Tennessee Williams' Movies

The beautiful and damned
Proudly melodramatic, sentimental, manipulative - Tennessee Williams's plays are showcases for our wants. No wonder so many movie directors have attempted to conquer them. Wyatt Mason celebrates a dramatist who made film a writer's medium
Wyatt Mason

The Guardian, Saturday November 8 2008

Film is a director's medium: the adage has been repeated so often we hardly question it. Filmgoers have been trained to see directors as the masters and commanders that their industry nickname, helmers, implies. In various documentaries about the making of films (Hearts of Darkness, Burden of Dreams), we've watched these little warlords lead their armies, the names that march slowly skyward at the end of cinematic campaigns, processions so solemn one might mistake them for inventories of a production's glorious dead. Of all these people who contribute to a film, only one is said to envision the whole. Thus the most notable directors - Fellini, Kurosawa, Godard, Herzog, Coppola, Kubrick - are termed "visionaries".

And yet, the movies of Tennessee Williams (1911-83) suggest that film isn't a director's medium after all. The Pulitzer prizewinning American dramatist - who never directed a film - is credited as writer, co-writer, re-writer or adapted/translated writer of more than five dozen. To watch the best of them is to encounter a commandingly consistent vision. Although scores of people directed - including Elia Kazan, Richard Brooks, John Huston, George Roy Hill, Sydney Pollack and Sidney Lumet, talents of divergent temperament and taste - out of such unruly heterogeneity emerged Williams's singular, overarching sensibility. More than anyone before or since, he made film a writer's medium.

One clear measure of how completely Williams managed to wrest control of his films, figuratively speaking, from directors' hands can be seen in just how many separate filmed versions there are of his best plays. There have been, for example, 10 takes on The Glass Menagerie, his career-making 1944 play about a family in depression-era St Louis (three in English; seven others in languages as remote from Williams's American as Turkish and Malayalam). There have been an even more surprising five versions of perhaps his most celebrated play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) - more surprising because the very first, 1951, version, starring a 23-year-old Marlon Brando at the blunt peak of his immoderate beauty, would seem willing and able to bully all comers away. But film directors aren't easily intimidated. Like men thrown repeatedly from an indomitable bull, they can't stop themselves from remounting Williams's creations. And while one explanation for such insistence is surely the uncommon richness of Williams's work, another reason is how resistant his work proves to the imprint of another artist's vision.

In this way, the earlier playwright whom the Mississippi-born Williams might be said to resemble most is Shakespeare. For it hardly matters if you set a film of Richard III in Nazi Germany, or on a contemporary Brighton housing estate, or in a galaxy far, far away. Stubbornly, its author's choices always preempt and push into the background those of any director-come-lately with a nifty new idea. The play remains tautly itself, remains the thing; and the director becomes, rather inevitably, a servant of that thing, or a distraction from it.

Williams resembles Shakespeare in a second way, for he too is a writer with an extravagant relationship to the English language. Though both men could and often did manage the simple, entombing line ("The rest is silence"; "Life is a thief"), both are equally, notably at home in abundance. Both soliloquise, grandly. The plays and their cinematic cousins are drunk on talk. But there's a difference between how each uses soliloquy - the speaking of one's thoughts when alone or heedless of other hearts. In Shakespeare, soliloquies arrive when his people are literally alone. But in Williams, they arise when his people are figuratively alone - but literally not alone.

Williams's characters are lonely, but not because they are without companions: rather, because they have the wrong companions. His people are solitaries made so by company. Whether in the dissolute New Orleans rooms of A Streetcar Named Desire or the grand parlours of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the unfurnished mansion of Cry-Baby or the Mexican coast of Night of the Iguana, grievances simmer and bubble up and boil over. Often, the soliloquies of the aggrieved are their helpless attempts at bridging the distance between them and others. But no less often, their speeches are hapless attempts at purging the ungovernable anger (or sorrow, or confusion) they feel for those same others, the people both closest to and farthest from them, the people they love most and can abide least - their intimates, their lovers, their relations.

Such contradictions, such oppositions - not to say explosions - are at the heart of Williams's art. "The test of a first-rate intelligence," F Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Crack-Up (1936), "is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." By Fitzgerald's measure, the contradiction-addled creatures in Williams's work would fail miserably. His characters are distinguished by first-rate hearts - hearts that manage to hold two opposed feelings at the same time, but which are undone in the holding.

The best and most famous example is surely Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire. As played with frightening composure by Vivien Leigh in the Kazan-directed film, Blanche is convincingly demure, earnest, self-possessed, refined; but equally she is brazen, dishonest, unhinged, debauched. Blanche is the genteel prude who is also, secretly, sex-addicted. Between these extremes Blanche teeters, at risk of toppling into the void that yawns when a self's halves misalign and begin to repel each other like magnets' poles. Streetcar is the record of that repulsion.

The story is straightforward. Blanche arrives from Mississippi to visit her sister, Stella, in New Orleans. While there she meets Stella's young husband for the first time. Stanley Kowalski is working-class Polish-American, possessed of a tiger's big-pawed pacing grace and the animal's churning appetite: Stanley consumes. "I'm gonna strike you as being the unrefined type, huh," he tells Blanche, soon after her arrival. Indeed he does strike her thus, but he also strikes her - and us - as something more: as supernaturally, supersexually, male.

Over the five months of Blanche's unending visit, Stanley and Blanche posture and spar. Things simmer and build as she soliloquises and drinks, lies and flirts, antagonises and taunts, wildly outstaying her cold welcome and paying for it with her body and her mind. As played by Leigh, Blanche is unbearably needy, impossibly grand, exhaustingly doomed. As played by Brando - a Brando so remote from his late-life appearance as to defy both resemblance and credulity - Stanley is one of Rilke's angels: as beautiful as he is terrible. He drinks, plays cards, fights his friends, beats his wife and, in the end, smiling, literally and figuratively chewing, rapes his sister-in-law. "Streetcar is a cry of pain," wrote Arthur Miller, "forgetting that is to forget the play."

This movie version of Streetcar, the best one, doesn't forget that cry, but does mute it, a little. Censored in script before it was shot and censored in the edits before it was released (a time in Hollywood when film-makers abided by moral edicts passed down by an actual "Legion of Decency"), Williams's sexually explicit play was made implicit here and there, its sharp edges softened, its ending altered. In the movie, Stella learns of the rape and leaves Stanley; in the play, she learns the truth yet stays. In the movie, one man is punished; in the play, all women are. But even with tampering that goes beyond interpretation almost to negation, Streetcar the film does all the work that the play does on the page, and for the same reason that Williams's work survives all its directors, because his writing attracted actors as ravenous as Stanley, hungry to play at being people both luckless and lonely, predatory and easy prey, all of whom are starving inside.

Richard Burton as a priest defrocked for his attraction to underage girls in Night of the Iguana; Paul Newman as the drunken prodigal son who could have been a football hero in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Elizabeth Taylor as a young woman threatened with lobotomy because of her passionate nature and tragic memories in Suddenly, Last Summer; Katharine Hepburn as the single mother of two, whose love for and meddling in the lives of her children is the ruin of all three in The Glass Menagerie; Carroll Baker as the child bride in an unconsummated marriage who falls for another man in Baby Doll: each performer brought to the role an uncanny ferocity and realism, a ferocity the equal of Williams's writing. For although it is true that a director can and will help actors find their way to the centre of a character, a great performance is built not on directorial choices, but on writerly ones. Williams's choices, as a writer, are never truer than when he burrows deep into the cavities of his characters, whereas the films in which they figure aren't ever quite those characters' equals. The films are proudly melodramatic, unapologetically hyperbolic, hysterical, sentimental, titillating, manipulative and overstuffed. And yet, for all their flighty improbabilities, the substance of Williams's characters grounds his films in the quietest, and most credible, human needs. "A home is something that two people have between them," says a character in Night of the Iguana. "What is important is that one is never alone."

That need for home, a home founded in human nearness, is a commonplace in Williams's films. Baby Doll is the apotheosis of this theme. Ham-fisted woman-in-jeopardy plotting aside, the film manages to contain truly astonishing moments of haptic intimacy. So intense are these scenes of human need that, when released in 1955, the film was denounced by the Legion of Decency and pulled from screens. And yet, on screen, we see not a breast, and hear not one of the seven deadly words. We watch a man lose his young wife to another man. We witness that wife, on a swing, get bullied into wanting that man. It takes 15 minutes on screen. It's not written in the language of film; it's in Williams's language, language by which the actors are possessed. More than any writer before him and any helmer since, Tennessee Williams created these showcases for our wants. He showed them to be so narrow and so deep.

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