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This film version of Summer and Smoke (1961), one of Tennessee Williams's earliest plays, compares favorably with more famous screen adaptations of his work, such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), and has the advantage over them of starring the actress who played the lead on stage to great acclaim.
Summer and Smoke had its genesis in a short story, "Oriflamme," written by the young Williams in 1944, well before his theatrical breakthrough, when he was still living with his family in St. Louis and struggling to find his literary voice. The story later served as a sketch for a short play, The Yellow Bird, similar in theme and lead character's name to a longer work that was initially called "Chart of Anatomy." By the time that play reached Broadway, it had been retitled as the more poetic and appealing Summer and Smoke. The play did not do well, however, and most critics (with the notable exception of Brook Atkinson of the New York Times) panned it. In development at roughly the same time as A Streetcar Named Desire, it suffered in comparison to that play, which had opened a year earlier and caused a sensation, thanks to its frank sexuality and dynamic leading man Marlon Brando.
Despite its initial failure, Summer and Smoke was revived a few years later to resounding success. The 1952 production by director Jose Quintero at New York's Circle in the Square Theater put Off-Broadway on the map and established the career of a relatively unknown young actress. For her portrayal of Alma, a repressed Southern spinster grasping at one chance for love with the wild, undisciplined young doctor she has known for years, Geraldine Page won the Drama Critics Award, the first given to a performer in a non-Broadway production. It also brought her to the attention of Hollywood, leading to an uncredited part in Taxi (1953) and a substantial role opposite John Wayne in Hondo (1953), for which she received a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination. Good movie roles were not forthcoming, however, and Page returned to the stage, building a sterling reputation both on Broadway and off, earning her first Tony Award nomination for another Williams play, Sweet Bird of Youth. Although she appeared occasionally on television, she did not return to film until Summer and Smoke, eight years after her feature debut.
Hal Wallis Productions actually bought the film rights to Summer and Smoke in 1952, shortly before its Off-Broadway revival, for $100,000, a purchase based largely on the success of the film versions of Streetcar and The Glass Menagerie (1950) and on Williams's high reputation in the theater. Unlike several screen versions of his work, Williams had no part in adapting the script. That was entrusted to James Poe, who had worked on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Meade Roberts, who worked with Williams to adapt his play Orpheus Descending into the film The Fugitive Kind (1959).
The film of Summer and Smoke was directed by Peter Glenville, a distinguished stage director who guided the British theatrical production and was therefore sensitive to the material's style and language. But Glenville didn't settle for a mere filmed play and opened it up with scenes set in gambling houses, at cock fights and public band concerts. Whether this approach worked well for the large-format Panavision screen was debated among critics, who either found Summer and Smoke to be "one of the better American films this year" (New York Herald Tribune) or "confused and meaningless" (Films in Review) and full of "melodramatic explosions that are made monstrous on the giant screen" (New York Times). Opinion was mixed, too, on British actor Laurence Harvey as the wayward doctor Alma inadvertently reforms then loses. Many reviewers felt he was miscast.
Everyone loved Page, however, and Williams considered her "a talented and beautiful actress...the most disciplined and dedicated." She was Oscar®-nominated as Best Actress and won National Board of Review and Golden Globe awards, making enough of an impression in Hollywood to follow up with a screen version of her stage success in Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), earning another nomination and another Golden Globe win. Also receiving a nomination for Summer and Smoke was Una Merkel, veteran of 1930s comedies and musicals, recreating her stage role as Page's domineering mother. Nominations also went to the art direction and set decoration and to Elmer Bernstein's score. The Directors Guild of America and the Venice Film Festival recognized Glenville's achievement with additional nominations.
Various versions of the story have been filmed for television, including the early sketch The Yellow Bird and a 1964 revision retitled by Williams Eccentricities of a Nightingale. Lee Remick and Blythe Danner were among the actresses who played Alma in television productions opposite David Hedison and Frank Langella as the object of her adoration.
Director: Peter Glenville
Producer: Hal B. Wallis
Screenplay: James Poe, Meade Roberts, based on the play by Tennessee Williams
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art Direction: Hal Pereira, Walter Tyler
Original Music: Elmer Bernstein
Cast: Laurence Harvey (John Buchanan, Jr.), Geraldine Page (Alma Winemiller), Rita Moreno (Rosa Zacharias), Una Merkel (Mrs. Winemiller), John McIntire (Dr. Buchanan).
BW-119m. Letterboxed.
by Rob Nixon
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