Tennessee Williams 1948 play, Summer and Smoke, was made into a Hollywood movie thirteen years after it was written.
Grade: B (*** out of *****)
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In 1952, Jose Quintero directed a landmark stage production, which became famous for establishing Geraldine Page as a foremost stage actress of her generation.
Set in 1916 in a Mississippi town, the story concerns a fragile, frustrated spinster, Alma Winemiller (Geraldine Page), and the consequences of her sexual repression.
Interestingly, in 1961, another film revolved around a spinster, played by Deborah Kerr in The Innocents, based on Henry James’s book The Turn of the Screw.”
Alma nurses an unrequited love for John Buchanan (Laurence Harvey), the virile next-door neighbor. Under the facade of decorum and gentility, she is burning with desire for the pleasure-seeking John. Spent in futile dreams, Alma’s life has been a miss.
Caught between a righteous minister-father (Malcolm Atterbury) and borderline insane mother (Una Merkel), she is almost doomed, “almost,” because at the end she changes and even transforms.
Against the tradition of repressed spinsters, Williams constructed a heroine capable of rebelling against her parents and against society’s mores. Eventually, Alma adopts a looser morality and, in the last scene, picks up a traveling salesman at the town’s square.
The film, as a whole, is no more than a passable adaptation of a Tennessee Williams work, stemming from the fact that, as the critic Yacowar has pointed out, it is a stylized play of ideas with an expressionistic setting.
Moreover, Laurence Harvey might have been miscast in the lead role.
Two theoretical forces clash in the play: body, or sensualist orientation, embodied by John, and soul (the heroine’s name) or spiritualist orientation. Every character in the movie has its opposite type and embodies an abstract idea. Alma’s father is everything that John is not: the two complement each other.
To open up the play, director Peter Granville resorts to outdoor activities, band concerts, gambling casinos, and cockfights. But the town is never brought into vivid or credible life and the setting remains an external decor for what is essentially a psychological study.
In the tradition of small-town adolescents, Alma is the only character that has both parents. John has no mother, Nellie, Alma’s student, has no father, and Rosa Gonzales also lacks a mother.
But Alma’s mother is a psychopathic woman, given to outbursts of malice. Spiteful and addled, she shocks Alma with her kleptomania. Childish, she reveals sensory delight in ice cream.
Mrs. Winemiller is a negative role model, a living proof of what might happen to sexually frustrated housewife, unhappily married to a self-righteous man.
Cast
Laurence Harvey as John Buchanan, Jr.
Geraldine Page as Alma Winemiller
Rita Moreno as Rosa Zacharias
Una Merkel as Mrs. Winemiller
John McIntire as Dr. Buchanan
Thomas Gomez as Papa Zacharias
Pamela Tiffin as Nellie Ewell
Malcolm Atterbury as Rev. Winemiller
Lee Patrick as Mrs. Ewell
Max Showalter as Roger Doremus (as Casey Adams)
Earl Holliman as Archie Kramer
Pepe Hern as Nico
Credits:
Directed by Peter Glenville
Screenplay by James Poe and Meade Roberts, based on Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams
Produced by Paul Nathan, Hal B. Wallis
Cinematography Charles Lang
Edited by Warren Low
Music by Elmer Bernstein
Distributed by Paramount Pictures
Release date: November 16, 1961
Running time: 118 minutes
