I
Université Paris 7 Année universitaire 2006-2007
Hélène Muron Mémoire de M1 – Anglais de spécialité – UE2
From the Big Easy to the big screen:
The film adaptations of Tennessee Williams’s plays
Dirigé par Mme Penny Starfield
Summary
Introduction………………………………………………………………...3
I. From Columbus to Broadway, and from Broadway to Hollywood : the evolution of Williams’s theater 5
I.A. The autobiographical origins of Williams’s theater 5
I.B. The first stage productions of the plays 9
I.B.1. The productions 10
I.B.2. Critical reception 13
I.C. From Broadway to Hollywood: the genesis of the adaptations 16
II. From the stage to the screen: the constraints of the adaptation process 20
II.A. Formal constraints 20
II.B. Commercial constraints: the law of the studios 25
II.B.1. Hollywood in the 1950s: the end of the Golden Age 25
II.B.2. New trends: the law of the box-office 26
II.C. Legal and moral constraints: the law of the censors 29
III. Williams’s plays on the screen 34
III.A. Comparative study of the stage and screen versions 34
III.B. The case of A Streetcar Named Desire 40
III.C. Differing opinions on the adaptations 44
III.C.1. Williams’s opinion on the films 44
III.C.2. Critical reception of the movies 46
III.C.3. “A new type of Hollywood film” 48
Conclusion…………………………………………………………...……50
Bibliography………………………………………………………………52
Annex………………………………………………….………………….54
From the Big Easy[1] to the big screen:
The film adaptations of Tennessee Williams’s plays
The adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s plays on the big screen undoubtedly spread this Southern author’s fame throughout the world. It seems that his work lent itself to filming: in little more than twenty years, fifteen of his plays were adapted for the screen. Most of the Tennessee Williams films, as they are often called, were box-office successes, and some of them even surpassed the plays in terms of mass appeal and visual power – Marlon Brando’s T-shirt in Elia Kazan’s film A Streetcar Named Desire remains one of the most famous cinematographic images of the 20th century. For the general public, the films are often confused with the plays, or considered as faithful transcriptions of the stage versions. However, the attentive viewer cannot help but notice differences between the plays and the movies: whole scenes were toned down, truncated, or completely censored. My research was based on this simple statement: several of Williams’s plays were adapted for the screen, and yet the films often seem to betray the original texts. The posters of the movies made from the plays all include the name of the playwright, but Williams himself disapproved of many of them. Why did the studios, the directors and the screenwriters who adapted his plays modify their source material, and to what extent is the term “betrayal” really accurate?
As I could not study the fifteen films that were made from Williams’s work, I decided to focus on seven very well-known plays and on their cinematographic adaptations. In several instances, both the play and the movie have become classics of literature and cinema: The Glass Menagerie, first staged in 1944 and filmed by Irving Rapper in 1950; A Streetcar Named Desire, first staged in 1947 filmed by Elia Kazan in 1951; Baby Doll, written in 1955 and filmed by Elia Kazan in 1956; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, first staged in 1956 and filmed by Richard Brooks in 1958; Suddenly, Last Summer; first staged in 1958 and filmed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 1959; Sweet Bird of Youth, first staged in 1959 and filmed by Richard Brooks in 1962; and The Night of the Iguana, first staged in 1961 and filmed by John Huston in 1964. Baby Doll is an exception, as it was written for the screen, but it is interesting to study it alongside the other Tennessee Williams films.
I studied the adaptation process of Tennessee Williams’s work from its genesis – the plays – to its outcome – the films. First of all, in order to understand why so many of Williams’s plays were filmed, a historical or biographical frame is necessary: I followed the development of his plays from his Southern home to Broadway, and from Broadway to Hollywood. Then, I adopted a theoretical viewpoint on the adaptation process itself: what does this change from one medium to another imply? Because of the technical differences between a play and a film, and because of the different commercial and social contexts in which they are produced, adapting a play for the screen involves a series of constraints and compromises. Finally, as I studied the films themselves, I observed how these constraints led to significant differences with the original texts: with the exception of A Streetcar Named Desire, which was an exemplary adaptation, most of the films have led to controversy. The films that were made from Tennessee Williams’s plays shed light on the complexity of the process of filming literary works: what is a successful adaptation?
From Columbus to Broadway, and from Broadway to Hollywood : the evolution of Williams’s theater
Tennessee Williams’s plays, which were first conceived as the expression of their author’s personal sensitivity and issues, rose to fame as they were produced in Broadway, and quickly attracted the attention of Hollywood producers.
1 The autobiographical origins of Williams’s theater
Tennessee Williams’s inspiration was largely autobiographical: he wrote about the South and about desire, and about the isolation of individuals in a society where they do not belong.
As the pseudonym Tennessee Williams chose for himself indicates, the South is omnipresent in his literary world. He was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in the small town of Columbus, Mississipi, and he spent all his childhood and adolescence in Southern states. Several of his works are set in towns where Williams himself lived, such as St. Louis or New Orleans, and others include references to actual locations: in Baby Doll, the Kotton King Hotel Baby Doll Meighan wants to seek refuge in is an allusion to the King Cotton Hotel in Memphis. From his father Cornelius’s side, Tennessee Williams descended from old Southern families and boasted famous ancestors such as General James White, who was the founder of Knoxville, the poets Tristram Coffin and Sidney Lanier, a major Confederate author, and John Sevier, the first governor of Tennessee[2]. His mother was originally from Ohio, but because of her father’s appointments as a Reverend, she was mostly raised in Tennessee and Mississippi. By the time she turned twenty, she had become the epitome of the Southern belle. The caricatured description of Amanda Whigfield in The Glass Menagerie is considered to have been directly inspired by Edwina Williams:
“Amanda: One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain – your mother received – seventeen! – gentlemen callers! Why, sometimes there weren’t enough chairs to accommodate them all. We had to send the nigger over to bring in folding chairs from the parish house.
Tom [remaining at portieres]: How did you entertain those gentlemen callers?
Amanda: I understood the art of conversation!
Tom: I bet you could talk.
Amanda: Girls in those days knew how to talk, I can tell you.
Tom: Yes?
[Image: Amanda as a girl on a porch, greeting callers.]
Amanda: They know how to entertain their gentlemen callers. It wasn’t enough for a girl to be possessed of a pretty face and a graceful figure – although I wasn’t slighted in either respect. She also needed to have a nimble wit and a tongue to meet all occasions.
Tom: What did you talk about?
Amanda: Things of importance going on in the world! Never anything coarse or common or vulgar. [She addresses Tom as though he were seated in the vacant chair at the table though he remains by portieres. He plays this scene as though he held the book.] My callers were gentlemen – all! Among my callers were some of the most prominent young planters of the Mississipi Delta – planters and sons of planters!”[3]
The characters appear as a reflection of the Williams family at the time when they lived in St. Louis. Tom Wingfield is obviously an autobiographic character: he shares the playwright’s first name, and his job at the warehouse was clearly inspired by Williams’s experience as a worker in a shoe factory during the Great Depression.
Other characters in Williams’s plays bear a close resemblance to Southerners he knew: in Cat on Hot Tin Roof, Big Daddy, who embodies the traditional figure of the Southern planter, was directly inspired by the father of his friend Jordan Massee, Jr. These examples show the ambivalence Tennessee Williams felt towards the traditional image of the South, as his depiction of the romantic Southern belle and of the family patriarch is both ironic and sympathetic. Catherine Roger[4] demonstrates that Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire embody a much darker, and more conflictual vision of the South: Blanche’s obsolete principles and obsession with purity stand in sharp contrast with Stanley’s cynical values. Whereas she is a figure of the Old South, with its strict decorum and its hypocrisy, he represents the mutations of modern society, and Tennessee Williams was confused by this “union of opposites, [this] condition of instability, [this] paradox”[5] of the Southern culture.
Like Blanche, who has been cast out by the conservative society she comes from, and yet is nostalgic of its values, Tennessee Williams “vacillates between opposing dogmas, (…) never quite convinced of either Cavalier sensuality or Puritan transcendence”[6]. Sensuality and desire are indeed central themes in Williams’s plays, but they are generally presented as an issue that torments the characters, rather than as a pleasurable, fulfilling force. Blanche DuBois obviously embodies this contradiction, but she is not the only one – Chance Wayne, in Sweet Bird of Youth, considers himself “rotten” because of the sensuous life he has led:
“Princess: You’re still young, Chance.
Chance: Princess, the age of some people can only be calculated by the level of – level of – rot in them. And by that measure I’m ancient.” [7]
For Williams himself, as a homosexual in a socially conservative era and society, desire was a particularly problematic feeling. Homosexuality is omnipresent in his plays, but, as John M. Clum[8] underlines, it constantly has morbid connotations: in A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer, the characters are all obsessed with dead homosexual men: Blanche’s “degenerate”[9] husband Allan Grey, Brick’s friend Skipper, and Sebastian Venable. The former owners of Big Daddy’s plantation, and of Brick and Maggie’s bed, are also a couple of homosexual men, Jack Straw and Peter Ochello. Male figures in general are eroticized in Williams’s plays: “In Williams’s work it is the man who is the object of the gaze and of sexual desire, not the woman”[10]. Men, like Stanley Kowalski, are the ones who possess sexual power over women; the only female character who has an erotic appeal is Baby Doll, but Archie Lee Meighan’s desire for her is an object of derision throughout the text. However, in most of the plays, the characters’ sexuality, far from being a comical element, put them in a tragic situation: Blanche DuBois feels torn between her conservative education and her lust, and Brick Pollitt cannot accept his homosexual inclination in a patriarchal society. As a result of this predicament, both characters gradually lose their mind as the plays unfold.
Because of the conflict between their overwhelming sensuality and the strict decorum of the society they live in, Tennessee Williams’s characters find themselves socially and mentally isolated. The playwright himself acknowledged that since his family’s move from Clarksdale, Mississippi to St. Louis, Missouri when he was seven, he had always felt like an outsider. This feeling increased when he was a student at the University of Missouri: “Tom’s father thought that joining a fraternity would help make Tom a man, but he was as much a misfit among the ATOs as he had been in grade school. The brothers found him shy and socially backward, a loner who spent most of his time at the typewriter.”[11] This situation is reflected in Brick’s dilemma in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: “Brick rejected Skipper because the society in which he was educated, the jock-frat boy culture of Old Miss, taught him only loathing and derogatory language for what Skipper felt for him (and what he may have felt for Skipper)”[12]. The Southern society Williams lived in was harsh on individuals who did not fit into traditional gender or social roles, the roles assigned by marriage and patriarchy. It was harsh on him, a homosexual, but also on his sister, a neurotic who was sent into confinement and lobotomized. After this tragic event, Williams gradually developed an obsession with mental illness, in his private life as well as in his work. Neurotics are present throughout his plays; characters like Amanda Wingfield or Blanche DuBois seek refuge in their own mental sphere to avoid the difficult reality of the outside world; they “make-believe” as in the song Blanche keeps singing :
“Blanche [singing blithely]: Say, It’s only a paper moon, Sailing over a cardboard sea – But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me!”[13]
Tennessee Williams himself found solace in drugs and alcohol, and this tendency is reflected in many of his works, as the characters drink or take barbiturates. Brick Pollitt, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, hardly sobers up during the course of the play, and Blanche DuBois also reaches for liquor several times in A Streetcar Named Desire. In Sweet Bird of Youth, the Princess Kosmonopolis and Chance Wayne can also be seen to swallow “pink capsules”[14] with their drinks. These characters’ desperate attempts to intoxicate themselves into oblivion only succeed in isolating them even more. Because of this constant solipsism in Williams’s fictional world, honest and happy relationships between human beings truly seem to be doomed.
With the exception of The Glass Menagerie, which has a realistic social background, the plot in Williams’s plays is mostly psychological, and it is generally a harsh, pessimistic reflection on human nature. But in spite of their very sombre dimension, Tennessee Williams’s plays generally met with tremendous success as soon as they were produced in theaters.
2 The first stage productions of the plays
Most of Tennessee Williams’s plays were performed in Broadway, where they quickly earned public and critical recognition.
1 The productions
After Battle of Angels, which opened in December 1940 in Boston and was a complete failure, The Glass Menagerie was the first of Williams’s plays to be produced on the stage. It premiered in Chicago in December 1944, and was only moderately successful despite very enthusiastic reviews; but when it opened on Broadway in March 1945, it was an instant success. It was performed 561 times and earned Williams instant recognition not only from the public but also from the critics, as he was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The Glass Menagerie was directed by Eddie Dowling, who followed Tennessee Williams’s numerous stage directions. With The Glass Menagerie, Williams sought to create a “new, plastic theatre”[15], and he included his “Production Notes” in the published version of the script, with three sub-headings: “The Screen Device”, “The Music” and “The Lighting”. Though the “screen device” was omitted in the first Broadway production of the play, Williams’s influence on the direction was otherwise omnipresent. He did not compose “The Glass Menagerie” tune himself, but his description of it is a good example of the accuracy of his stage directions:
“It expresses the surface vivacity of life with the underlying strain of immutable and inexpressible sorrow. When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken. Both of those ideas should be woven into the recurring tune, which dips in and out of the play as if it were carried on a wind that changes.” [16]
The Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie therefore followed Williams’s vision.
The next Williams play to be taken to the stage was A Streetcar Named Desire, which opened in 1947 in New York. It was directed by Elia Kazan, and it represented the beginning of Williams’s life-long collaboration with the director. Tennessee Williams was very intent on having Kazan direct A Streetcar Named Desire, because he considered him to have “the dynamism [his] work need[ed]”[17]. The director “had reservations”[18], but he finally agreed, and the two men collaborated very closely. Brenda Murphy emphasizes the revolutionary dimension of their work, which went beyond the “out-dated model that treated the playwright as a “writer”, working alone and outside the presumably corrupting influence of the theatre, and the director as a subordinate talent concerned only with realizing the writer’s imagination as well as he could within the constricting limits of the stage production”[19]. Amelie Moisy[20] quotes the two men’s autobiographies[21] to evidence the tremendous differences between them, and yet also the friendship and sympathy they instantly felt for each other. They shared a feeling of being outsiders, and because of that they understood each other very well, and agreed instinctively on how A Streetcar Named Desire should be directed: “Blanche must finally have the understanding and compassion of the audience”[22]. Their collaboration was extremely efficient, as Kazan was devoted to translating Williams’s vision as faithfully as possible, while also bringing his own ideas into the direction: “It was Kazan who wanted Stella and Stanley to be young; he convinced producer Irene Selznick that Studio actors familiar with method acting should be given precedence over stars; he was responsible for hundreds of changes in A Streetcar Named Desire”[23]. The two men’s collaboration proved successful: the play ran for 855 performances, and besides the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Donaldson Award, it won Williams the Pulitzer Prize.
For Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which premiered in March 1955 at the Morosco Theatre in New York, Williams and Kazan collaborated again, but in this case the director’s influence was much stronger than it had been for A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams presented him with an unfinished version of the play, and Kazan had so many comments and reservations on it that Williams entirely re-wrote the third act. In a Note of Explanation that precedes the “Act Three – Broadway version” in the published script of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams explains that Kazan’s comments regarded the evolution of the characters at the end of the play: according to the director, “Big Daddy was too vivid and important a character to disappear from the play except as an offstage cry after the second act curtain”, “the character of Brick should undergo some apparent mutation as a result of […] the interview with his father in Act Two”, and “Margaret […] should be, if possible, more clearly sympathetic to an audience”[24]. Williams was reluctant to make any changes, but his desire to work with Kazan was so strong that he finally complied with most of his suggestions. Kazan also proposed actors, notably Burl Ives as Big Daddy, and again Williams was not easily convinced, but he finally accepted. Despite certain uneasiness, Williams eventually acknowledged that Kazan’s influence had been beneficial on the play: “The reception of the playing-script has more than justified, in my opinion, the adjustments made to that influence”[25]. The play was indeed a great commercial success, and Williams was granted a second Pulitzer Prize for it.
Suddenly Last Summer was performed for the first time on the 7th of January 1958 at the York Playhouse in New York. Its cast did not include famous stage actors, and it was not produced in the same circumstances as the other Williams plays: first of all, it was presented off-Broadway, that is, in a smaller theater; and second, it was part of a double-bill with Something Unspoken, another one-act play that is usually played after it. However, it encountered as much public and critical success as the other plays, and it is still produced very frequently today.
In March 1959 Sweet Bird of Youth opened in New York. During the pre-production, Tennessee Williams was going through a very difficult phase psychologically; he was very insecure about his work on this play and he relied heavily on Kazan. The main actors, Geraldine Page as the Princess and Paul Newman as Chance Wayne, were chosen by Kazan and the producer Cheryl Crawford. Moreover, Kazan worked on the setting with Jo Mielziner, who had already staged other Williams plays: “Believing they had a weak script, they seemed determined to shift as much of the play’s signification as they could to the material elements of the stage language. More than any of their earlier collaborative efforts, Sweet Bird was a play whose story-line was propelled by the codes of lighting, space, movement and gesture”[26].
After tryout performances in Italy and in Florida, The Night of the Iguana was premiered on December 28, 1961 at the Royale Theatre on Broadway. It was directed by Frank Corsaro and the cast included Bette Davis, as Maxine Carr, Patrick O’Neal, as the Reverend Shannon, and Margaret Leighton, as Hannah Jelkes. It ran during nearly a year and was nominated for three Tony Awards; Margaret Leighton won the award for the Best Actress in a Play. It is considered as Williams’s last great critical and commercial success.
2 Critical reception
Newspaper reviews of the plays are a very reliable source as regards the first stage productions of the plays. In his book Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams[27], Robert A. Martin gathered several articles that were published in New York newspapers after the opening nights of the plays – while some reviewers focus on the text itself, others provide interesting information about theatrical elements such as the direction, the actors, or the setting.
Reviewers for the premiere of The Glass Menagerie were unanimous in their praise of the play, calling it “a masterpiece of make-believe”[28], “a vivid, eerie and curiously enchanting play”[29], and “an event of the first importance”[30]. Through their description, it appears that the production was faithful to the sombreness of the text: “The play hurts you… hurts you all through. It arouses in you pity and terror. (…) There is frustration everywhere in this stark tragedy”[31]. However, it also appears from the three articles presented in Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams that the actors’ performances were a key element in the success of this production: the reviewers particularly insist on the “sustained skill and expressive force”[32] of Laurette Taylor, who played Amanda Wingfield.
As a result of Kazan and Williams’s well thought-out collaboration, A Streetcar Named Desire received very enthusiastic reviews: Williams Hawkins called it “a terrific adventure in theater”[33], and Louis Kronenberger considered it “the most creative new play of the season”[34]. Reviewers praised the actors’ performances and Kazan’s “brilliant direction”[35], but they also appear to have been truly shocked by the harshness of the play itself: “A Streetcar Named Desire is not a play for the squeamish. It is often coarse and harrowing and it is frequently somewhat jerky in its blacked-out sequences”[36]; “The nervous rasp of [Stanley and Blanche’s] mutual irritation is depicted in terms of rare theatrical tension and excitement. There are scenes of violence and raw emotion that leave you pop-eyed and gasping”[37].
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof also elicited mixed feelings on the part of its reviewers: “Even though the Williams characters are repulsive to those accustomed to the niceties, the amenities, of life, they generate a lot of emotional tension and excitement”[38]; “It is a powerful and provocative evening; you are torn between fascination and revulsion, but you are held”[39]; “The play functions like a snake charmer. It holds one’s hypnotized and breathless attention, while it writhes and yowls and bares the souls of its participants with a shameless tongue”[40]. It appears from their comments that the stage version of the play was completely uncensored, not only as regards the language, (“the strongest heard hereabouts in quite a spell. Williams doesn’t call a spade a spade, but rather a steam shovel.”[41]) but also with respect to the homosexual relationship between Brick Pollitt and his college friend Skipper.
Suddenly Last Summer was critically acclaimed, but few reviews are available. Sweet Bird of Youth was acclaimed by critics, despite its harshness: the actors, the story and the staging received much praise. Frank Aston acclaimed the performances of the two leading actors: “The handsomely lithe Miss Page makes a memorable thing of the film queen, sweeping from moans to rages to posturing to inner terrors to vainglorious and laughable self-admiration”, and “Mr. Newman is superb in a role that requires him to be almost constantly repugnant”[42]. In his review, Robert Coleman insisted on the sordidness of the play: “Tennessee Williams writes about degeneracy with a touch of the poet and knows how to shock the customers. In Sweet Bird of Youth Williams is again dealing with the abnormal and frustrated”[43], but he also remarked that the ending was more optimistic than in the other plays: “for a change, [Williams] even has one of his tortured, bewildered souls climb out of the gutter”[44].
Reviewers for The Night of the Iguana were very enthusiastic: John McClain called Williams “our best living playwright”[45], and Norman Nadel described the play as “an awesome and powerful new drama, vividly laced with strident comedy, merciless in its candor, and shockingly explicit in its probing of human loneliness”[46]. Both critics also praised the tropical setting designed by the stage designer Oliver Smith.
The commercial success of the stage productions of Williams’s plays were undoubtedly a decisive factor that triggered the process of adapting them for the screen.
3 From Broadway to Hollywood: the genesis of the adaptations
The adaptation process of Williams’s plays for the screen was due to two key factors: Williams’s own interest in the cinema industry, and a favourable context in Hollywood.
Tennessee Williams’s relation with Hollywood actually began before the beginning of his career as a playwright. Indeed, he moved to California in 1943, when his agent Audrey Wood convinced him to sign a seven-year contract with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. After an abortive project in which he was supposed to write a scenario for the actress Lana Turner, he started to adapt his yet-unpublished short play The Gentleman Caller for the screen. His agent had reservations about this, as she feared it would make it impossible for the play to be performed on the stage afterwards; Williams on the other hand thought it “would work better on screen than stage”[47]. But when MGM refused his script, Williams grew discouraged, and he was finally fired after another of his projects failed. However, the significance of this episode was visible a few years later when he decided to take up The Gentleman Caller again, and turned it into The Glass Menagerie. Jackson Bryer sums up the importance of cinematic devices in this play: “both overtly in the use of the screen on which images and titles for scenes are periodically projected and more generally in its employment of music and dim lighting and in its fractured time scheme”[48]. Williams described these devices at length in his “Production Notes” in the published version of the play, and he insisted on the “organic” and “plastic”[49] dimension he wanted for his theatre. Bryer adds that “these expressionistic techniques, combined with Williams’s cinematic interests, foreshadow the style of many later Williams plays, which show him to be one of the most cinematic playwrights on the American stage.” Indeed, several of Williams’s plays show, though to a lesser extent than The Glass Menagerie, cinematic qualities. Maurice Yacowar also insists on Tennessee Williams’s early interest in the cinema industry: he dedicated some of his plays to popular actors, and “more generally, [his] writing style was influenced by film”[50]. Yacowar remarks that Williams distanced himself from traditional conventions of theater and took up a more modern stance: “in his stage dialogue he avoided theatrical diction in preference for the naturalism established in American film” and “he rarely wrote plays in the traditional structure by acts”[51].
But Williams’s interest in the cinematic genre was not enough to guarantee the success of his plays if they were to be turned into films. As the rebuttal of his script The Gentleman Caller showed, his plays did not correspond to what the Hollywood cinema industry produced in the early 1940s. In his article “Hollywood in crisis: Tennessee Williams and the evolution of the adult film”, Barton Palmer establishes a distinction between the early Broadway adaptations of Williams’s plays and the films that were produced in Hollywood during the Second World War: optimistic, bourgeois films that pleased the population and had tremendous attendance. Broadway and Hollywood actually appealed to two very different kinds of audience: “Disdainful of an American cinema devoted to happy endings and flat characters, Broadway audiences were eager for an art that provided difficult satisfactions rather than the deceptive pleasures of wish fulfilment”[52]. However, by the end of the 1940s, the American cinema industry encountered economic difficulties, because of a series of unrelated problems. First, after a long suit, the Supreme Court passed an antitrust ruling (the “Paramount decision”) that made the distribution system of the studios illegal: “the government claimed that the only way to prevent the monopolistic abuse of power in the motion-picture business was to break up the vertical integration of the industry – to divorce the major studios from ownership of theaters”[53]. Then, in 1947, came the investigations and the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the decline of importations from Hollywood’s most lucrative foreign market, Great Britain. The last, but not least problem that appeared was the competition of television. Studios were slow to react to this threat, but the producers finally realized that they had to turn to new strategies to appeal to the public: as Robert Sklar puts it, “the only way to keep audiences coming back was by feeding their craving for novelty. Television was the new toy that entranced them at the moment, but the way to beat a gimmick was with a better gimmick”[54]. Thus, to outclass the poor quality of television programmes, studios developed new techniques, like stereoscopic three-dimensionality, and new formats like Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision and Panavision, that allowed the production of more and more wide-screen Technicolor blockbusters. Besides, to attract a new class of educated viewers, studios started producing neorealist art films such as Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thief. These new strategies favoured the production of “American films on the European model, films that would be both intellectually satisfying and titillating”[55], and producers therefore began to consider the adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s plays.
In only a few decades, Tennessee Williams’s plays developed from a regional to a national scope as they were produced in Broadway; and as they were taken to Hollywood, they reached an international dimension. However, adapting the plays for the screen was not as simple as producing them on the stage.
From the stage to the screen: the constraints of the adaptation process
The adaptation of theater works for the screen is a very frequent process, from classical plays to more modern ones, and Tennessee Williams was no exception, as fifteen of his plays were turned into films. But the success that his plays encountered among Hollywood producers must not conceal the complexity of the adaptation process: adapters were indeed confronted with three types of constraints. First, they had to deal with the formal differences between theater and film; then, they needed to compromise with the powerful studios; and finally, they had to negotiate with the censors.
1 Formal constraints
The first constraint that has to be taken into account while adapting a play for the screen is the essential difference between these two media. Theater and cinema are distinct artistic forms that do not appeal to the same public and do not operate in the same context. Maurice Yacowar, in the introduction to his compelling book Tennessee Williams and film[56], studies the three major compromises implied by the transition from the stage to the screen. The first compromise is formal: it is related to the artistic elements that distinguish these two media. Yacowar underscores the discrepancy between the “physical realism of the film image of life” and the “artificiality of the stage image”[57]. As defined in part IV of Aristotle’s Poetics, Tragedy is “an imitation of an action”: this definition can be extended to theater in general, as its formal or technical constraints prevent it from being more than “an imitation”. Cinema on the other hand offers a variety of devices – “lighting, set, props, sound effects, or camera angle”[58] – to convey an atmosphere or a message. The camera itself is the source of a major difference between the stage and the screen, as its tracking or zooming movements are highly significant. Because of the camera which acts as a prism between the public and the action, there is a change from a “single, fixed perspective” to a “variety of points of view”. In an article on the adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire for the screen, Gilles Menegaldo also underlines this specificity of the cinematic medium: “Comme le théâtre, le cinéma est un art du mouvement, mais alors que le théâtre repose sur le mouvement des acteurs et, occasionnellement, le déplacement d’objets et de décors, le cinéma ajoute une troisième catégorie de mouvements, ceux qui sont effectués par l’entremise de la caméra et qui induisent une modification de la perception du spectateur et une variation de la distance au sujet (ou à l’objet) filmé en fonction du cadrage adopté (échelle scalaire) ”[59] . The perception of the audience therefore varies from the stage to the screen. Moreover, the role of the actor also differs between these two media: in the theater, the actor’s presence is heightened by the absence of the many technical devices that are available in the cinema. As Yacowar puts it, “the actor is the expressive center on stage, while in the film the actor is only a part of the expressive whole”[60]. The audience’s perception of the actor is thus completely different, as the theater emphasizes his “physical presence” whereas the cinema reduces him to an “image”. This difference in the perception of the actor has two consequences. First of all, viewers are more likely to identify with the partial image that is shown to them on the screen than with the entire person they see on the stage. Besides, the image of an actor created by the screen tends to endure beyond one film and can actually turn into a consistent role or character. Yacowar remarks that many famous actors have developed a “continuing persona”[61] that appears in most of their films: he cites the examples of John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Buster Keaton, but this also applies to many other stars like Humphrey Bogart or Bette Davis. In the theater, plays are usually performed by more than one cast of actors, so that what matters to the audience is the mask and not the actor behind it. The theater does not create such a durable impression about its performers, and this confirms the idea that stage actors are expected to deliver more than stars of the screen. They have to be more expressive, because they do not have a reputation or an image that conveys a certain message about their character. Casting is therefore an essential element in the transition from the stage to the screen.
According to Yacowar, the second compromise inherent to this transition is not related to the theatrical and cinematic media themselves, but to the context in which they are presented. A movie theater is quite distinct from a traditional theater, and the shows that are performed in these two places are governed by different rules and traditions. The first one is the intermission that usually divides the performance of a play into two or more “separate segments”, and thus distinguishes the theatrical medium from the cinema which presents “a continuous flow of action”[62]. Besides, cinema is obviously a much more common form of entertainment than theater: films are reproducible, as they can be shown simultaneously in many places, but plays have a unique quality, as each performance takes place one particular day, on one particular stage. Menegaldo insists on the different temporalities that define the theater and the cinema: “La question se complique encore du fait de la multiplicité des représentations scéniques, mais aussi de leur caractère éphémère. Alors que le cinéma fixe les images sur une pellicule et peut reproduire le processus de projection (le film est réalisé une fois pour toutes), le spectacle vivant est par définition transitoire, non reproductible et ne se conserve, sauf exception, que sous forme de témoignages et de traces (visuelles ou verbales) fragmentaires”[63]. Because of this, the screening of a film has no exceptional value: “films are run several times an evening, with audiences coming and going at all times, eating, drinking, and chatting with something less than the reverence that the theatrical ‘event’ enjoys”[64]. The cinema industry does not enjoy the same standing, or appeal to the same public as the theater: it offers lower prices, and has a much broader scope. As Yacowar puts it, “film is a mass medium, while theater still is regarded as the interest of a small, sophisticated minority”[65]. Besides, in the case of Tennessee Williams’s plays, there is also a notable geographical, and thus sociological difference between the stage performances and the cinemas that showed the films. Most of Williams’s plays opened on Broadway, where they were performed for a very specific audience of demanding and cultured New Yorkers; but the films were screened throughout the country and viewed by a very mixed public. The cinema industry therefore has to follow stricter rules of decorum than the theater, in order to reach to the largest possible audience, and this has to be taken into account in the adaptation of a play of the screen.
The last, but not least compromise analysed by Yacowar is the necessary interaction and collaboration of the playwright with the film director. This relationship is obviously essential on the stage as well: for instance, the director can take liberties in the direction of the actors, and thus change the significance of certain dialogues or scenes. In his “Note of Explanation” in the published script of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams himself insisted on “the influence, its dangers and its values, of a powerful and highly imaginative director upon the development of a play, before and during production”[66]. This note has often been quoted as a sign of Williams’s dissatisfaction with Kazan’s authoritative influence, but he also underlines the positive effects that such collaboration can cause: “It does have dangers, but it has them only if the playwright is excessively malleable or submissive, or the director is excessively insistent on ideas or interpretations of his own. (…) No living playwright, that I can think of, hasn’t something valuable to learn about his own work from a director so keenly perceptive as Elia Kazan”[67]. In the cinema however, the director’s influence is much stronger than on the stage, as he is not following the text of the play, but a modified version of it: the screenplay. The adaptation of the text from one medium to another implies important compromises: “Whole scenes can be omitted so that the three hours traffic of the stage can be compressed into the conventional ninety minutes of the feature film”[68]. Besides, the director has complete latitude as regards the technical aspect of the adaptation, as he decides how to film the scenes. A simple camera move like a close-up can indeed transform the meaning of a scene, by eclipsing certain elements or characters and focusing on others. However, Yacowar finally remarks that some alterations can be justified for the sake of naturalism or fidelity to the original: “Most obviously, a film may open out the action in order to avoid the impression that a restricted atmosphere is part of the import of the play. For while a single set is natural in theater, it is uncommon in film”[69]. To protect the meaning of a play, and to avoid subverting it with unnecessary modifications, the adaptation would have to be made through a close collaboration between the playwright and the director.
Yacowar shows that filming a play involves several internal compromises; and the adaptation process is made even more complex by external factors.
2 Commercial constraints: the law of the studios
Adapting Tennessee Williams’s plays for the screen involved commercial compromises, because Broadway and Hollywood were governed by different production systems.
1 Hollywood in the 1950s: the end of the Golden Age
The Hollywood cinema industry of the 1950s was dominated by eight companies. The five major production studios were Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros. and RKO. What allowed these studios to prevail over the film industry was their affiliation with distribution companies and theater chains – for instance, MGM’s parent company Loew’s Inc. was a small chain but it included several well-placed first-run theaters, particularly in New York City[70]. The last three studios were Columbia Pictures Corporation, Universal Pictures and United Artists, which was founded by actors and directors. These companies were also quite profitable but they were considered minor because they did not own theater chains. Instead of competing with the blockbusters produced by the major studios, Columbia and Universal were specialized in low-cost “B” movies, but they sometimes produced more expensive films as well. In spite of the domination of these eight studios, Hollywood also involved independent producers. As defined by Peter Lev, independent production “refers to a move away from a factory-like system where all aspects of a production are handled by studio employees, and toward a flexible, free-lance system where the personnel and other elements of a production are assembled for each individual film”[71]. Independent producers were often talent agents as well, like Charles K. Feldman who obtained a waiver from the Screen Actors Guild in order to combine both functions. As the cinema industry began its decline, independent producers could not count on the support of the banks, and had to turn to the studios for financial agreements.
For the American motion picture industry, the 1950s were a decade of change and, more precisely, of decline: the Golden Age of Hollywood that had lasted for thirty years was drawing to a close. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 1947 and 1957, weekly motion-picture attendance in the U.S. dropped from 90 million to 45 million. Peter Lev accounts for this sharp decrease with two factors, which correspond to two different periods: the post-war years, and then the decade of the 1950s. Lev explains that “in the late 1940s the drop-off was largely a readjustment after some unusual wartime and postwartime conditions. During and just after World War II, people had money and relatively few ways to spend it. Gasoline was rationed, many commodities were reserved for the war effort, and the movies enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the entertainment business”[72]. The decisive factor came in the 1950s with the development of television: Lev remarks that in April 1948, only twenty commercial televisions were broadcasting in the United States, and that in 1950, more than 7.3 million television sets were sold in the country. Lev presents three other factors that explain the sharp decline of movie attendance from the end of the 1940s: the anti-trust case that put an end to the studios’ vertical integration system, the decline of foreign markets, particularly European, and the attacks of the HUAC and other citizens’ groups.
2 New trends: the law of the box-office
These difficulties led the producers to an unexpected conclusion: “the reason people stayed home was that there weren’t enough good pictures”[73]. The decline of cinema attendance triggered new trends in Hollywood: the rise of independent production, the elaboration of new cinematic techniques, and the development of genre films, such as musicals, film noir, war films, westerns or melodrama. But in the longer run, the consequences of these difficulties were mostly financial: banks were less inclined to invest in the motion-picture industry unless they had some guarantee of success. The anti-trust decision was partly responsible for this change: “since each picture had to be marketed individually, there was no guarantee of first-run play dates until after the picture had been completed and previewed, and no idea of total bookings until after the first-run returns”[74]. In order to find favour with the public, and thus with financial institutions, producers had to resort to new strategies: “to win [the] approval [of the bankers] a picture had to have proven box-office stars and traditionally effective stories or formulas”[75]. Sklar mentions another significant element: the replacement of the old studios moguls – Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn from MGM, Harry Cohn from Columbia, Darryl Zanuck from Twentieth Century-Fox, among others – by a new generation of younger producers, who adopted an extreme position. As Sklar puts it, “It was as if the rules of baseball had been changed so that the only hit that mattered was a home run. The studios became interested only in the motion-picture equivalent of a home-run”[76].
The movies that were made from Williams’s plays were no exception, as most of them were produced or co-produced and distributed by the largest Hollywood studios. Because of agreements between production studios and distribution companies on the one hand, and independent agents and production studios on the other hand, many films were produced through a cooperative system. This was the case for most of the movies that were made from Williams’s plays. The Glass Menagerie was produced by Charles K. Feldman in 1950 and distributed by Warner Bros. A Streetcar Named Desire was produced by Charles K. Feldman and Warner Bros. Pictures in 1951, and distributed by Warner Bros. Baby Doll was produced by Newtown Productions in 1956 and distributed by Warner Bros. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Avon Productions in 1958 and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Suddenly Last Summer was produced by Columbia Pictures Corporation, Horizon Films, Academy Productions and Camp Productions in 1959, and distributed by Columbia. Sweet Bird of Youth was produced by Roxbury Productions Inc. and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1962. The Night of the Iguana was produced by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer and Seven Arts Productions in 1964, and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In most cases, the studios placed conditions on the casting or on the scenario to correspond to the ideal movie: “big-name stars, proven formula, pre-sold title from a best-selling novel or Broadway hit musical or play”[77]. This even occurred with partly independent productions, like The Glass Menagerie, and the changes were clearly detrimental to the movie: Yacowar explains that “the cast of big names did not meet the artistic needs of the play. Laura’s fragility and delicacy are lost in the vigor, solidity, and discretion that characterized Jane Wyman’s persona as The Indomitable Sufferer from Johnny Belinda (1948) on”[78]. The same phenomenon can be observed in the movie Sweet bird of Youth: the casting of Paul Newman as Chance Wayne led to a simplification of his character, as the producers were not willing to debase such a star. Newman had played the same role in the first Broadway production of the play, but his persona as a movie star had evolved since then, and it influenced his characterization of Chance in the movie. As Sklar puts it, “there is no question that the emphasis on these [new box-office trends] helped make Hollywood’s product more timid, trite and conventional”[79].
Commercial constraints are undoubtedly an essential element to take into account while adapting a play into a movie, as the imperatives of the production studios can transform the meaning of a movie. Besides, the producers themselves were subjected to the influence of the censorship authorities.
3 Legal and moral constraints: the law of the censors
The Hollywood cinema industry of the 1950s was governed by a set of very strict rules of censorship and controlled by two main agencies: the Production Code Administration, and the Catholic Legion of Decency. These regulations did not exist in the theater, and they had to be taken into account while adapting plays into films. Peter Lev studies these authorities in a chapter entitled “Censorship and Self-Regulation”[80].
The Production Code Administration (PCA) was founded within the cinema industry to control the moral standards of the films and avoid external censorship. It worked with the cinema industry itself, i.e., with studios and producers. The Motion Picture Production Code was written in 1929 by the Jesuit priest Daniel J. Lord and the publisher Martin J. Quigley, a Catholic who owned film industry trade papers; and it was adopted by the film industry trade association, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), in 1930[81]. The “General Principles” of the Code were as follows:
“1. No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
2. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.
3. Law – divine, natural or human – shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.”
These principles were followed by a series of “Particular Applications” that regarded topics such as crime, brutality, sex, vulgarity, obscenity, costumes, or religion. Lev explains that the PCA evolved from a merely advisory position to an obligatory status, partly because of MPPDA chairman Will H. Hays’s influence. In 1934, the PCA became part of the MPPDA, and all the distributors who were members of the trade association had to submit their scripts and their films to the PCA and obtain its “Seal of Approval” before releasing them. Joseph Breen, one of Hays’s assistants and a Catholic layman, was appointed head of the PCA and according to Lev, this decision reflects the pro-Catholic inclination of the Administration in the 1940s and 1950s. The Catholic Church indeed exerted more influence on the film industry than the numerically superior but divided Council of Churches of Christ. However, as defined by Martin Quigley, who remained an unofficial advisor to the PCA for many years, the main source for the principles of the Production Code was “the Ten Commandments, the basic moral charter of all the religions of the Judean-Christian civilization”[82]. Lev concludes that “the Catholic influence on the PCA had more to do with the politics of decision-making than with the Code itself”[83]. Joseph Breen himself did not base his decisions strictly on the written provisions of the Code – he reportedly told a staff member: “Just you listen to me. I am the Code!”[84]. However, his power was limited by economic factors, as the PCA and the MPAA (that succeeded to the MPPDA) were financed by the studios. The censors’ work was therefore made of negotiation rather than unilateral decisions: “for those films that had Code problems, the PCA would work with the producers (usually at script stage, occasionally after filming) to suggest solutions”[85]. This was notably the case for A Streetcar Named Desire, as the film was the fruit of a long negotiation process between Kazan, Williams and Breen. Conflicts between filmmakers and the PCA increased in the 1950s as social and moral standards changed in postwar America: the transformations of society were reflected in the movies, and the economic difficulties of the studios led them to emphasize sensational subjects to appeal to the audience. After a few years and several disputes over movies such as A Streetcar Named Desire, the Code was revised in 1956: Breen had been replaced by the Protestant Geoffrey Shurlock, who was “less dogmatic and less confrontational”, and governed the PCA with more pragmatism. Despite Shurlock’s new agenda, the reform of the Code was modest: the main changes regarded subjects like abortion, childbirth or drug addiction, and the treatment of homosexuality was still prohibited. However, by the end of the decade, interpretation of the Code had become more and more liberal, and the MPAA began considering more flexible ratings, by age groups.
The Catholic Legion of Decency was the second group that exerted influence on the American cinema of the 1950s. It was founded in 1934, to pressure both the Production Code Administration and the film studios. Originally, the Legion worked with a pledge system, whereby Catholics committed themselves not to attend immoral movies. In 1936, a National Legion of Decency office was founded in New York, and it rated the weekly releases according to the following categories:
A-I: Morally Unobjectionable for General Patronage
A-II: Morally Unobjectionable for Adults
B: Morally Objectionable in Part for All
C: Condemned[86]
Most films were previewed by the Legion Office, and re-cut by filmmakers in order to avoid a C rating and organized boycotting from Catholics. Producers respected these regulations, and even agreed to work with the consultants offered by the Legion when the script mentioned the Catholic Church. The Legion was all the more influent as it collaborated with the PCA: men like Martin Quigley and Jack Vizzard served as intermediaries between the two authorities, which often consulted each other. The influence of the Catholic Legion of Decency started decreasing when producers realized that their objections were not always detrimental to the success of their films: sometimes, the ratings of the Legion even caused publicity and thus helped improve box-office results. Nevertheless, the Legion’s decision on Baby Doll, released in 1956, had a strong influence on the audience. Lev remarks that several aspects of the script could appear as shocking: the triangular relationship between Archie Lee Meighan, his underage bride Baby Doll, and the attractive Silva Vacarro; Baby Doll’s suggestive postures in her crib; and the treatment of adultery. The PCA had objected to an early version of the script in 1952, but in 1956 the censors were more tolerant and they agreed to negotiate with Kazan on certain aspects of the movie. Catholics were outraged by Shurlock’s loose interpretation of the Code, and by this accommodation with a film that they perceived as “evil in concept” and “certain to exert an immoral and corrupting influence on those who see it”[87]. The Catholic Church therefore launched a massive campaign against the movie: Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York denounced it from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and he was followed by other clergymen who called for a boycott of the film. The Church exerted pressure on theater owners, threatening them with a six-month boycott if they showed the movie, and despite some criticism, notably from other religious groups, this campaign actually succeeded. As a result of the Catholic Legion of Decency’s action, the release of Baby Doll was limited and the film was a commercial failure. By the end of the 1950s however, the Legion evolved with society and with the Catholic Church, and changed its categories: A-II became “Acceptable for Adults and Adolescents”, and a new category, A-III “Acceptable for Adults”, was created. According to Lev, this new category allowed more flexible ratings: “this reduced the number of films rated B (objectionable though not condemned), and therefore smoothed relationships between the Legion, the studios, and the film audience”[88].
Through Lev’s article, censorship appears more as a careful negotiation process than as a series of strong, irrevocable decisions. The PCA was first and foremost an internal organ, which worked in collaboration with the studios. However, the influence of the PCA and of the Catholic Legion of Decency were sufficient to ruin the box-office results of a film, therefore their regulations had to be taken into account while adapting Williams’s controversial plays into films.
The adaptation of Williams’s plays for the screen appears as a complicated process, first of all because of irreducible formal differences, but also because of the historical context in which it took place. Besides, Williams’s plays were particularly likely to suffer from the diktats imposed by the studios and the censors, as they dealt with subtle, controversial and sombre themes, thus running counter to the “happy-ending” formula favoured in Hollywood in the 1950s.
Williams’s plays on the screen
The adaptation of Williams’s plays for the screen was a complex process that had controversial results. These films, which are usually considered as cinema classics, differ significantly from the plays they are based on, and with the exception of A Streetcar Named Desire, which was adapted in special circumstances, they have given rise to a great deal of dissent.
1 Comparative study of the stage and screen versions
Comparing the stage and screen versions of Williams’s plays with a critical eye is a difficult task, as most of the film versions of his plays were transformed: controversial elements such as violence, sex or homosexuality were rejected by the studios or the censors, and therefore amputated from the movies. Besides, other changes were made by the directors or the screenwriters, as Williams’s contribution to the screenplays was variable. The article “Film Adaptations”[89] in The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia is an objective summary of the various processes of adaptation of Williams’s plays: Gene Phillips’s neutral approach is very valuable considering the controversies provoked by many of the movies. Maurice Yacowar’s study, in Tennessee Williams and Film[90], is a more detailed and subjective critical source: Yacowar indeed insists on the cinematic techniques that convey – or fail to convey, in some cases – the meaning of the plays, and he tackles the value of the changes that were made by the directors.
In the 1950 adaptation of The Glass Menagerie, filmed by Irving Rapper, Williams is credited as writer of the screenplay, along with Peter Berneis. In fact, he only wrote a few scenes, and the original script was changed to suit the public’s taste for romance: a romantic touch was added to the scene between Kirk Douglas (The Gentleman Caller) and Jane Wyman (Laura), and at the end of the movie, after Jim O’Connor leaves, he is replaced by a new gentleman caller. The film was later adapted for the television in 1973 as a teleplay, and in 1987 as a movie. The Glass Menagerie was filmed for the second time in 1987, by Paul Newman. The film was made for the television, and the cast included Joanne Woodward as Amanda and John Malkovich as Tom. Newman and his wife Woodward had successfully worked on this play in the theater before and they were therefore ready to take it to the screen. The screenplay was Williams’s script, and unlike the 1950 version by Irving Rapper, the adaptation was very faithful: the ending was as sad and hopeless as in the play.
For A Streetcar Named Desire, filmed in 1951 by Elia Kazan, Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration, objected to three elements (aside from a few crude remarks that were toned down) : “an inference of sex perversion with reference to the character of Blanche’s young husband, Allan Grey, [as] there seems little doubt that this young man was a homosexual”, “an inference of nymphomania with regards to the character of Blanche herself”, and “the reference to the rape which is both justified and unpunished”[91]. In an effort to abide with these regulations, Kazan and Williams had to cut some scenes from the movie, and modify others. All references to the homosexuality of Blanche’s late husband were erased, and Blanche’s nymphomania was turned into “a product of her search for romance and security, and not for gross sex”[92]. As Williams considered the rape as crucial to the plot, he and Kazan had to find a compromise: the rape scene itself would be made implicit, and Stanley would be punished in the end. Kazan managed to make the last scene of the movie perfectly ambiguous: Stella, who had sought refuge in her neighbour’s flat, repeated that she was not going back to Stanley, and the audience could only guess whether she would change her mind or not. The uncut version of the movie that was released in 1993, though is only differs from the original by four minutes of footage, evidences the influence of the censors on the adaptation.
Baby Doll was filmed in 1956 by Elia Kazan, from a screenplay written by Williams specifically for the occasion. The film was highly controversial: it was considered “immoral” by the Catholic Legion of Decency because of its strong sexual undertones, and though it was intended by Williams as a comedy, Kazan filmed it as a social movie, with realistic techniques. However, Kazan was generally faithful to the Williams’s ideas: for instance, the introductory shot of the film, which shows the dilapidated house, stands in sharp contrast with the end of the movie when Baby Doll and Vacarro are hiding in lush trees. According to Yacowar, these images can be understood as symbols of Vacarro’s fertility as opposed to Archie’s sterility and decay: “For in his manner and in his marriage, Archie is out of tune with nature. He is outside the fertility cycle, for he has imposed himself upon an unwilling wife”[93].
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was filmed in 1958, from a script written by the director, Richard Brooks, in collaboration with James Poe. Brooks was intent on adapting the play as faithfully as possible, but he also had to respect the taboos that dominated the film industry at that time. In the film, all clear references to Brick’s latent homosexuality were erased: Big Daddy only blames him for being irresponsible, and his relationship with Skipper is depicted as mere friendship, and not as the reason for the failure of his marriage. All references to sex in general, and to the church, were also toned down to suit the proprieties and the public. According to Yacowar[94], the casting is in line with Williams’s characters, particularly as regards Maggie and Brick, as Brooks’s treatment of Brick’s sexuality seemed to point towards homosexuality. As for Brooks’s additions, they are mostly outdoor scenes: some of them show the spectator events that were merely described in the play, while others, according to Yacowar, are symbolic of exposure and truth:
“[These scenes] are used to express the expansive spirit of Big Daddy. In the first, he has his fields and racehorses behind him as he tells Maggie, “I’m gonna live… I got so many feelings in me and I’m gonna use them all.” This scene does not occur in the play, but it demonstrates what Maggie told Brick, that Big Daddy prefers them over Mae and Gooper. […] Big Daddy needs open-air scenes to suggest his energy and power, and, of course, the scene sets up a dramatic contrast to the dingy basement to which Big Daddy retreats when he learns that he is dying”[95].
Another change consisted in expanding the scene[96] in which Big Daddy tells Brick about his possessions:
“Big Daddy: We got that clock the summer we wint to Europe, me an’ Big Mama on that damn Cook’s tour, never had such an awful time in my life, I’m tellin’ you, son, those gooks over there, they gouge your eyeballs out in their grand hotels. And Big Mama bought more stuff than you could haul in a couple of boxcards, that’s no crap. Everywhere she wint on this whirlwind tour, she bought, bought, bought. Why, half that stuff she bought is still crated up in the cellar, under water last spring!
[He laughs.]
That Europe is nothin’ on earth but a great big auction, that’s all it is, that bunch of old worn-out places, it’s just a big fire-sale, the whole rutten thing, an’ Big Mama wint wild in it, why, you couldn’t hold that woman with a mule’s harness! Bought, bought, bought! – lucky I’m a rich man, yes siree, Bob, an’ half that stuff is mildewin’ in th’ basement. It’s lucky I’m a rich man, it sure is lucky, well, I’m a rich man, Brick, yep, I’m a mighty rich man.
[His eyes light up for a moment.]
Y’know how much I’m worth? Guess, Brick! Guess how much I’m worth!
[Brick smiles vaguely over his drink.]
Close on ten million in cash an’ blue chip stocks, outside, mind you, of twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile!
[A puff and crackle and the night sky blooms with an eerie greenish glow. Children shriek on the gallery.]
But a man can’t buy his life with it, he can’t buy back his life with it when his life has been spent, that’s one thing not offered in the Europe fire-sale or in the American markets or any markets on earth, a man can’t buy his life with it, he can’t buy back his life when his life is finished…”[97]
In the film, this part of the scene is moved and expanded, and for Yacowar, this change alters the meaning of the whole movie. Two teleplays of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were also produced in 1974 and 1984, in an effort to present the controversial elements of the play more explicitly.
Suddenly Last Summer was adapted in 1959 by Gore Vidal (as screenwriter) and Joseph Mankiewicz (as director). The cast included three Hollywood stars: Montgomery Clift as Dr. Cukrowicz, Katharine Hepburn as Mrs. Venable and Elizabeth Taylor as Catherine. Yacowar states that the adaptation of this play posed three problems. First, it contained many disturbing elements, such as “homosexuality, nymphomania, rape, cannibalism, voyeurism, and a pinch of prefrontal lobotomy”[98]; second, its setting was surreal and fantastic; and third, it was usually performed with its sister play, Something Unspoken, whose realism provided a good balance. Because of its moral ending, the Catholic Legion of Decency did not object to the play being turned into a film. Besides, the controversial themes of homosexuality and cannibalism were considered central to the plot, as Sebastian Venable is killed and eaten by the young boys with whom he had sexual relations: because of this, the script was accepted by the Production Code Administration. But the last two problems demanded adaptation and expansion of the text. Yacowar underlines the fact that Suddenly Last Summer deals with central themes in Williams’s vision: refusal of reality and solipsism; difference, as opposed to uniformity; and the savagery that lies beneath civilization. In Mankiewicz’s movie, nature is omnipresent, as a metaphor for civilized savagery, and the mental wards are clearly shown, to add to the horror of Catherine’s fate. One of Mankiewicz’s main changes was the development of the character of Dr. Cukrowicz: he was presented as a warmer, more sensitive man, and his romance with Catherine was also added as a box-office concession. As Yacowar puts it, “when Catherine calls him Dr. Sugar, she is translating both his name and his nature”[99]. Mankiewicz’s most important addition concerns Catherine’s long monologue at the end of the movie: Sebastian’s horrid death is actually shown on the screen while she relates it, with a mixture of realism and fantasy that leaves certain ambiguity.
Sweet Bird of Youth was filmed in 1962 by Richard Brooks, with Paul Newman and Geraldine Page, who were both in the first Broadway performance of the play. But apart from this, Yacowar[100] shows that the film was quite different from the stage production: most references to the murkiest elements of the play (venereal disease, sterilization, prostitution, impotence and castration) were toned down in the movie, and the audience was made to sympathize with the three pathetic, faded beauties (Chance Wayne, Heavenly Finley and the Princess Kosmonopolis) of the play. According to Yacowar, “this optimism pervades the film”[101]: the ending was significantly changed, as all the characters are granted a fresh start in spite of their corruption. In the play, Chance Wayne is castrated and no hope of happiness is left for him; but in the film, he is only beaten by Boss Finley’s men, and he manages to escape with Heavenly. Yacowar finally underlines the fact that the one optimistic message in Williams’s play is erased by Brooks’s adaptation: in the play, the Princess’s frozen heart resurrects as she asks Chance to leave with her; but in the movie, Tom Finley threatens her into doing so.
The Night of the Iguana, directed by John Huston in 1964, is considered as one of the best adaptations of a Williams play. The script was written by Huston and Anthony Veiller and overseen by Williams, and it is quite faithful to the text of the play. Though the atmosphere of the movie is quite similar to that of the play, Yacowar argues that Huston’s film was intended as more cheerful than the pessimistic play: “John Huston has always expressed a more robust spirit than Williams has, a vision less blackly lined with defeat and destruction and one where the joys of life and of the quest make up for loss and defeat. As a result, the film of The Night of the Iguana has a slightly more positive spirit than the play”[102]. The casting served that purpose: the choice of Richard Burton, a notably lustful persona, made it unnecessary for the actor to overact his part, and the choice of Ava Gardner allowed Maxine to become a much more positive figure than the original character. Yacowar points out to three other elements that contribute to the cheering up of the movie: the vivid setting of the film; the positive message of the last word, uttered by Maxine instead of Hannah; and the presence of the restless beach boys.
The observation of the differences and similarities between the plays and the films sheds light on the difficulty of the adaptation process, and on the multiplicity of factors that influence it. However, it appears that among the fifteen film adaptations that were made from Tennessee Williams’s plays, A Streetcar Named Desire clearly stands apart.
2 The case of A Streetcar Named Desire
A Streetcar Named Desire was indeed made in exceptional circumstances. First of all, its production mode was original, as it was made as a partly independent project, financed by Charles Feldman and Warner Brothers: “the conditions within the American film industry that resulted in large part from the studios’ financial difficulties made it possible for Williams’s play to be purchased and conceived as an independent commercial project, with hopes of its being adapted in a more or less “faithful” fashion. Kazan’s version of A Streetcar Named Desire would have been unthinkable during the heights of studio success” [103]. Gilles Menegaldo also insists on the unique quality of this film: “Cette question de l’adaptation du texte à l’écran se pose de manière assez particulière à propos de A Streetcar Named Desire dans la mesure où Elia Kazan, le réalisateur du film, est aussi le metteur en scène de la pièce qu’il crée à Broadway en 1947. Cette spécificité vient également de la collaboration, très étroite, entre Kazan et Tennessee Williams, auteur de la pièce et co-scénariste du film, un cas assez rare et dont on trouve des échos tant dans les écrits de Williams que dans ceux de Kazan ”[104]. A Streetcar Named Desire can indeed be considered as an exemplary adaptation, since it was first and foremost an “opportunity”[105], an artistic challenge for both Kazan and Williams, whose work for the stage production had already proved efficient in 1947. Amelie Moisy[106] presents an interesting study of their collaboration, as she traces its genesis from the inside, with extracts from the two men’s autobiographies. Through these prime sources, the adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire really appears as a well thought-out project for both the playwright and the director. Moisy shows that in the beginning, despite the tremendous stage success of the play, Kazan was not very enthusiastic about taking it to the screen, and Williams had to talk him into it. Kazan eventually accepted, and he became very engaged in the project. At first, he wanted to expand the play by adding scenes that would present backgrounds for Blanche and Stanley:
“I could “open up” Streetcar, make the play into a proper film by putting on screen everything that Blanche describes in dialogue about Belle Reve and her last days there. The scenes were all described in her speeches. I’d get out of that tight little stage setting, those two miserable rooms. I’d photograph the old family place and the dying deaf woman within, the night scene with the young drunken trainees on the lawn calling “Blanche! Blanche!” and how she’d go out to them, what happened then, and show the paddy wagon the next morning picking up the young soldiers. I’d photograph the day Blanche was run out of town and the unyielding faces of the townspeople, glad to be quit of her. I’d film all this somewhere in the delta country of southern Mississippi, get on film something truer and more telling than what we had on stage”[107].
However, he quickly realized that “the force of the play had come precisely from its compression, from the fact that Blanche was trapped (…) Everything we’d done to “open up” the play diluted its power (…) I decided to photograph what we’d had on stage, simply that”[108]. Gilles Menegaldo[109] underlines the fact that the casting of the movie was consistent with this approach: with only one exception, all the actors were the same as in the Broadway production. For the role of Blanche however, the Warner Brothers studio required a star as a box-office concession, and the actress Vivien Leigh was finally chosen. Kazan was quite hesitant at first, but this decision was actually rather relevant, since the public knew her through the role of another Southern Belle, Scarlett O’Hara, and since she had already played Blanche in the London production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Moisy argues that the actors, and particularly Leigh, succeeded in bringing Williams’s characters to life on the screen: “Leigh’s “artificial” acting is in keeping with the calculating character of Blanche. Yet the actress, who was manic depressive, had experienced the distress of rioting perceptions of reality. Her panic before the rape, and her “adjustment” to the doctor, are poignant, and make Kazan’s effects, the echoing “Now, Blanche[110]”, for example, overstated to a sensitive viewer”[111].
As regards the direction, Kazan and Williams resolved to adopt an expressionistic technique of “filmed theatre”, in order to be as faithful to the play as possible: the unity of space was maintained, and thanks to a system of movable walls, the set shrank as the movie advanced to show Blanche’s feeling of confinement. Moisy points out other similarities, for instance Williams’s image of “a moth beating its wings against a wall”, taken up in the rape scene where “Blanche, in her gauzy dress, conveyed a moth’s “mortal panic””[112]. Yacowar also remarks that Kazan changed the very atmosphere of the movie, to make it more oppressive:
“the steam and the sweating crowds of jostling strangers set up the heat motif. Blanche cannot escape the discomfort of heat, emblematic both of her own sensuality and of the pressure of other people’s presence upon her. Kowalski sweats from his physical enthusiasms. Mitch sweats from his tensions, as he wavers between Kowalski’s vision and Blanche’s. Fever pervades the film. Even neighbour Eunice is associated with the pattern, as she threatens the cardplayers with a kettle of boiling water. Paradoxically, Blanche’s refuge from the heat is hot baths; similarly, her romanticism leads her to satisfy her sensuality, as well as to flee it”[113].
Moisy also considers that Kazan’s innovations were generally in line with Williams’s vision: “Arguably, Kazan’s expressionistic technique is more oppressive on film than in the intrinsically distanced and colourful live production; some of these disorientating techniques set A Streetcar Named Desire in the film noir genre, and it may even be seen as projecting the stereotyped misogyny of noir”[114].
Menegaldo’s close study of the variations between the play and the script of the film shows that they differ significantly, but that Kazan’s changes are generally justified: for instance, if in one scene he makes Stanley appear less mean than in the play, he compensates this by reinforcing his cruelty in another one. The broken mirror that reflects the rape scene in the movie is another example of the relevance of Kazan’s changes, and Menegaldo and Yacowar agree on its symbolic value : “Le motif du miroir brisé est un moyen efficace et élégant de suggérer la violence physique de l’agression, mais aussi la désintégration psychique de Blanche”[115] ; “the mirror is an image of Blanche’s shattered composure and self-respect”[116]. As for the streetcleaner’s fire hose that appears immediately after the mirror scene, it appears as an ambiguous image. On a first level, it can undoubtedly be understood as a phallic symbol, an therefore as a metaphorical representation of the rape, but Yacowar insists on the ambiguity of this image:
“As bawdry, it tempts us into Stanley’s view, that the affected Blanche is trash, which needs to be washed away by his purifying, direct force. This sense agrees with the “raffish charm” that the screenplay (p.338) described in Kowalski’s furnishings. From Blanche’s perspective, however, the shot expresses her shame and the blow to her self-respect caused by the rape and then Stella’s disbelief. Eunice’s line gives the image yet another meaning: it suggests that Stanley, formerly a victim of the hose and treated as trash by the regularizing forces in society, is now enjoying a kind of revenge by bringing Blanche down to his level. Finally, the image relates to the succeeding scene, where we see the Kowalski baby in his carriage. From this perspective, the characters are washing aside the embarrassing past in order to begin life anew”[117].
These examples show the extreme level of complicity between Kazan and Williams: despite numerous censorship regulations and resulting changes to the text, the two men were able to keep the film faithful to the message of the play. Besides, Kazan’s artistic liberties as a director also served Williams’s subtle and ambiguous vision.
A Streetcar Named Desire is an exceptional case, as most of the movies that were made from Williams’s plays have been criticized for betraying the original text.
3 Differing opinions on the adaptations
The film adaptations of Tennessee Williams’s plays have given rise to differing opinions. Because of the necessary changes made to the original text, and of the liberties taken by film directors, Williams disapproved of most of the movies. However, some critics have a kinder approach as they acknowledge the intrinsic value of the films, regardless of the plays.
1 Williams’s opinion on the films
Tennessee Williams cast a very critical eye on the films that were made from his plays. The first Williams’s play to be adapted for the screen, The Glass Menagerie, did not augur well for the following adaptations, as the happy ending added by the studio completely transformed the meaning of the play. Williams considered it as the “worst adaptation of his work”[118]: for him, it “represented a complete reversal of the intent of the play”, which “infuriated him”[119]. In an interview, he even called the movie “the most awful travesty of the play I’ve ever seen … horribly mangled by the people who did the film-script”[120]. Williams was more satisfied with the following adaptation, A Streetcar Named Desire, though he disapproved of the ambiguous ending and considered the censorship of Allan Grey’s homosexuality a deplorable change[121], according to Phillips. For Cat on Hot Tin Roof, he did not make specific objections, but said that the film lacked the “purity”[122] of the play. According to him, the film “was jazzed up, hoked up a bit”[123] and as a result, it was “somehow, not quite what [he] meant to say”[124]. His opinion on Suddenly Last Summer was more clear-cut: he said that he “loathed”[125] the film because the allegorical dimension of the play was not translated on the screen. According to him, the play was turned into “a literal film, which made it absolutely unbelievable … and rather distasteful”[126]. Strangely enough, Williams was more pleased with Sweet Bird of Youth, in spite of Brooks’s numerous changes: he said that the film “was probably better than the play”[127], which probably means, according to Yacowar, that he was quite unsatisfied with his text. As for The Night of the Iguana, Williams did not appreciate Huston’s efforts to remain faithful to the play, and he said that he disliked the film[128].
2 Critical reception of the movies
Williams’s outright views on the movies were generally not shared by the critics. Though most commentators agree on the poor quality of the 1950 adaptation of The Glass Menagerie, and on the outstanding value of the 1951 film A Streetcar Named Desire, their judgment is not as categorical for the other movies. Notwithstanding its box-office failure, Baby Doll is generally considered a good film, and Yacowar even calls it “remarkable”: “There is horror in the fire scene, fright in the attic chase, sensuality in the posture of Baby Doll, and a stern moral view overall, but the film remains extremely funny. It is Williams’s best film comedy”[129]. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, on the contrary, was a huge commercial success, but it was not very well received by contemporary reviewers, who, according to Yacowar, found the adaptation “too mechanical”[130]. Yacowar himself was quite critical towards the film: he called it “a creative, faithful performance of the text but with a single, albeit disastrous, lapse in discretion”[131], i.e., the expansion of the scene in which Big Daddy tells Brick about his possessions. For Yacowar, this new scene reduced Big Daddy to a stock character, and it changed the play’s message from an attack on mendacity, to a trite criticism of materialism. However, Phillips considers that “given the taboos that existed in the film industry in the 1950s, Brooks conscientiously adapted Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to the screen”[132]. Phillips also praises the adaptation of Suddenly Last Summer: according to him, although it was not completely faithful to the play, its value lay in its groundbreaking treatment of censored elements. He calls it “a breakthrough film that dealt with homosexuality with integrity, presenting the officially prohibited subject in a way neither A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof could have done”. Yacowar also praises the film, calling it “one of the best “free” adaptations of modern drama that we have on film”[133]: according to him, the romance between Catherine and Dr. Cukrowicz is in line with the spirit of the play, and the doctor’s moral dilemma between responsibility and love provides a familiar moral that spectators can relate to. Critics disagree on the 1962 adaptation of Sweet Bird of Youth: Phillips observes that despite the director’s changes, “Williams’s message about the inevitable loss of youth, and the futility of trying to prolong it, still came through”[134]. Yacowar, on the other hand, calls this adaptation “criminal”[135]: for him, Williams’s sombre play on the transient nature of youth and innocence was turned into a film on love versus ambition. He asserts that although the films had some qualities, on the whole, Brooks completely simplified and subverted Williams’s message: “the film seems undermined by the very philistinism anatomized in the play”[136]. For The Night of the Iguana, Phillips acknowledges Huston’s effort to retain “much of Williams’s verbal and physical imagery” in the film, and he considers it as “a genuinely cinematic film, a valid adaptation of Williams’s work”[137]. Yacowar also considers as a faithful adaptation of the original text: “it is true to the play, if one allows for the director’s option of personal emphasis in his interpretation”[138]. He demonstrates that even though Huston’s interpretation is clearly lighter than Williams’s view, “there is the same spirit in the two men”[139].
3 “A new type of Hollywood film”
Another critical viewpoint consists in examining the Williams movies per se, a new cinematographic genre. Barton Palmer asserts that the films that were made from Williams’s plays have led to “a new type of Hollywood film”, intended for an adult audience. A close study of A Streetcar Named Desire shows how the main two protagonists embody a reversal of traditional gender roles, as the female becomes a desiring subject while the male is objectified: “the most important aspect of Williams’s vision is that his male characters are less the bearers of sexual desire – the traditional male role in American theatre and film – and more its object”[140]. A Streetcar Named Desire appears as “the first adult film”[141], or “adult art film” [142], because of “its startling differences from the standard Hollywood movie in the representation of sexual themes”[143] and its “powerfully moving if bleak examination of the human condition”[144]. According to Palmer, these trends were pursued in the following movies, particularly Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth, two films whose “primary appeal is emotional, not intellectual” [145], and that offer a “thorough-going eroticization of the male body”[146]. The highly visual quality of the cinematographic art is what allowed the films to surpass the plays: only in the film version did Stanley Kowalski’s T-shirt become an “emblem of unrestrained and unabashed sensuality”[147]. Palmer observes that the originality of Williams’s plays was partly toned down in the films, and that, as a result, the cinematographic products are inferior artistically to the literary works. Nevertheless, he underlines the innovative quality of the movies: “if the American cinema of the late fifties, sixties, and early seventies is densely populated by attractive yet emotionally sensitive men who lack decisiveness and are prone to failure, then Tennessee Williams must be credited for inaugurating what is, in part, a revolution in taste, but also, and more important, a transformation of the national character”[148]. The film adaptations of Williams’s plays should therefore be praised not only for creating new types of cinematographic characters and giving rise to a whole new genre, but also, beyond the big screen, for presenting a revolutionary conception of society.
The seven Tennessee Williams movies I studied are particularly interesting, as they are universally considered as classics, but they do not create a consensus of opinion. On the contrary, their distance from Williams’s plays questions the traditional idea that a film adaptation should be the perfect imitation of the play it is based on.
Conclusion
In spite of tremendous commercial success, the adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s works for the screen was clouded by the playwright’s dissatisfaction, as he was unhappy with many of the films that were made from his plays. Because they are harsh and yet subtle works, and because they were written at the time of the PCA, the adaptation of Williams’s plays was a two-fold issue, with the risks of excessive sensationalism on the one hand, and reductive censorship on the other. Adapters were confronted with a complex task, and while some of them lapsed into simplification – in The Glass Menagerie for instance –, others were on the verge of exaggeration – in Suddenly Last Summer. The films that were made from Williams’s plays pose the question of the cinematographic adaptation of literary works: as a synthesis between different media, different artists, and different visions, this process implies constant caution and compromises. A successful adaptation requires, if not a close collaboration, at least a certain level of understanding between the author and the director, so that the spirit of the text is preserved in the film. This was the case for The Night of the Iguana, in which John Huston was faithful to Tennessee Williams while taking a few liberties with the text.
Passing judgment on the film adaptations of literary works is a difficult task: the differences between the plays and the films are a reflection of the distinct identities of the artists involved in the adaptation process, and as such, they cannot be avoided. However, I discovered that these differences are more than a necessary evil: they represent a process of enrichment and exchange between two types of arts, or two artists. Technical possibilities such as camera movements or close-ups make it impossible for a director to “photograph what we’d had on stage, simply that”[149] without making choices – but, in many cases in the Tennessee Williams films, these choices were the creative ideas of talented directors. The filmed version of A Streetcar Named Desire is suffused with Elia Kazan’s style, and yet it is a masterful transcription of Williams’s play. Even though Richard Brooks deviated from Tennessee Williams’s original message, his vision of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof produced a great film that perfectly depicted the atmosphere of the South, and in which Elizabeth Taylor was the perfect embodiment of Maggie the Cat. Similarly, Katharine Hepburn’s performance as Mrs. Venable and Brooks’s ominous representation of madness in Suddenly Last Summer are admirable. To me, the artistic collusion induced by the adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s plays for the screen was a fruitful process, and the differences between the texts and the films should not be described in terms of betrayal, but as an enriching interpretation.
From the Big Easy to the big screen:
The film adaptations of Tennessee Williams’s plays
Bibliography
Primary sources
Bibliography:
Williams, Tennessee, The Glass Menagerie (1944) in A Streetcar Named Desire and other plays, London: Penguin Books, 2000.
Williams, Tennessee, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) in A Streetcar Named Desire and other plays, London: Penguin Books, 2000.
Williams, Tennessee, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and other plays, London: Penguin Books, 2001.
Williams, Tennessee, Baby Doll (1956) in Baby Doll and other plays, London: Penguin Books, 2000.
Williams, Tennessee, Suddenly, Last Summer (1958) in Baby Doll and other plays, London: Penguin Books, 2000.
Williams, Tennessee, Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) in A Streetcar Named Desire and other plays, London: Penguin Books, 2000.
Williams, Tennessee, The Night of the Iguana (1961) in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and other plays, London: Penguin Books, 2001.
Williams, Tennessee. Memoirs. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975.
Kazan, Elia. Elia Kazan: A Life. New York: Knopf, 1988.
Filmography:
The Glass Menagerie, Irving Rapper, 1950
A Streetcar Named Desire, Elia Kazan, 1951
Baby Doll, Elia Kazan, 1956
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Richard Brooks, 1958
Suddenly, Last Summer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959
Sweet Bird of Youth, Richard Brooks, 1962
The Night of the Iguana, John Huston, 1964
Secondary sources
Bryer, Jackson R. “The Glass Menagerie” in Phillips, The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia. ed. Philip C. Kolin. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004.
Clum, John M., « Gender and Sexuality » in The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia, ed. Philip C. Kolin. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004.
Hale, Allean. “Early Williams: the Making of a Playwright” in The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, ed. Matthew C. Roudané. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Holditch, Kenneth, and Leavitt, Richard Freeman. Tennessee Williams and the South. Jackson: University Press of Mississipi, 2002.
Holman, Hugh, The Roots of Southern Writing. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972.
Kolin, Philip C. (ed.). The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004.
Lev, Peter. History of the American Cinema Vol.7: The Fifties. Transforming the Screen, 1950-1959. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003.
Martin, Robert A. (ed.). Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1997.
Menegaldo, Gilles, “A Streetcar Named Desire: du texte à l’écran” in A Streetcar Named Desire: Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, ed. Gilles Menegaldo and Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris. Paris: Ellipses, 2003.
Moisy, Amelie. “To Broadway and Hollywood: Directing A Streetcar Named Desire” in A Streetcar Named Desire: Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, ed. Gilles Menegaldo and Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris. Paris: Ellipses, 2003.
Murphy, Brenda. Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, A Collaboration in the Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992
Palmer, R. Barton. “Hollywood in crisis: Tennessee Williams and the Evolution of the Adult Film” in The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, ed. Matthew C. Roudané. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002
Phillips, Gene D., S.J. “Film Adaptations” in The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia, ed. Philip C. Kolin. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004
Prenshaw, Peggy W., “The Paradoxical Southern World of Tennessee Williams”, in Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, Jac Tharpe ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississipi, 1977.
Roger, Catherine, “The South in A Streetcar Named Desire: Life is nothing but Lying! Dying!” in A Streetcar Named Desire: Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, ed. Gilles Menegaldo and Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris. Paris: Ellipses, 2003.
Sklar, Robert. Movie-made America, A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Random House, 1975.
Yacowar, Maurice. Tennessee Williams and Film. New York: Frederic Ungar Publishing Co., 1977.
Annex
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Tennessee Williams
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Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan
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A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
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Baby Doll (1956)
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
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Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
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Sweet Bird of Youth (1962)
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The Night of the Iguana (1964)
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[1] A popular nickname for the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, where Tennessee Williams lived as a young man.
[2] Holditch, Kenneth, and Leavitt, Richard Freeman. Tennessee Williams and the South. Jackson: University Press of Mississipi, 2002, p.7-8.
[3] Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie in A Streetcar Named Desire and other plays, London: Penguin Books, 2000, p.237.
[4] Roger, Catherine, « Le Sud dans A Streetcar Named Desire: Life is nothing but Lying ! Dying!” in A Streetcar Named Desire: Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, ed. Gilles Menegaldo and Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris. Paris: Ellipses, 2003.
[5] Holman, Hugh, The Roots of Southern Writing. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972.
[6] Prenshaw, Peggy W., “The Paradoxical Southern World of Tennessee Williams”, in Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, Jac Tharpe ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississipi, 1977, p.10.
[7] Williams, Tennessee, Sweet Bird of Youth, in A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays. London: Penguin Books, 2000, p.110.
[8] Clum, John M., « Gender and Sexuality » in The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia, ed. Philip C. Kolin. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004, p.72.
[9] As described by Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire, op.cit., p.190.
[10] Clum, op. cit.
[11] Hale, Allean. “Early Williams: the Making of a Playwright” in The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, ed. Matthew C. Roudané. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
[12] Clum, op. cit.
[13] Williams, Tennessee, A Streetcar Named Desire, in A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays, op.cit., p.186.
[14] Williams, Tennessee, Sweet Bird of Youth, in A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays, op.cit.
[15] Williams, Tennessee. “Production notes” in The Glass Menagerie, in A Streetcar Named Desire and other plays, op.cit., p.229.
[16] Williams, Tennessee. “Production notes” in The Glass Menagerie, in A Streetcar Named Desire and other plays, op.cit., p.231.
[17] Kazan, quoted in Moisy, Amelie. “To Broadway and Hollywood: Directing A Streetcar Named Desire” in Menegaldo and Paquet-Deyris, op.cit., p.242.
[18] Kazan, Elia. Elia Kazan: A Life. London, André Deutsch Ltd., 1988.
[19] Murphy, Brenda. Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, A Collaboration in the Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p.3.
[20] Moisy, op.cit.
[21] Kazan, Elia. Elia Kazan: A Life. London, André Deutsch Ltd., 1988.
Williams, Tennessee. Tennessee Williams: Memoirs. New York, Doubleday, 1975 printing.
[22] Williams, quoted in Moisy, op. cit., p.243.
[23] Moisy, Amelie, op.cit., p.244.
[24] Williams, Tennessee. “Note of Explanation” in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Other Plays, Penguin Books, 2001, p.107.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Murphy, Brenda, op. cit., p.145.
[27] Martin, Robert A. (ed.). Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1997.
[28] Garland, Robert. “The Glass Menagerie” review from the New York Journal-American, 2 April 1945. Reprinted in Martin, op.cit., p. 20.
[29] Morehouse, Ward. “The Glass Menagerie” review from the New York Sun, 2 April 1945. Reprinted in Martin, op.cit., p.21.
[30] Rascoe, Burton. “The Glass Menagerie” review from the New York World-Telegram, 2 April 1945. Reprinted in Martin, op.cit., p. 24.
[31] Ibid., p.23-24.
[32] Morehouse, Ward. “The Glass Menagerie” review from the New York Sun, 2 April 1945. Reprinted in Martin, op.cit., p.21.
[33] Hawkins, Williams. “A Streetcar Named Desire” review in the New York World-Telegram, 4 December 1947. Reprinted in Martin, op.cit., p.27.
[34] Kronenberger, Louis. “A Streetcar Named Desire” review in New York PM, 5 December 1947. Reprinted in Martin, op.cit., p.29.
[35] Hawkins, op.cit.
[36] Morehouse, Ward. “A Streetcar Named Desire” review in The New York Sun, 4 December 1947. Reprinted in Martin, op.cit., p.25.
[37] Hawkins, op.cit.
[38] Coleman, Rober, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” review in the New York Daily Mirror, 25 March 1955, p.21. Reprinted in Martin, op.cit., p.45.
[39] McClain, John, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” review in the New York Journal-American, 25 March 1955, p.20. Reprinted in Martin, op.cit., p.47.
[40] Hawkins, Williams, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” review in the New York World-Telegram and The Sun, 25 March 1955, p.28. Reprinted in Martin, op.cit., p.49.
[41] Coleman, Robert, op.cit.
[42] Aston, Frank, “Sweet Bird of Youth” review in the New York World-Telegram and The Sun, 11 March 1959, p.30. Reprinted in Martin, op.cit., p.52.
[43] Coleman, Robert, “Sweet Bird of Youth” review in the New York Daily Mirror, 11 March 1959, A-1. Reprinted in Martin, op.cit., p.53.
[44] Ibid, p.54.
[45] McClain, John. “The Night of the Iguana” review in the New York Journal-American, 29 December 1961, p.9. Reprinted in Martin, op.cit., p.55.
[46] Nadel, Norman. “The Night of the Iguana” review in the New York-World Telegram and The Sun, 29 December 1961, p.10. Reprinted in Martin, op.cit., p.57.
[47] Leff, Leonard J. “Hollywood”, in The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia, p.92.
[48] Bryer, Jackson R. “The Glass Menagerie”, in The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia, p.79.
[49] Williams, Tennessee. “Production Notes” in The Glass Menagerie, p.229.
[50] Yacowar, Maurice. Tennessee Williams and film. p. 3
[51] Ibid.
[52] Palmer, R. Barton. “Hollywood in crisis: Tennessee Williams and the Evolution of the Adult Film” in The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, ed. Matthew C. Roudané. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 207.
[53] Sklar, Robert, Movie-made America, A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Random House, 1975. Part 4: the Decline of the Movie Culture, p.272.
[54] Sklar, op.cit., p.283.
[55] Palmer, R. Barton. “Hollywood in crisis: Tennessee Williams and the Evolution of the Adult Film” in The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, ed. Matthew C. Roudané. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. p.212.
[56] Yacowar, Maurice. Tennessee Williams and film. New York: Frederic Ungar Publishing Co., 1977.
[57] Ibid, p.4.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Menegaldo, Gilles, “A Streetcar Named Desire: du texte à l’écran” in Menegaldo and Paquet-Deyris, op.cit., p.140.
[60] Yacowar, op cit., p.4
[61] Ibid., p.5
[62] Ibid., p.6
[63] Menegaldo, op.cit., p.140.
[64] Yacowar, op.cit., p. 6.
[65] Ibid.
[66] Williams, Tennessee. “Note of Explanation”, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, p.106
[67] Ibid.
[68] Yacowar, op. cit., p.6-7
[69] Ibid., p.7
[70] Lev, Peter. History of the American Cinema Vol.7: The Fifties. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003, p.12.
[71] Ibid., p.24
[72] Lev, op.cit., p.6
[73] Sklar, op.cit., p.279.
[74] Sklar, op.cit., p.287
[75] Ibid.
[76] Sklar, op.cit., p.289.
[77] Sklar, op.cit., p.289.
[78] Yacowar, op.cit., p. 13.
[79] Sklar, op.cit., p.287.
[80] Lev, op.cit., p.87-105.
[81] Lev, op.cit., p.87.
[82] Quigley, Martin, quoted in Lev, op.cit., p.88.
[83] Ibid.
[84] Quoted in Lev, op.cit., p. 89.
[85] Ibid.
[86] Quoted in Lev, op.cit., p.95
[87] Cardinal Spellman, quoted in Lev, op.cit., p. 96.
[88] Lev, op.cit., p.97.
[89] Phillips, Gene D., S.J. “Film Adaptations” in Kolin, op.cit., p.63-78.
[90] Yacowar, op.cit.
[91] Letter of April 28th, 1950, quoted in The American Film Institute Catalog, Within Our Gates : Ethnicity in American Feature Films. University of California Press, 1997, 980. quoted in Menegaldo, op.cit., p.148.
[92] Ibid.
[93] Yacowar, op.cit., p.35.
[94] Yacowar, op.cit., p.42.
[95] Yacowar, op.cit., p.45.
[96] In the second act of the play
[97] Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, op.cit., Act II, p. 59-60.
[98] Yacowar, op.cit., p.49.
[99] Yacowar, op.cit., p. 54.
[100] Yacowar, op.cit., p.93-98.
[101] Yacowar, op.cit., p.95.
[102] Yacowar, op.cit., p.106.
[103] Palmer, op.cit., p.217.
[104] Menegaldo, op.cit., p.139.
[105] Kazan, Elia. Elia Kazan: A Life. London: André Deutsch Ltd., 1988, p.384.
[106] Moisy, Amelie, op.cit.
[107] Kazan, op.cit.
[108] Kazan, op.cit.,quoted in Moisy, op.cit., p. 245.
[109] Menegaldo, op.cit., p.141
[110] In the film version of scene 11.
[111] Moisy, op.cit., p. 247.
[112] Moisy, op.cit., p.246.
[113] Yacowar, op.cit., p.17.
[114] Ibid.
[115] Menegaldo, op.cit., p.144.
[116] Yacowar, op.cit., p.20.
[117] Yacowar, op.cit., p.20.
[118] “The Glass Menagerie” in Phillips, op.cit., p.83.
[119] “Film Adaptations” in Phillips, op.cit., p. 63.
[120] Calendo, John, “Tennessee talks to John Calendo”, Interview, April 1973, p.44. Quoted in Yacowar, op.cit., p.14.
[121] “Film Adaptations” in Phillips, op.cit., p.64.
[122] “Tennessee Williams: Interview”, Playboy, April 1973, p.82. Quoted in Yacowar, op.cit., p.48.
[123] Ibid.
[124] Quoted in John Gruen, Close-up (New York : Viking, 1968), p.93. Quoted in Yacowar, op.cit., p.48.
[125] Calendo, op.cit., p.44. Quoted in Yacowar, op.cit., p.49.
[126] Ibid.
[127]“Tennessee Williams : Interview”, Playboy, April 1973, p.82. Quoted in Yacowar, op.cit., p.98.
[128] Calendo, op.cit., p. 44. Quoted in Yacowar, op.cit., p.106.
[129] Ibid.
[130] Baker, Peter, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, Films and Filming, November 1958, p.21; and McManigal, Rod, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, Sight and Sound, Winter 1958-1959, p.36. Quoted in Yacowar, op.cit., p.38.
[131] Yacowar, op.cit., p.38.
[132] “Film adaptations” in The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia, Phillips, op.cit., p.65.
[133] Yacowar, op.cit., p.58.
[134] Yacowar, op.cit., p.67.
[135] Yacowar, op.cit., p.48.
[136] Yacowar, op.cit., p.95.
[137] Ibid., p.68.
[138] Yacowar, op.cit., p.106.
[139] Yacowar, op.cit., p.112.
[140] Palmer, op.cit., p.220.
[141] Ibid., p.212
[142] Ibid., p.216.
[143] Ibid., p.216.
[144] Palmer, op.cit., p.215.
[145] Ibid.
[146] Ibid., p.227.
[147] Ibid., p.221.
[148] Ibid., p.231.
[149] Kazan, op.cit.,quoted in Moisy, op.cit., p. 245.
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