha Scott (Emily Webb), Fay Bainter (Julia Gibbs), Tim Davis (Joe Crowell Jr), Beulah Bondi (Myrtle Webb), Thomas Mitchell (Dr Frank Gibbs), Guy Kibbee (Charles Webb), Dix Davies (Si Crowell), Stuart Erwin (Howie Newsome), Frank Craven (Stage manager)

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is a landmark in American theatre. A play diving into peopes lives in a small American town over thirteen years, told to us by an omnipotent stage manager, it’s a theatrical staple. An intensely theatrical piece, deliberately staged with few props and staging, with the world of the town created by the actors, playing multiple roles, it’s miles away from the realism of film. Despite this, its success made a screen transfer both inevitable and a seemingly impossible task.

Nearly all the elements of the stage triumph are there. The stage manager – here billed in solely in his more formal ‘role’ as drugstore owner Mr Morgan – is still there, introducing Grover’s Corner and moving us through the years, frequently interjecting to guide the characters into place or move them along. The lives we follow are the same: young schoolfriends and neighbours turned married couple George Gibbs (William Holden) and Emily Webb (Martha Scott). A first act introduces the town, a second focuses on George and Emily’s wedding day (with flashback to the realisation of their mutual love) and a final act focuses on Emily’s childbirth deathbed, her spirit moving among the fallen.

What it can’t quite capture is the mythical, theatrical magic of the more impressionistic original. Where the theatre draws on the viewer’s imagination, Our Town is full of intricately created sets, households crammed with period appropriate props and recreated streets of Grover’s Corner. While the stage manager remains present, his role as both an identifiable character and an omniscient narrator is deliberately blurred – and clumsy attempts to recreate a few moments of audience interaction (muffled voices off camera shouting questions at the experts the stage manager brings on to introduce the town) don’t really work at all.

Some of these were inevitable when the media switched. Thornton Wilder was heavily involved in adapting his play, including signing off (or, perhaps, even suggesting) the change to the play’s conclusion to shift Emily’s heartbreaking experience of the loneliness of the afterlife into being a dream during her recovery from terminal illness. It’s arguable no Hollywood film would have dared stage something as expressionistic as the original stage work (you’d have to wait almost seventy years before Dogville did – but that was a very different film, a dark commentary on Our Town). Despite this, the shift of media left designer William Cameron Menzies as a strong creative force – arguably more so than director Sam Wood – whose designs charted Grover’s Corner’s layout and also the camera positioning and framing for nearly every shot.

This framing frequently uses low-angles, with the camera positioned low to the floor, close to surfaces like tables, or in the corners of rooms staring up at the actors. This effect adds a mythic, almost Homeric, scale to the action. It’s complemented by Aaron Copland’s score, a series of beautifully poetic compositions which carry real emotional force. The final visions of the afterlife have a starkly lit, gloomy power: deceased characters stand on their graves in theatrical beams of light, speaking with coolness to the middle-distance, their graveyard mixing with the fields surrounding the town, which the Stage Manager will walk across like some sort of medieval prophet presenting Grover’s Corner like a celestial PowerPoint. It’s striking, like something out of Dreyer.

Lots of this works. But it’s a complex, well-planned attempt to utilise the realism of film to make something that relies on simplicity and theatrical minimalism to carry emotional impact. On stage this minimalism gives the simple, beautifully low-key stories of Grover Corner a universal power, generations have found moving. But on screen, the detail and design (however hard it tries) drains this power out of the dialogue. In fact, it makes most of the play feel like what (on the surface) it is: ordinary people, having small, everyday, frequently undramatic conversations during which very little happens or changes. Put simply, it makes Our Town feel like it’s about not very much at all, and it’s very easy to let your attention drift.

This is despite the fine efforts of the cast. While William Holden is a little raw and slightly too lightweight as the well-meaning but not too bright George, Martha Scott is first rate as Emily. Narrowly winning the right to recreate her stage role, Scott gives Emily a radiant intelligence and a lovestruck adoration of George while just about managing to suggest that (in the long run) she might have found the slightly plodding George rather trying. Frank Craven also recreates his stage role with assured, authoritative effect. A host of fine Hollywood supporting players give wonderfully heartfelt performances, especially Mitchell, Kibbee, Bainter and Bondi as the parents. Mitchell in particular has a fine speech of fatherly concern.

Where Our Town really stands out is that sad, insightful view the loneliness and isolation of death and the purgatory stage of the afterlife. Sure, the film may undermine this with its cop out idea that Emily lives (undermining much of the stage manager’s message about the inevitability of the universal human journey to death). But the imaginative transitions (especially a wall of pictures to a field of graves, or a bedsheet to a funeral march through the hills) are beautifully done. The composition of the vision of the dead on their tombs – with their disconnected, dwindling personalities – has a deeply moving Bergmanish beauty to it. Despite the slightly cheesy view of a ghoulish Emily watching a day in her life, the sequence is the closest the film gets to capturing something of the universal power of the original play.

But it’s a solitary moment in a film that otherwise struggles to find a middle ground between theatricalism and realism. Imagine if Hollywood had been brave enough to try and do something without the realism, to present something that really was (as the poster blared) “the season’s most unusual picture”. But that’s not Hollywood is it?

Fanny (1961)

Pagnol adaptation is middle-brow entertainment, that feels contrived and little obvious

Director: Joshua Logan

Cast: Leslie Caron (Fanny), Horst Buchholz (Marius), Charles Boyer (César), Maurice Chevalier (Panisse), Georgette Anys (Honorine), Salvatore Baccaloni (Escartefigue), Lionel Jeffries (Brun), Raymond Bussieres (The Admiral), Joel Flateau (Césario)

The most entertaining story about this largely forgotten Best Picture nominee is that its director pushed heavily for it to be titled Joshua Logan’s Fanny – until the obvious was pointed out to him. The next is that Logan directed the original musical version of this Marcel Pagnol adaptation on Broadway; but the songs were dropped here, because producer Jack L Warner was convinced musicals were box office poison.

Fanny adapts Pagnol’s trilogy into a single, simple narrative. In 1920s Marseilles, Fanny (Leslie Caron) is a carefree young woman, in love with Marius (Horst Buchholz), who loves her but dreams of a life at sea – and certainly not of running his worldly-wise father César’s (Charles Boyer) bar. But this young couple won’t be honest with each other (or themselves): Fanny doesn’t want to hold Marius back from his dreams, Marius doesn’t want her to be forced to wait for him. After he leaves, Fanny discovers she is pregnant, so marries César’s old friend Panisse (Maurice Chevalier) who is more than happy to raise Marius’ son as his own. But how will Marius react when he returns?

Logan’s film takes this complex, almost Ancient Greek, set-up and makes it feel rather soapy and twee. It’s not helped by the fact that you can instinctively tell, watching the film, it is the book of a musical where the songs have ceased to exist. Time and again, the dialogue builds towards crescendos where songs are obviously meant to break out – but never do. Or scenes – such as old timers card-playing or romantic ambles – feel designed primarily for songs and now feel a bit aimless. It makes for a curiously disjointed affair, with the constant feeling something is missing.

It also doesn’t help that this very French story (Caron was worried about the reaction at home of taking on an American remake), feels like a rather picture-postcard image of French life. The gallic passions, the rough-edged café regulars playing practical jokes with hats placed over bollards (apparently in France, no one can resist kicking a hat on the ground), the berets and laissez-faire attitudes, the casting of two of Hollywood’s most famous French actors… It feels studied and not always natural. (Not helped by some woefully poor and obvious dubbing of a few of the actors).

Logan fails to bring to this any real flair in filmmaking and storytelling. Despite the presence of Jack Cardiff behind the camera, Fanny is a film full of basic compositions, one-shot/two-shot styles and visually flat storytelling, spiced up with the odd sweeping camera move. Time and again, the action is carefully set-up in theatrical medium shot to get three actors into frame. Logan several times punctuates moments of shock with crashing zooms into extreme close-up. Caron is frequently filmed with a gauzy romanticism in lingering close-up – an effect that looks odd when it’s not applied to any shot either side. Marseilles aerial shots also make the studio sets stick out even more.

As for the story, Fanny has a contrived reliance on no one ever really saying what they think or feel at any time. It’s so painfully obvious Marius is in love with Fanny – from his jealous, soda-squirting fury when Panisse flirts with her, to the looks of awkward devotion he shoots her on dockside walks together – it’s amazing to think they can’t work it out. Likewise, Fanny’s romantic feelings for Marius (captured in frequent doe-eyed close-up) are transparent. With the youth of both these characters – they start as teenagers – you can’t help but feel that there is no reason why they can’t agree to a few years apart before marriage. Instead, both believe the other demands unequivocal personal sacrifice from them, for no particular reason.

What Logan does do well, is draw some good performances from the cast. Leslie Caron is fairly radiant as Fanny, even if the character’s main function seems to be to pine sadly behind a brave face of self-sacrifice. It’s a shame Fanny often doesn’t call for much from her beyond that, since she gives the role a certain steel (none more so than her firm rejection of a returning Marius disrupting her new family life) including her hard-headed decision to marry a man she likes and respects but does not love. Buchholz does similarly well with a character who could be a frustrating Romeo, but who he manages to make his desperation not to be trapped into his father’s life understandable.

The real attraction is the casting of Boyer and Chevalier, who find a fair bit of charm in their characters (even though both are well within their wheel house). Chevalier, in particular, was thrilled to land a non-Musical role – and if the aged flirt he’s asked to play in the first half isn’t that dissimilar from his role in Gigi, his portrait of Panisse as increasingly scared at losing his new family is touching. Although the role really only adds little touches of overt tragedy and sadness to his standard role Chevalier’s charm adds a great deal of affecting vulnerability.

Chevalier campaigned hard for the Oscar nomination he had missed out on for Gigi – so I wonder how he felt that the Best Actor nod went to Charles Boyer instead. (I suspect lingering mud from collaboration slurs against Chevalier probably scuppered his chances). Boyer’s role is really a supporting one, but his smooth, effortless underplaying means he adds a lot of humanity to the otherwise larger-than-life César. Dispensing gruff worldly wisdom, playfully bantering with Chevalier, pained and angry at his son’s betrayal and determined to play a role in his (secret) grandson’s life, Boyer plays it all with an effortless ease which is the film’s greatest strength.

It’s a shame these performers are stuck in such a flat film which makes Pagnol’s story feel rather plodding and exposes its more contrived elements. It’s final resolution teeters on the edge of the unbelievably convenient – from Marius, it transpires, now living only a few miles away but never encountered by the other characters, to a ludicrous ‘happy’ ending that wraps every problem up with a neat bow (another moment where you can feel the missing musical roots). And it’s as uninspired as most of the rest of it. It’s definitely middle-brow entertainment. And, ironically, it lost out on Best Picture to that year’s Box Office smash – the musical West Side Story.

A Thousand Clowns (1965)

Stagey Broadway adaptation, a little too in love with its lead character’s rather tiresome whimsy

Director: Fred Coe

Cast: Jason Robards (Murray Burns), Barbara Harris (Dr Sandra Markowitz), Martin Balsam (Arnold Burns), Barry Gordon (Nick Burns), William Daniels (Albert Amundson), Gene Saks (Leo Herman ‘Chuckles the Chipmunk’)

Everyone has dreamed of leaving the rat race behind, but not many of us actually try it. But that’s the life mission of Murray Burns (Jason Robards), a former script writer for charmless TV entertainer Leo Herman (Gene Saks), who refuses to join the clowns carrying suitcases for a day on the New York treadmill. No, he’ll go where he pleases, when he pleases and live a life that means he’s a man not a chair! That’s under threat when social workers Albert Amundson (William Daniels) and Dr Sandra Markowitz (Barbara Harris) investigate whether this is the right environment for Murray to be the carer of his precocious nephew Nick (Barry Gordon). Will Murray listen to sense – and the entreaties of Sandra, who falls for him, and his brother Martin Arnold (Martin Balsam) – knuckle down and find a job?

Your level of enjoyment of A Thousand Clowns will probably really depend on whether you think Murray sounds like admirably free spirited or smackably smug. Many at the time probably inclined towards the latter. A Thousand Clowns had been a Broadway smash for playwright Herb Gardner, translating to the screen with nearly all the original cast (only Balsam and Harris were newbies) and Fred Coe returning to direct. It was singing the song for many in the 60s who rejected the 9-5 – although since many of its viewers became the Reaganites of the 80s perhaps they got over it.

It probably won’t surprise you to hear I inclined towards the latter view. Murray is the sort of man who can seem whimsically charming on film but would probably infuriate anyone who met him in real life (as anyone who has ever had neighbours who make a point of shouting ‘witty’ things in the street at all hours can attest). Bouncing around New York with his surrogate son in tow, spending the day waving at departing ships, cycling through parks or playing long imaginative games with unwitting passers-by, is the sort of roguish eccentricity that gets tired pretty quickly. Also, despite 426 performances on stage, on screen Robards feels too abrasive and confrontational an actor for a part that really needs lovable charm and innocence to work.

But then perhaps this is a sign of A Thousand Clowns wanting to have its cake and eat it. A big part of this film loves the bohemian free spirit, and apartment full of whimsical clutter and Murray’s refusal to be a cog in the world’s machine. But another part does acknowledge Murray feels like a man in the grip of a mid-life crisis, taking a love for independence and free-living to ridiculous extremes. Because the film wants to simultaneously suggest his way of living is both an admirable dream but also an irresponsible way to carry the burdens of parenthood. But suggest it softly, so that Murray’s (inevitable) return to a more conventional working life doesn’t feel like a downer.

Nick is the sort of precociously articulate and emotionally intelligent child who only exists in the world of fiction. Murray’s lifestyle isn’t particularly shown to have hampered Nick, played with feisty energy by Barry Gordon (whose bond with Robards after a year of working on stage together is clear), who is smart, confident and (in some ways) more grown up than his surrogate dad. The two alternate the roles of parent and child, with Nick at times urging Murray to knuckle down and find a job, and Murray trying to teach Nick (who he even allows to change his name at will, until he finds one he’s happy with – one of the film’s better gags) the value of thinking for yourself.

Against this, the film largely throws up a parade of strawman – none more straw than William Daniels (who makes a lot of some poor material) as the sort of pen-pushing, accountancy-minded social worker who is a fixture in dramas like this, seeing the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Even the more sympathetic Sandra is presented as a mildly negative force.

Starting a relationship with Murray, her first act is to start turning his bohemian apartment into the sort of bourgeois curtain-and-lace suburban nightmare Murray is running away from. There is the faint whiff of sexism, that this woman of course dreams of conventional homely life and is determined to pull down (however nicely) the happy-lads home. A feeling that’s not helped by Barbara Harris playing her as almost permanently on the edge of hysterical tears. Although both characters make valid points, their presentation is designed to make us side with the unconventional.

That continues with Murray’s old boss, a pompous, unpleasant egotist, well played by Gene Saks. Only Martin Balsam – who won an Oscar, largely for a well-delivered set-piece speech – is given any argument of merit around the cold hard reality of finding your place in the regular world. Mind you , it could be argued Murray has never actually had to work in the office grind. When he reluctantly heads out into the job market, literally the first offer he gets is as co-host of his own TV show(!) followed by a gig writing for a ratings-winning comedy show. I get it’s a bit more work than throwing confetti at a cruise ship, but we’re hardly talking soul-crushing drudgery here.

A Thousand Clowns pulls all this together into what feels at times an overlong two hours, nearly all of it set in Murray’s apartment. The film would have felt even more stage-bound without a late decision (which Herb Gardner sacrificed a share of his salary to pay for) to throw in a series of French nouveaux inspired montages of Robards, Gordon and Harris to jauntily crash around New York (soundtracked with a mix of band themes and jazz). But it can’t compensate for the rather mixed messages or the general feeling that it’s hard to sympathise with a judgemental man-child who refuses to do the sort of job most people would give an arm-and-leg for.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934)

Laughton dominates in a dry, rather stately adaptation of the romance between the Brownings

Director: Sidney Franklin

Cast: Norma Shearer (Elizabeth Barrett), Fredric March (Robert Browning), Charles Laughton (Edward Moulton-Barrett), Maureen O’Sullivan (Henriette Barrett), Katharine Alexander (Arabel Barrett), Ralph Forbes (Captain Surtees Cook), Marion Clayton (Bella Hadley), Una O’Connor (Wilson), Leo G Carroll (Dr Ford-Waterlow)

The poet Elizabeth Barrett (Norma Shearer) is confined to her bed (she hasn’t stepped out of the room let alone gone downstairs or stood up in years) and in love with fellow poet Robert Browning (Fredric March), a love he returns with all the giddy enthusiasm of a schoolboy. But despite what you might think, that’s not the real drama in The Barretts of Wimpole Street and there are precious few emotional obstacles between these two. The real drama comes from Elizabeth’s relationship with her father, Edward Moulton-Barrett (Charles Laughton), a possessive control-freak with an unhealthy concern for his daughter who he wants to keep locked away so only he can possess her. Can Elizabeth escape her gilded prison?

Adapted from a highly thought-of Broadway hit, and about two of the most famous poets of the nineteenth century, it’s not a surprise Barretts of Wimpole Street was singled out as another perfect vehicle to cement Norma Shearer as the leading actress of her age. Despite her Oscar-nomination here, as is often the case with Shearer, when called upon to do ‘serious drama’, her mannered breathlessness can be a little trying. That quality is present throughout Barretts, her delivery crammed with heightened earnestness and dramatic intensity. But, there is a real commitment, and she gives a decent performance, capturing Elizabeth’s complex feelings towards her father and the fierceness of her determination – even if it’s a performance that always feels like she’s trying too hard to be taken seriously.

You can say much of the same thing about the rest of this, at times very stately, film, which wears its theatrical, single-set roots very heavily. Shot with a safely staid camera, that frames the action with little invention, it can feel slow and artificial. As with so many other films about writers, we also get little sense of what drives them. The only moment we touch on this is the first meeting between Browning and Elizabeth, with March’s Browning bounding around the room apologetically trying to explain his work while distracted with romantic attraction. For Elizabeth herself, other than settling at her desk once with pen in hand – Shearer cocking her head to the left with a wistful stare as she thinks carefully – you could quite easily forget she is a celebrated poet.

What is perhaps refreshing is how uncomplicated the romance element of the story is. There are no doubts at all about the affections, and no sense of compromise or danger that anything (other than her father) will come between them. March actually seems slightly lost on some level with how little there is to play with Browning: other than a giddy enthusiasm and romantic earnestness, he has almost nothing to do and is all but banished from the film’s most dramatic moments. There is an undeniable chemistry between him and Shearer, but so little stakes between them – and Browning remains largely a pleasant cipher – that it’s very hard to really find much interest in their scenes.

But then that’s because the drama is at home, and the ogre dominating the Barrett household. Franklin communicates the dread this figure holds over his children, even subconsciously, from the start: during the opening shots, we are shown repeated close-ups of Shearer grinning as each of her several siblings enter, culminating in a shot of fixed neutrality when her father enters. This domineering monster controls every inch of his children’s life, makes it clear that disobedience (like getting married) will be met by instant disinheritance and banishment from the family home. A home that is run entirely to his whims and personal tastes.

Who better to play this vile bully filled with fear and loneliness, than Charles Laughton? The film had to remove all references to Edward’s potentially incestuous interest in his daughter but, as Laughton so memorably said, the censors couldn’t ‘cut the glint in my eye’. And they felt fine leaving in dark implications that Barrett’s later children were not “born of love”. Laughton’s performance is towering, a ramrod stiff body of frustrated desires, whose instinct when he feels threatened is to lash out with cruel, verbal and physical violence. He thinks nothing of literally twisting the arms of his daughter Henriette (a very good Maureen O’Sullivan) to extract her confession of loving another man, just as he feels free to browbeat her into swearing on the bible to renounce him.

His creepy parental desire – at one point he sits with Elizabeth and earnestly desires her to stay with him, with all the intense longing of a lover – is palpable, his frustrated sexuality clear. There is a great scene where Marion Clayton’s lisping cousin Bella playfully sits on his lap and asks him to kiss her: Laughton grabs the back of her head for a full-on snog, then leaps instantly to his feet as if terrified that she will detect his obvious arousal. At another, he sweeps a tired Elizabeth into his arms like some sort of Rochester to carry her up to her bedroom.

This but scratches the surface of Laughton’s portrayal of suppressed desires. All of them are bottled up in an intense fear and vulnerability that Edward has of being abandoned – Laughton almost trembles with fear at the prospect of any of his children leaving. At great length with Elizabeth, he hammers away at her confidence, a torrent of passive aggressive words stressing her weakness and incapability to survive. It comes from a deep insecurity but, whenever we feel even a moment of sympathy for this psychologically damaged man, he reverts to bullying, shouting and a willingness to commit acts of petty, damaging cruelty.

Laughton’s superb performance (rightly he was immensely put-out not to be Oscar nominated) not only elevates the film (all its most memorable moments feature him) but also draws some of her best work out of Shearer, who raises her game to match him in their confrontation scenes. The drama of these sequences is the heart of a film that otherwise fails to bring much energy, despite some good performances (including Una O’Connor, giving one of her finest maids, full of exasperated, supportive patience). Away from Laughton, the film feels slight and slow. But with him, it’s a portrait of creepy possessiveness and misdirected desire. Even if, of course, no one could say that at the time.

The Country Girl (1954)

Acting with a capital A in this ultra-serious addiction drama, that makes its points with heavy hand

Director: George Seaton

Cast: Bing Crosby (Frank Elgin), Grace Kelly (Georgie Elgin), William Holden (Bernie Dodds), Anthony Ross (Philip Cook), Gene Reynolds (Larry), Jacqueline Fontaine (Lounge singer)

Adapted from Clifford Odet’s play, George Seaton’s The Country Girl is serious with a capital S, with acting with a capital A from its stars, both of whom (to the delight of the Oscars) play wildly against type. Frank Elgin (Bing Crosby) is a faded song-and-dance man, a weak-willed people pleaser who hit the bottle big time, filled with guilt about the death of his young son. He’s married to the dowdy Georgie (Grace Kelly), whose whole life has become an endless chore propping up the feeble Frank. Elgin is hired by hot-shot Broadway director Bernie Dodds (William Holden) for his new musical. Bernie soaks up Frank’s lies that Georgie is a demanding, controlling bully rather than Frank’s go-to comfort blanket. Can Georgie hold Frank together for the previews, despite Bernie’s misguided belief that Frank would fare better if she was shipped home?

The answer, not surprisingly, is no. The Country Girl, in many ways, is quite Victorian in its sense of domestic tragedy. The death of Frank and Georgie’s son – killed by traffic when Frank let go of his hand for some publicity photos – has a real classic melodrama ring to it, a feeling added to by the Frank’s memories coming storming back whenever he hears the refrain of the song he had been recording moments before the accident. It’s the cause for a series of scenes of half-cut self-loathing from Frank, who powers his way through life both through the bottle and whining at Georgie to fix his problems.

Frank is an innate people-pleaser, desperate to be adored. (He even pathetically asks a barman, between shots, if he likes him). But behind that is a demanding prima-donna, turned incessant self-pitier. He moans about everything to Georgie – his lack of a dresser, being pestered by his under-study, the pressure of learning the lines and carrying the show – and then instantly assures Bernie moments later that he’s delighted with everything. Worse than that, he spins constant lies that Georgie does everything she can to batter his confidence so can control his life and give meaning to hers.

Frank even shifts his attention seeking suicide attempts and hotel smashing drunken outbursts onto her, painting himself as a victim too decent to fight back against his bullying wife (even using repurposed speeches from his old stage triumphs as material). It’s music to the ears of William Holden’s Bernie, filled with bitterness at his own ex-wife who he sees as a jealous burden holding back his own career. He laps up believing that Georgie’s demands are her self-important power plays rather than filtered demands from his cowardly star.

Bing Crosby took on his biggest acting challenge, miles away from his aw-shucks Oscar-winning Going My Way charm. Crosby put in extreme effort – rather like Frank with Bernie, George Seaton ruthlessly coached him – but the problem is you can see it all. Seemingly every scene sees Bing shaking, on the edge of tears, looking into the middle distance, and battening down the musical richness of his voice into a weak mumble. There is a lot of earnest, sad-eyed starring in The Country Girl and this softly-spoken, rather mannered performance puts everything out there (the film even throws in a few in-play musical numbers, which Crosby delivers as per his usual style, so that we can really soak up the difference in his performance).

It’s similar with Grace Kelly, her glamour disguised as much as humanly possible under an ill-fitting cardigan, glasses and bags painted under her eyes. Much like Crosby, Kelly goes all out to wring every emotion possible out of this bitter, tragic woman who loves and deeply resents her manipulative husband. Kelly won an Oscar – beating Judy Garland in A Star is Born (allegedly by about 6 votes) – and the performance smacks of the sort of Acting Oscar loves (in many ways it’s a miracle Crosby lost to Brando’s subtle work in On the Waterfront). She even has a late speech, where Georgie lets out all her buttoned-down resentment, that has ‘for your consideration’ written all over it. Much like Croby, its very mannered – you admire its professionalism but can see all the effort.

Both stars hard-work is particularly noticeable when compared to the easy naturalism of Holden, who has the least flashy role but is arguably the best thing in it. He subtly downplays the eagerness which Bernie transfers his own marital resentments on to the Elgin’s marriage, just as he lets Bernie’s growing frustrations with both Elgins develop naturally. He even manages to make Bernie’s late intense attraction to Georgie not seem like it comes as wildly out of left field as the script make it.

The Country Girl works through its melodramatic events with a largely predictable series of beats, as Elgin goes from sweating through rehearsals to smashing up a bar, to drying out in his dressing room. The photography adds a lot of atmosphere, with shadow-cast moments adding a real sense of oppression to the film’s gloomy progress (there is a particularly lovely shot of Kelly buried in the shadows in the theatre wings). There are affecting moments, even if the film lays many of them on somewhat heavily with a trowel. But Seaton’s dialogue is strong, even if it is somewhat melodramatic and his directing is sound.

And you can’t deny the effort he gained from the two stars, even if their performances are so earnestly committed that it becomes a little overbearing to see the Acting in action. It’s fascinating to wonder how much more effective The Country Girl might have been if it had not played almost all of its emotional beats so heavily to the max, but had trusted us to discover the emotion for ourselves.

Mister Roberts (1955)

Dry and stagey version of a theatre hit, that never quite comes to life cinematically

Director: John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy (Ward Bond, Joshua Logan)

Cast: Henry Fonda (Lt Jnr Gd Doug Roberts), James Cagney (Lt Cmd Morton), William Powell (Doc), Jack Lemmon (Ensign Frank Pulver), Betsy Palmer (Lt Ann Girard), Ward Bond (CPO Dowdy), Ken Curtis (Dolan), Philip Carey (Mannion), Nick Adams (Reber), Perry Lopez (Rodrigues), Patrick Wayne (Bookser), Harry Carey Jnr (Stefanowski)

Henry Fonda hadn’t made a film for almost seven years, spending the intervening years collecting garlands on Broadway: and a lot of those were for his over 1,000 performances of Mister Roberts. When the hit play came to the screen, he was the only choice (even if Fonda looked a bit long-the-tooth for a junior lieutenant). Fonda was less than happy with the film – despite its financial success and Oscar nominations – and it’s easy to see why. This is an uneasy mix of awkwardly opened up filmic sweep and stagy set up, with the original’s saltiness watered down to gain Naval co-operation.

Fonda is Lt Jnr Grade Doug Roberts, second-in-command of naval cargo ship Reluctant (known as the Bucket). It’s 1945 and the ship is under the tyrannical command of Lt Commander Morton (James Cagney), a lazy placeman riding Robert’s organised shirttails to career success. That’s why he’s unwilling to grant Roberts’ wish to be transferred to a combat ship so he can do his bit. Roberts is the buffer between Morton and the crew, Morton taking any opportunity he to impose his Bligh-like authority through punishments. How will the power struggle between the two men play out?

The most interesting thing about Mister Roberts is the immense turmoil of its making, burning through no less than four directors. Ford butted heads with Fonda (never the easiest guy in the world), who felt he knew far the material better than Ford. This eventually led to a punch-up and Ford hitting the bottle big-time before he was sent to a sanatorium. Ward Bond took over before Mervyn LeRoy was shipped in. LeRoy claimed to have directed over 90% of the film (allegedly in Ford’s style), before he too was replaced by Logan, the original Broadway director, who only didn’t get the job in the first place because Fonda had also fallen out with him. Logan felt the recut script ripped the heart out of the play and, like Fonda, that the film was not a patch on the original.

This chaos perhaps explains why this feels like such a bland and stagey affair. There is the odd widescreen shot of Reluctant puffing through the seas, or Fonda surveying the panorama. But these are outweighed by static camera set-ups of a sound-stage recreation of the ship. Scenes play out in angles that seem to basically replicate the way they were set on stage (most strikingly, a scene where the crew stare out at the nurses on the island through binoculars – you can almost picture the sailors peering out into the stalls). It’s the worst type of ‘opened-out’ film adaptations, where the opening-out is restricted solely to the odd widescreen shot of a vista while the rest of the film is shot and staged like it’s still in a theatre.

On top of this, Fonda and Logan was probably right that a lot of the play’s energy was lost when its harsher beats were trimmed. It’s not a surprise the saltier dialogue was thrown overboard. But Morton was changed from a Queeg-like bully into a broader, comic character, a ludicrous martinet whose obsession with his palm-tree pot-plant was dialled up to the max. James Cagney gives a broad performance, either frothing at the mouth or fainting away in fury. He’s such an absurd figure, he can’t be seen as a genuine threat, possibly because the Navy could not abide the idea that a bully who placed his own career before his crew’s wellbeing could ever land a command.

It rather mutes the more satirical points about the unpredictability of rigid command structures. You can still see beats of it in the film’s recurrent, slightly bizarre, ‘now hear this’ announcements over the intercom (a surprisingly M*A*S*H-ish touch) or in some of the more mad-cap destructive elements of Lemmon’s slacker Ensign Pulver. Just as the crew’s poor moral and willingness to find ever more obscure reasons to shirk duty might have played more into criticism of the domineering navy regime on stage. Not here.

With a slightly neutered content and flat direction, what Mister Roberts relies on is the strength of its performances. It certainly got a trio of legends and an up-and-comer destined for great things. A very fine Fonda, with that long experience, gives his trademarked decency mixed with a sensitivity for his men and bitterness at his commander. It plays out with an indulgent fatherly regard for his men and a subtle cheek for his captain. His disgust for Morton is tangible as is his emotion at the crew’s regard.

Equally good is William Powell, in his final role, an archly dry commentator on events, as playful forging whisky as he is quietly amused at the crew’s wild attempts to escape their duty. Jack Lemmon Oscar-winning turn as Pulver was an early display of both the manic comic energy, tinged with an adolescent sexual excitement, that he bought to several later roles. But he also manages to find some genuine moments of emotional depth. Cagney blisters in a 2D role, but few do bombast better.

But Mister Roberts frequently feels a little slow and dry, and it’s never quite funny or zany enough for what it’s trying to do. Not surprising, since Ford and LeRoy are hardly anyone’s idea of satirical, screwball directors. When it does go for zany energy, it ends up making its characters look like dicks – the crew’s shore leave (after a year on ship) is clearly meant to be amusing (Fonda gives them a ‘boys-will-by-boys’ smile). But the actions described (trashing an ambassador’s house, ripping clothes off women, turning a dinner party into a brawl) sounds more like drunken louts than charming rogues (hard not to feel Morton isn’t more than a little bit right to be furious).

It says a lot that the broad comedy lands less well than the serious moments – especially as the film’s sudden tragic ending is its most effective moment. The stagy, dry production feels like it has made only the most awkward transition to screen – I suspect Fonda was right to wish more people had seen it on stage than on celluloid.

Hedda (2025)

An imaginative Ibsen reworking that works brilliantly in some places but doesn’t make enough of an impact

Director: Nia DaCosta

Cast: Tessa Thompson (Hedda Gabler), Nina Hoss (Eileen Lovborg), Imogen Poots (Thea Clifton), Tom Bateman (George Tesman), Nicholas Pinnock (Judge Roland Brack), Finbar Lynch (Professor Greenwood), Mirren Mack (Tabita Greenwood), Jamael Westman (David), Saffron Hocking (Jane Ji), Kathryn Hunter (Bertie)

Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is pretty much the closest you get to a female Hamlet: complex, multi-layered, torn between envy and vulnerability, selfishness and frustrated yearning, independence and stupefying domesticity. y Nia DaCosta’s intriguing adaptation mixes in some fascinating ideas but never quite lands with the force and energy it needs to really impact the audience.

DaCosta moves the action from nineteenth-century Sweden to a house party in 1950s England, in the palatial home of debt-ridden academic George Tesman (Tom Bateman) and his austerely cool wife Hedda Gabler (Tessa Thompson). George is making a desperate pitch for a professorship to repay his debts to sinister Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), who seems more interested in getting payment-in-kind from Hedda.

Hedda affects a distanced, disinterested manner – until the arrival of her old flame Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss), with her new partner Thea (Imogen Poots) in tow. Eileen and Thea have written a revelatory new book (currently only one draft copy exists) that places Eileen in the driving seat for gaining George’s professorship. Shaken, Hedda instigates a campaign to destroy Eileen, based either on desperation, deep jealousy or self-loathing, that plays out during the increasingly debauched, night-long party.

There are so many good ideas in Hedda, it’s disappointing that the final product is so curiously uninvolving. DaCosta’s film, sharply directed with a lovely ‘bright young things’ flair mixed with some Du Maurier gothic menace, looks fabulous and confidently mixes intense character study with illicit sex, dramatic gunshots and desperate fisticuffs. The transplanting of Ibsen’s original to a new setting is surprisingly smooth and the idea to compress the whole story (which takes place over a couple of days in the original) to a single night does at points give it a propulsive energy, especially as characters’ inhibitions increasingly fracture under the influence of drink.

The best innovation in Hedda is translating Hedda’s old lover Eilert Lovborg into Eileen. This switch opens up a rich vein of possibilities which the film embraces in its most successful moments. Hedda has turned her back on her own sexuality to claim a place in society: a sexuality Eileen flaunts in front of her male peers, her costuming an intriguing fusing of styles. Hedda’s envy of Thea taking her place now has the double tinge of knowing that Thea – who has left her family and become more of an intellectual partner than Hedda ever was – is also a braver, more committed person than Hedda.

It also blows open even further the cosy, drawing-room, closed-shop nature of this world, where George and the peers he is so desperate to appeal to withdraw to private rooms for clubbable drinks and smutty gossip about girls. Professor Greenwood (a reptilian Finbar Lynch) drags around a trophy wife (Mirren Mack) whom he treats with indifference right up until exploding in fury at her cuckolding him. Judge Brack (a vilely smooth Nicholas Pinnock) alternates between patronising women and looming like a predator over them. George stands out as a genuinely decent man here, respectful of Eileen and uncomfortable with overt masculinity, but even he still sees Hedda’s place as tending to hearth and home rather than a true equal.

This theme of sexual politics comes roaring into life thanks to Nina Hoss’ magnetically charismatic performance, embodying Eileen with a swaggering, intellectual confidence that hides a deeper fragility that’s only just keeping her on the wagon. A wagon she spectacularly falls off (due to Hedda’s prodding) in an attempt to show she can be one of the boys, culminating in an attempt to barnstormingly dominate a room, drunkenly unaware (despite George’s efforts to warn her) that her lake-water soaked shirt is clinging suggestively to her body to the slathering delight of her male audience.

Hoss’ performance is brilliant, collapsing from assured distance, via frantic nervous energy, into wild-eyed desperate vulnerability. Charting an opposite course is Imogen Poots, very good indeed as Thea who feels like one of life’s doormats (not helped by the hideously unflattering dress Hedda insists she wears) but who reveals deep strength of character and determination. The film’s finest sequences revolve around these two, who offer the film’s most intriguing and best-explored modernisation. Credit also to Nicholas Pinnock’s marvellously predatory Judge Brack and Tom Bateman’s decent-but-timid George, a man so sheltered that raucous sex jokes fly obliviously over his head.

It’s unfortunate that the film stumbles more with its portrayal of Hedda. I’m not sure Hedda manages to really grasp the conflicting depths of its lead character. Tessa Thompson gives a committed performance, but it’s hard not to feel the English accent vocally constrains her (why not just let her use her own?) and the film rarely gives her a chance to fully explore the character’s depths. We should feel there is an explosive cauldron of feelings under Hedda’s surface, but only rarely (if at all) does the film ever manage to pierce it, rarely getting to grasp with the character’s conflicting impulses, settling more for an Iago-like drive to destroy, based on jealousy.

Hedda also misses a slight trick, I feel, by not playing up Hedda’s potential outsider nature in 1950s England via her race. (There is a throwaway comment on her ‘dusky skin’, but in a film of colour-blind casting, with the most powerful character played by a Black actor, it doesn’t land.) And making Hedda a bohemian contemptuous of high society doesn’t sit well with her obsession with her father’s status, or her desire to control her high surroundings.

It contributes to a film that never quite manages to come to life as it should, because we never quite understand our lead character, whose coldness and distance extends to us as well as the characters. In a film awash with good ideas, it’s a fatal flaw, and Hedda never quite catches fire emotionally or thematically as it should, because Hedda herself is curiously underserved and under-explored.

PS: Years ago, I played George Tesman in a production of Hedda Gabler where Tom Bateman played Eilert Loveborg. He was (of course!) brilliant, and it was a personal delight to see him as Tesman here (as well as a little odd, I won’t lie!), just one of many perfectly judged performances he’s given in his career.

Children of a Lesser God (1986)

Clumsy Pygmalion drama that very uncomfortably mixes its messages during its obvious plot points

Director: Randa Haines

Cast: William Hurt (James Leeds), Marlee Matlin (Sarah Norman), Piper Laurie (Mrs. Norman), Philip Bosco (Dr Curtis Franklin), Allison Gompf (Lydia), Bob Hiltermann (Orin)

Adapted from a hit Broadway play, Children of a Lesser God (its title plucked from Tennyson’s The Passing of Arthur – though, like much of the film, I’ve no idea what point it’s trying to make) was hailed as a landmark in disability representation. Truthfully, it’s possibly slightly more retrograde than Johnny Belinda (made almost forty years earlier) and certainly not as good a film, its plodding plot and confused message not salvaged by two excellent performances.

James Leeds (William Hurt) is a charismatic teacher, newly arrived at a New England school for the deaf. His mission is to encourage the kids to speak, as he’s convinced they will struggle in the world on sign language alone. He becomes fascinated with the school’s janitor Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin), a recent student, whipper-smart but defiantly silent, speaking only through fluent, witty sign language. Determined to teach her to speak and open-up a panorama of new opportunities for her, James and Sarah start a passionate relationship that increasingly flounders on the language barrier between them and Sarah’s own insecurities.

The positives first: both leads are excellent. Hurt is dynamic, engaging and charming – so much so it’s easy to overlook what a dick his character is (of which more later). Hurt accompanies all his dialogue with fluent sign language (no mean feat) and convinces utterly as the sort of maverick teacher who wins minds while carrying a prickly ego from uninterrupted success and validation. Opposite him, Matlin (still the youngest winner of the Best Actress Oscar) is electric: defiant, unaccommodating, sensual and damaged but able to burst into a radiant smile of confidence. Matlin makes her prickly but sensitive, defensive but determined and passion bursts out of her.

These two leads display obvious chemistry (although Matlin’s later recounting of Hurt’s serious domestic abuse during their relationship, barely denied by him, casts an uncomfortable shadow over the film). This lifts an otherwise straightforward film. It’s awash with expected plot points and beats from a meet-cute, to growing passion, falling outs and reconciliation. Aside from a few under-water shots (Sarah feeling completely comfortable under water, where her hearing is the same as everyone’s), it’s flatly filmed (it’s not a surprise Haines lost out a Best Director slot to David Lynch for Blue Velvet) and would not have looked out of place as a TV movie-of-the-week.

However, it’s main issues are the plays it makes for representation, while presenting deafness as an obstacle where the onus is on the deaf people themselves to fit in as much as possible. For a film about two people struggling to find a middle-ground between sound and silence, it never once dares us to experience the world as Sarah does. From its insistent score onwards, sound is an ever-present. None of Matlin’s dialogue is subtitled (she speaks aloud only once), with all of it translated by Hurt. For a film about finding common ground, its not interested in letting us experience even a taste of Sarah’s world.

Would it have killed them to have one scene where, perhaps, we walked around the school hearing what Sarah hears (nothing)? Or a scene where James and Sarah speak only through sign, with captioned translation? Instead, without really realising it, the film largely vindicates James’ position that not being able to speak is an abnormality Sarah is sticking to out of wilful, self-damaging stubbornness, rather than a choice she is entitled to make to engage with the world on her terms.

Unpack this stuff, and suddenly the whole film is a confusing mess of unclear positions and perspectives. James’ maverick teacher – in true Dead Poet’s style he wins the kids over by being unstuffy – is peddling a message that the deaf kids would be better off, if they became as much like him as possible. The film never once comments on James ignoring the one student in his class immune to his charm, essentially exiling him from his ‘in crowd’ during class. Is this great teaching? James has an unattractive messianic complex and a large part of his initial interest in Sarah is based on an arrogant belief that he can ‘save’ her from life as janitor, expecting her gratitude in return.

This Pygmalion like set-up quickly demonstrates it has way less insight about the self-occupied arrogance of its teacher than Shaw. It becomes clear to Sarah, that her successes (and the successes of James’ students, who under his tutelage perform a song-and-dance routine at parents day) are seen as his successes. When she wows James’ colleagues at a poker night with her wit and skill, they praise him (right in front of her), which he soaks up with a smug pleasure. The film never quite puts these dots together, or sees the irony in James’ bored disengagement with her deaf friends or his giving up on explaining Bach to her.

Worse than this, James ignores her early comment that she doesn’t want to be made to speak (she tells him that, as a teenager, she used sex to silence boys who pushed her to talk). Despite his vows, he increasingly, insistently demands she speaks, and fails to recognise when she resorts to using sex to try and shut him up. The film never pulls him up his selfishness and pushy imposing of his views, its sympathy for Sarah not changing its quiet view that her own problems are a major brick in the wall between them.

The film doesn’t really question James’ arrogance, because it can’t shake its habit of viewing her a problem to be solved. It effectively endorses James’ view that she should adjust and change as much as possible. Is it really wrong for Sarah to want to live on her own terms, not other people’s? To refuse to perform as James demands?

In fact, much as the film wants us to dislike Philip Bosco’s rules-bound obstructive headmaster, he makes two very valid points: one, it’s not for James to decide what’s best for Sarah and it’s not appropriate for James to fuck someone who is both a junior member of staff and (effectively) his student. Children of a Lesser God doesn’t even try to explore the moral complexities of any of this, instead settling for the idea that a disability can be overcome if someone works hard, overcomes their own issues and defers to an inspirational teacher. Combine that with its plodding, unoriginal story and you’ve got a film that hasn’t aged well.

On Golden Pond (1981)

Sentimental drama, sickly-sweet, which owes any success it is to its legendary leads

Director: Mark Rydell

Cast: Katharine Hepburn (Ethel Thayer), Henry Fonda (Norman Thayer), Jane Fonda (Chelsea Thayer), Doug McKeon (Billy Ray Jnr), Dabney Coleman (Dr Bill Ray)

The, admittedly luscious, score by Dave Grusin gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect, as Billy Williams’ camerawork drifts over a sun-kissed lake. On Golden Pond is an overwhelmingly sentimental film, just about lifted above its Hallmark Classic material by its legendary cast. Justified residual affection for them made this frequently mawkish, sickly-sweet film a massive box-office hit. Instigated by Jane Fonda, as a late bridge for a final reconciliation with her father Henry, it won him an Oscar 41 years after his last (and only previous) nomination.

Henry Fonda plays Norman Thayer, a curmudgeonly academic on the cusp of his 80^th birthday, whose avuncular abruptness covers a fear of death and the slow decline of his wits. Along with his supportive, sparky wife Ethel (Katharine Hepburn) he’s spending this birthday at their summer home on the shore of New England golden lake. They are joined, unexpectantly, by their marginally estranged daughter Chelsea (Jane Fonda) with her new boyfriend Bill (Dabney Coleman) and his thirteen-year-old son Billy (Doug McKeon) in tow. Chelsea and Bill leave for a holiday in Europe, leaving Billy behind. Can Billy and Norman find common ground, and will the presence of this young man help Norman and Chelsea find reconciliation and understanding after years of tension.

If you don’t know the answer, you’ve not seen enough movies. Pretty much every development in On Golden Pond could be jotted down correctly on a pad in advance. Of course, Norman’s hostility will melt slightly as he rediscovers something of his playful youth and vigour in the kid. Of course, Billy’s contempt for the gentle pleasures of Golden Pond will wash away as he embraces the delights of fishing, reading classic novels and playing board games under the increasingly warm surrogate parental eyes of Norman and Ethel. Of course, Chelsea’s ostentatious determination to only refer to Norman by his name will eventually see her calling him ‘Dad’. Of course, Norman will finally allow himself to confess his love for his daughter.

All these inevitable emotional plot developments are hit with assured smoothness in Rydell’s straight-forward film, perfectly packaged for mass appeal. Every character is an archetype: the grouchy old guy with a heart of gold, the loving wife who devotes herself to exasperatingly caring for her husband and smoothing over those he offends, the prickly daughter whose resentment hides her desperate need for her father’s love… You could argue the film’s very predictability is the secret sauce behind its success.

It can be safely consumed as a heart-warming fable. So much so, it’s easy to miss how biased the film is in favour of the older generation. So sentimental is the eye it casts over Norman, so forgiving and sympathetic is it to his quiet raging against the dying of the light, that it effectively gives him a pass for any responsibility for the coldness between him and his daughter, partially born from his domineering expectations and demands of her.

When Chelsea complains to Esther about her father’s coldness, distance and high standards, she’s roundly told she should have seen past this to the love her father buried deep down. (Esther even slaps her for questioning it!). This is a film that firmly states the younger generation should adjust to fit in with the older. Chelsea should pull herself together, stop whining, and get over the fact her Dad never really told her how he feels: that, effectively, the problem they have is her expectations rather than his failures. It’s fitting with a film that, however charmingly it does it, also sees Billy adapting and changing to better fit in with the Thayers rather than any vice versa. God knows what it would make of something like Five Easy Pieces.

The film’s patronising, one-sided view of generational conflict and its soppy sentimentality would make it unbearable, if it wasn’t for the performers at its heart. Henry Fonda, with less than a year to live, takes a cliched character and invests Norman with a richness and depth of personality that is far more than the film deserves. Fonda’s precise diction and ability to turn those blue eyes cold is perfect for Norman’s grouching, but when those same eyes collapse into panicked fear (such as when Norman gets lost in woods he has walked all his life) it’s as moving as his attempt to shrug off his failing memory.

Fonda’s perfectly delivers both the irritation and hidden fear when he stares at photos of himself and his younger family and plaintively asks who they are. He makes the bond with Doug McKeon’s Billy (also excellent) genuinely rather sweet, these two kindred souls shooting the breeze and catching fish like life-long buddies (Fonda fills Norman here with an almost teenage sense of naughtiness). It’s a rich, charming performance.

He’s expertly supported by Katharine Hepburn, who brings her customary spark, fierce intelligence, take-no-nonsense assurance and dry wit to Esther. Truthfully the role, for which she won a record-breaking fourth Oscar, is almost identical to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Once again, she is the dutiful but loving wife, smoothing over the feathers her husband disrupts and speaking home truths to her disappointed child. Hepburn could probably do this standing on her head, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t nail it. Jane Fonda, a far more generous performer than she gets credit for, plays Chelsea with such emotional commitment it can’t help but pull some heartstrings. Even Dabney Coleman is restrained and gentle.

Of course, a lot of this success also comes from the deeply blurred lines between truth and fiction that abound in On Golden Pond. It’s no secret to anyone watching that the Norman-Chelsea relationship has multiple parallels with that of Henry-Jane. Jane Fonda had planned the film as a tribute to her father (much to the disappointment of James Stewart who dreamed of playing it), and when the duelling father and daughter quietly reconcile, it’s impossible to not also see the real actors themselves building bridges after a lifetime of disagreements. It’s a greater emotional impact than the actual film itself and surely contributed to its success.

On Golden Pond is less successful on its own merits. An overly sentimental film, with a golden-eyed regard for the dignity and decency of the older generation, where inter-generational conflict is resolved with a few gentle words and a backflip off a diving board. Remove the actors – and the emotional truth behind its making – and you have a very slight, predictable and manipulative movie.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

Excellent acting almost saves a neutered, inverted version of Williams’ powerhouse play

Director: Richard Brooks

Cast: Elizabeth Taylor (Maggie Pollitt), Paul Newman (‘Brick’ Pollitt), Burl Ives (‘Big Daddy’ Pollitt), Jack Carson (‘Gooper’ Pollitt), Judith Anderson (‘Big Mama’ Pollitt), Madeleine Sherwood (Mae Flynn ‘Sister Woman’ Pollitt), Larry Gates (Dr Baugh), Vaughn Taylor (Deacon Davies)

There is a fun little anecdote of Tennessee Williams running into a crowd of people lined around the block to catch Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at their local multiplexes and loudly begging them “Go home! This movie will set the industry back 50 years!” You can sort of see why Williams was a bit pissed. It’s a miracle really that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof works at all. The studio snapped up this Broadway mega-hit and promptly instructed Richard Brooks to remove all the content that worked with a bunch of New York Times readers, but wasn’t going to fly in a mid-West fleapit. What we end up with is a curious, mis-aligned, neutered work that arguably inverts several of Williams’ points and is reliant on its incredibly strong, charismatic acting to work.

Brick (Paul Newman) is a former College sports star, now adrift in life, trapped in an unhappy marriage with Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor) who he resents and blames for the suicide of close friend Skipper. All Maggie’s attempts to rediscover any love is met with cold, blank disinterest as Brick hits the bottle big-time. Maggie keeps up the front of wedding bliss, as she is determined they will win their share of the inheritance from Brick’s father ‘Big Daddy’ (Burl Ives) who believes he’s merely under-the-weather, but is in fact dying. This news is also being kept from his devoted (but privately barely tolerated by Big Daddy) wife Big Mama (Judith Anderson), while Brick’s brother’s Gooper (Jack Carson) and his wife Mae Flynn (Madeline Sherwood) makes aggressive pitchs to cement Big Daddy’s fortune for themselves.

This simmering Broadway adaptation of a Southern family weighted down by lies (or mendacity as they love to call it), concealments and barely disguised resentments, was a smash hit but a very mixed film. It’s weighed down by both too much respect of the theatrical nature of the play, and too little interest in its actual message. Richard Brooks’ production largely restricts itself to interspersing wider shots with some reaction shots and sticks very much to its ‘same location for each act’ set-up. It’s a surprisingly conservative and safe re-staging of a hit play.

Despite Brooks’ liberal re-writing of the dialogue (of which more later), it remains a very theatrical rather than cinematic piece, largely devoid of imaginative editing or photography. The attempts to ‘open up’ the piece introduced by Brooks feel pointless or add very little (such as witnessing the accident where Brick breaks his leg or travelling to the airport to see the arrival of Big Daddy’s plane). Compared to the inventive and dynamic use of single-location shooting in Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof feels considerably more stately and reserved, and is far less successful in using the tricks of cinema to successfully build tension and conflict.

What it shares however with 12 Angry Men is the electric acting. Elizabeth Taylor gives one of her finest performances, her Maggie bubbling with sexual and emotional frustration, reduced to hurling physical and verbal punches at Brick in an attempt to get any sort of emotional rise out of him. She makes Maggie, for all her desperation and confusion, surprisingly sympathetic. Taylor manages to be both selfish and domineering while also showing how broken up Maggie is with shame and guilt. It’s a detailed, intense, passionate performance.

It also works perfectly opposite Paul Newman’s brooding intensity as Brick. This is the handsome, blue-eyed legend inverting his charisma into something insular, at times merely starring in self-loathing into the middle distance as other speak at him, only rarely rising to let rip at others with contempt and fury. Newman is a force of quiet, emotional anger, even if (stripped of his character’s primary motivation) he comes across at times like a spoilt child who never really grew up rather than the tortured man trapped in a lie of a life, that Williams intended (Brooks even frames him at one point with a high-school football of himself behind him, his past literally haunting him).

Burl Ives would certainly have won an Oscar for this, if he hadn’t won that year for The Big Country. Recreating his Tony Award winning role, he’s a whirligig force of nature as Big Daddy, bullishly insistent on getting his own way, shrugging off with irritation his wife’s affection (an effectively unsettled Judith Anderson) and hiding his own fear at oncoming death in a relentless pursuit of the future. Ives also nails Big Daddy’s outstanding late speeches, investing them with a deep sense of melancholy and sadness under the bombast and strength. It’s a great performance. Jack Carson is perfectly, anonymously uninteresting as ‘other son’ Gooper and Madeline Sherwood hits the beats of shrill hostility she’s asked for as his wife Mae Flynn.

That these performances work so well is a tribute to the underlying strength of a play that has been radically, almost disastrously, lobotomised by Brooks into something that flattens, blurs and (at points) radically inverts the intention. Putting it bluntly, Williams’ original used Brick’s unspoken (perhaps even subconscious) homosexual attraction to Skipper as the root cause of his disastrous marriage and booze-laden depression. Maggie, all too-aware of her husband’s sexual orientation, fumes in frustration at his lack of interest in making the inheritance-required babies. Even Big Daddy suspects this massive unspoken secret at the heart of a family. The fact this remains unspoken to the end, that the characters carry on with the fake fiction of the Pollitt dynasty is a damning indictment of the hypocrisy of American family life.

That wasn’t going to wash in Hollywood. No hint of Brick’s homosexuality could be allowed: in fact, Newman’s heteronormative virility is repeatedly stressed (at one point he even embraces Maggie’s dressing gown in romantic longing). It weakens both characters – for all the skill of Newman and Taylor, it makes both characters shallower, two people letting sulks and pride stand between happiness, rather than two people trapped into a doomed cycle. The film resolutely associates happiness with love and duty to the family unit, emphatically not what Williams’ play suggested.

No wonder he was pissed. A daring play about Southern family hypocrisy and buried secrets, where the burden of the family is a deadweight crushing people is turned into a straight (in every sense) celebration of it. It makes the play a conservative, reassuring lie, as much as a mendacity as the characters talk about. So maybe Williams was right to berate that crowd. Still it pissed Brooks off mightily: he pithily retorted it was a bit rich of Williams to kick up such fuss over a film which made him very wealthy. I guess at least there Brooks makes a strong point.