"Steamy Tennessee":The films of Tennessee Williams

[papeetepatrick]

The moviemakers are between a rock and a hard place, because what worked on stage won’t necessarily work on screen even if transferred over with minimal changes. You can get away with stuff in the theater that the camera won’t let pass.

Yes, and although there are many examples, one of the most glaringly obvious, which looks like a filmed version of a televised play is 'Glengarry Glen Ross', which I enjoyed despite this total absence of the cinematic. Surely because of the performances, Pacino and Lemmon especially good, but so are all the others too. Not that I know how it should have been filmed. Was this the best way for those of use who didn't see it onstage. Definitely a cut above just a televised live performance of a play.

What's an example of a play that went to the screen and seemed both like the play and also seemed like a real movie? Is 'The Importance of Being Earnest' a good example'? Maybe so, because it's so 'naturally artificial' that you need the sense of staginess even on film. I realize I've seen very little Williams onstage, maybe only 'Streetcar', with Rosemary Harris at the old Vivian Beaumont, and I preferred this to either of the film and/or TV versions I've seen (Leigh/Brando/Hunter and Ann-Margret/Treat Williams/d'Angelo, although I liked both of those as well.

[dirac]

The moviemakers are between a rock and a hard place, because what worked on stage won't necessarily work on screen even if transferred over with minimal changes. You can get away with stuff in the theater that the camera won't let pass.

Yes, and although there are many examples, one of the most glaringly obvious, which looks like a filmed version of a televised play is 'Glengarry Glen Ross', which I enjoyed despite this total absence of the cinematic. Surely because of the performances, Pacino and Lemmon especially good, but so are all the others too. Not that I know how it should have been filmed. Was this the best way for those of use who didn't see it onstage. Definitely a cut above just a televised live performance of a play.

What's an example of a play that went to the screen and seemed both like the play and also seemed like a real movie? Is 'The Importance of Being Earnest' a good example'? Maybe so, because it's so 'naturally artificial' that you need the sense of staginess even on film. I realize I've seen very little Williams onstage, maybe only 'Streetcar', with Rosemary Harris at the old Vivian Beaumont, and I preferred this to either of the film and/or TV versions I've seen (Leigh/Brando/Hunter and Ann-Margret/Treat Williams/d'Angelo, although I liked both of those as well.

Lots of food for thought in your post, papeetepatrick. I took the liberty of cutting and pasting it as a new topic, since I think the discussion could go in many different directions!

[Quiggin]

Are you somehow accessing a more lengthy version? or talking about another review?

Sorry, I was running to a meeting and didn't double check -- the comment was indeed from another review, the introduction to the New Directions edition of Night of the Iguana, by Doug Wright, which opens with:

The cast of the original production was perhaps as fine as any that has been assembled for Night of the Iguana. Bette Davis, who had been performing in movies for a number of years and thus had an unfortunate tendency to look out into the audience when she was "off camera," nevertheless embodied the earthiness of Maxine described by Williams as affable and rapaciously lusty ...

He goes on to say:

Not surprisingly, however, it was Margaret Leighton who performed most memorably in her luminous creation of Hannah, the kind of woman Tennesse Williams may have believed his sister Rose might have been ...

In general, I like theater and cinema to be kept separate -- both are very different in character, and a hybrid of the two is less than either one. Andre Bazin credits Orson Welles and Jean Renoir as being to deal with both with some honesty. But the lovely ocean scenes in Night of Iguana and the Williams dialogue seem to be from different artistic cloth. And as Bazin suggests theater and film have a different sort of time (Gene Kelly says something similar about stage time regarding musicals). Bazin in What is Cinema:

The duration of the action on the stage and on screen are obviously not the same. The dramatic primacy of the word is thrown off center by the additional dramatization that the camera gives to the setting.

[papeetepatrick]

(Gene Kelly says something similar about stage time regarding musicals). Bazin in What is Cinema:

Hey, that's interesting, and maybe why, generally, musicals made for the screen like 'Singin' in the Rain' are usually considered by critics to be greater than adaptations of Broadway musicals. I'd like to think that it also may be why I seem to be nearly alone in thinking Kelly's 'Hello, Dolly!' is one of the very best film adaptations of a Broadway musical ever made. Most do agree that 'Call Me Madam' is as good or better than the original (also with Merman), but that's beside the point here, since it wasn't made by Kelly, and probably is a fluke. But this could explain why the Broadway musical films don't seem to have something fresh in the way that even silly baubles made directly for the screen do--this stage-time thing.

But you know much more about Williams onstage than I do, and my affection for 'Iguana' could be because of never having seen it onstage, at least to some degree. And it is true that I did prefer the 'Streetcar' I saw onstage to the two fine versions on film, but I wouldn't know if that's why. I may just not understand Blanche Dubois very well, and may well have liked Rosemary Harris's Blanche just because I think Rosemary is so thrilling an actress (I once heard her do this soliloquy of Lady Teazle at a benefit, and it was one of the most wonderful things I ever saw.)