I VISITED SOMEONE yesterday night while they were watching that old movie of Suddenly Last Summer, the one with Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Montomery Clift. She said she was avoiding listening to the news, don't we all do that a lot these days.
You have to distinguish the original one-act play of Suddenly Last Summer, which Williams wrote for the stage and what he and the experienced Hollywood screen-play writer Gore Vidal made from it. I doubt Vidal, even in collaboration with Williams was capable of improving on Williams alone. Gore Vidal had no poetry in him and little humanity.
I haven't seen a Tennessee Williams play in decades. Not on stage. And not one of the movies they made of one since they had Cat On A Hot Tin Roof with Jessica Lange, Tommy Lee Jones and Rip Torn on PBS. Lange was great as Maggie, really great. Yesterday night it struck me how dated Williams's plays seem now, when they seemed so new when they were new. That shouldn't be surprising, just about all of the plays that made his reputation are old, now. Their daring topicality, as well. I hope that LGBTQ+ liberation continues to make them seem increasingly incomprehensible to younger People now and more so to future generations just as we have to have so much about Renaissance plays explained to us. Though like America's perennial theme of racism and white supremacy progress made by my minority group will prove to be as vulnerable as the progress in racial equality has proven to be. It's so telling how vulnerable such progress is in the hands of our imperial Supreme Court under the corruptions their "free speech" rulings have allowed to propagate in the mass media and, so, our politics. It will be really terrible if the topical theater of the 1950s and 60s becomes topical again.
That possibility of reliving that awful history has become topical since the Court has, since the time that Williams was having premiers, used the First Amendment to insure corruption in our society and politics under the slogans of "free speech," "free press," in no small part on behalf of the industries of stage and screen. If they hadn't included political speech and so-called journalism, it might have been less topical, now. How foolish (or corrupt) they were not to make a distinction about the right of the struggle for equality to tell the truth and the privilege they grant to those who oppose equality to lie us into perpetual inequality. Readers of this will know that's become one of the major themes of this blog. It has to be because that is one of the main venues through which our indigenous fascism, white supremacy thwarts and turns back progress towards equality. I will add that, given their place in that kind of malignant anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic politics we have another indigenous fascist force in our national life, the one virtually every country has, the influence of millionaires and billionaires. Even as there was a marginal and influential force in the legal profession and the judiciary that somewhat and quite mildly favored equality, the millionaires and billionaires, seeking to harness the white supremacist tradition, promoting that, has been successful in turning aside the progress of the 1960s and early 70s through the court. The combination of the two forces explains a lot about how we are so in danger of the facade of liberal democracy crumbling away. The recent and transparent lies of one of Trumps minor flunkies that if he gets a second regime they'll abolish porn is absolutely in no danger of happening, if for no other reason than so many of the Trump supporting billionaires make money off of it, the Murdoch clan for a start. And it would prove mighty unpopular with his base, so many of whom live in the highest porn viewing states and among those whose lives are a living expression of what porn merely imitates. Exploitation, cruelty, sexism, racism, every negative stereotype there is. That's as true of gay porn as it is straight porn in every way.
But back to the movie.
One of the things that stood out for me, aside from Tennessee Williams style of going from poetry to the sewer and back in rapid succession, was the different acting styles of the three principle actors. Katherine Hepburn's old-line style as contrasted to Elizabeth Taylor (back when she was still making an effort to really act) to Montgomery Clift whose acting seemed the most natural of the three. To some extent that could be because of the different roles but I don't think that was all there was to it. It's been a long time since I watched a Hollywood movie and saw how the production so often swamps the story. The use of filmed depictions of Taylor's flashback monologue was especially distracting, it would have been a lot better if they'd just left it to her, closeups of her face (well, maybe the makeup could have been a little more subdued) and the text to paint the picture. Though maybe audiences trained by movies and TV from the 50s couldn't imagine it anymore. These days I always wonder if it would be more effective as a radio play because the imagined scene tends to be less distracting than what some director or producer or actor provides by way of visuals. They always want to get artsy with the camera and sets. Hepburn did a better job of extending her usual style of just playing herself in the role, I think she was trying, too. And since the role of the evil, psychotic wealthy aunt was sufficiently baroque, her acting suited it. Maybe it was having Montgomery Clift there instead of her usual Spencer Tracy or Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart. It would have been interesting to see what she'd have become if she'd had a better actor than Tracey to form a duo act with. Or if she'd stuck to the stage, more.
Since acting is an art that's at the mercy of directors and producers, not to mention other actors, especially in an old-line Hollywood movies, it's too bad we can't see how they'd have acted the parts in another production or on stage. Of the three I think that Montgomery Clift was probably the best actor, if he hadn't had such a tragic end to his life or or gotten off the bottle he might have been really great. I recall reading that it was when he returned to the stage after his car accident that ruined his beautiful face some woman in the audience loudly expressed shock at how he looked and that finished him. Audiences bear the ultimate responsibility in the arts, the credit and the blame.
But it's remembering the plays that leave me feeling cold. Having binged on Eugene O'Neill recently, Tennessee Williams doesn't measure up. Considering that we had being gay in common, that's a little surprising. And it's not just Williams from the days of my youth. I haven't seen a production of Edward Albee in a long time but I think his work would leave me even flatter now. Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf might have been the last time she really put her all into a role but I have to say that Richard Burton as George really didn't do it for me. Richard Burton has struck me as even more over-rated than Spencer Tracy but seeing that movie of his Hamlet on Youtube might prejudice me against him. Watching him play Hamlet as Hamlet warned the players not to act inoculated me against his reputation and honeyed voice. Becoming a star isn't good for a lot of actors, it's too easy being a star. Same thing happens to singers and musicians, stardom isn't healthy.
Once I read someone commenting on how Williams' play-writing petered out in no small part due to him being gotten addicted to drugs by the infamous "Dr. Feelgood", claiming that his short stories were still good. I tried them and couldn't stand them, all I saw was decay and pathology. I still like some of his best plays, the discipline of having to make something presentable on stage back when there were limits might have worked for him a lot better than having no limits did. Having limits removed might go a long way in explaining how things got so bad in American lit after the Courts said there were no limits. I'm not advocating that all the limits of the 50s be reimposed, at least not except in regard to the mass media lying us into fascism and billionaire domination, but I'm pointing out there are consequences for allowing the country to have its mind saturated in lies and shit. Some of those consequences prove the program of libertarian First Amendment interpretation as imagined by elite lawyers and judges and "justices" are worse than the Hollywood Production and Broadcasting Codes.
I read the exchanges between Trump's rape-defense style female lawyer and Stormy Daniels and could see immediately that Daniels was, in every way, the smarter of the two. And more moral. It's tragic that a mind and spirit like hers was forced by circumstance into a career in porn, she'd have been a great member of Congress. I can't say that I respect porn, though I think those who act in it are the last ones to be blamed for what they do, but I respect Stormy Daniels. I just wish she hadn't taken the bribe and exposed Trump when it might have prevented the catastrophe of having him in the presidency putting the intellectual and moral inferiors of her on the Supreme Court. To join those Bush I and II put there, before them. I strongly suspect she now wishes she had, too.
You might like to listen to an audio-production of The Glass Menagerie with Clift as Tom, Jessica Tandy as Amanda and Julie Harris as Laura. I'm not sure if this is the same as the radio version of it that Clift was in.
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