Tennessee Williams Film Collection

[Lino]

You know what? You're right - already ordered it as I'm writing this. It was very cheap anyway.

[Gigi M.]

I've never really like The Rose Tattoo. To start, Lancaster is totally miscast, probably his worst performance of the 50's. The amazing gifts of Magnani are the only reason to watch this picture. She's amazing in her part, considering her language limitations at the time. Marisa Pavan who plays her daughter, is also great.

[Lino]

Savant reviews the new Cat disc:

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=21579

but also Roman Spring:

http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s1974roma.html

and Night of the Iguana:

http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s1973igua.html

[Lino]

Baby Doll review:

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=21655

[Lino]

Got my Rose Tattoo on the mail but still haven't watched it so expect some comments later.

Meanwhile, I would like to get you people talking about the new Cat transfer and other such recent restorations of classics in what color is concerned. For my money, yes, the new image does look a bit vertically stretched but I still want to find out how it looks like on my tube. But for what it's worth, I think that overall it displays a definite improvement on the old transfer: the colors are much more easy on the eye and it just looks more natural. I know this is a very personal take on a touchy subject, cinephile-wise, but let's just say I trust Warner on this one.

The thing is, maybe we've grown too accustomed to how these films were supposed to look and our first reaction is of strangeness. I think a similar reaction is to be had whenever a restoration of some sort is made, be it film, music, sculpture, painting, whatever. There is always the question of who made the restoration and what principles guided that very thing. Because it's very hard to know how things were supposed to look or sound like if you weren't there in the first place. With film, things are maybe easier to find out (with all the annotations left by DPs and the directors) but in the end, you can't please everyone. It's really a hard task.

What do you all think?

[skuhn8]

Just announced the release of this box set here in Hungary...sans baby doll and Night of the Iguana, the latter being my absolute main reason for wanting this set. Looks like another laborious struggle to coerce friends or relatives to ship to me. Why oh why? Why couldnt' they toss the Viv Leigh/Beatty one instead of Iguana. Despite so many lukewarm reviews this film just makes me heart gallop. Never could figure out why, but in the days when I had tnt in Hungary I watched this a couple times a year without tiring.

[Lino]

My set finally arrived yesterday and the first thing I did was watch the documentary on the exclusive bonus disc. It's very worthwhile and you get to see Williams in a good mood (sans alcohol... or at least not too much!) reciting passages from his own works while dramatizations of his best known plays are intercut with his interviews.

One funny thing: the interviewer looks exactly like Williams and even dresses like him!

Looking foward to watching the movies now. It's been too long a time for some of them since I did that.

[Napier]

Annie Mall Wrote

Looking foward to watching the movies now. It's been too long a time for some of them since I did that.

Please enjoy these wonderful films Annie,I have already gone through this set twice!Ihave a whole stack of about ten Criterion titles that went on the back burner when Tennessee Williams set arrived,ENJOY.

[Lino]

Just slowly making my way through this set. Right now we're having a sort of heatwave right here in Portugal so I really couldn't ask for a better weather to enjoy the steamy, humid and torrid ole world of Tennessee Williams, right?

The first film I rewatched after checking the South documentary on the bonus disc was Night of the Iguana. And boy, do certain films just get better with age! I enjoyed it much, much more than the last time I watched it on TCM (which was years ago). Certainly one of the very best Williams adaptations to the big screen ever. And that cinematography -- wow. How can a B/W film translate such high temperatures as this one? Great, just great.

Later, I went for the "marriage on the rocks" opus with Liz and Newman on top form. Watched it with the Donald Spoto commentary on and overall I wasn't disappointed. He touched in pretty much all that was interesting to know and provided some background and even some clever personal opinions of his own that sounded relevant to me. I enjoyed it but I only wish that the featurette on the film could have been longer. Oh, and I definitely prefer the new transfer. Much more natural looking this time around and less darker, for sure.

Next on the menu were the almost twin-like Roman Spring of Mrs Stone and Sweet Bird of Youth, both first time viewings for me. And I have some mixed feelings about them. While the former seemed to be to me a kind of reworking of the main themes of the latter (and the film being the downbeat, tired offspring of it) it nevertheless got the best color transfer of the whole set. Amazing definition of colors! If only Sweet Bird was so lucky -- washed-out colors, too dark in some scenes with details overlapping each other (overall, it reminded me of how Cat used to look like before the recent restoration).

However, the film was a killer! Surely the sleaziest, nastiest characters Williams ever created. I mean, there isn't one single person in that film that I could sympathize with. Not even lovely Heavenly or Aunt Nonnie. Of course, this is one film I will find myself going back again and again, if only for Geraldine's amazing portrayal of a fading movie star.

[kieslowski_67]

BTW, for those who are interested, COSTCO is selling the set for $40.

[Lino]

Just some quick note: am I the only one to notice that maybe the version we're getting on the Sweet Bird of Youth disc is censored? Just look at how the picture seems to zoom in in the scene where Heavenly is talking to her father at the beach and then goes to the sea to freshen up herself and then her father pushes her into the water. Doesn't it look sort of wrong in the moment when she comes out of the water, all wet with her dress revealing more than it should if it was dry? Except, we don't get to see anything...

Just a thought.

[Michael]

Annie, you're taking your time to watch Baby Doll?!?!

Right now we're having a sort of heatwave right here in Portugal so I really couldn't ask for a better weather to enjoy the steamy, humid and torrid ole world of Tennessee Williams, right?

With this climate, Lucrecia Martel's La Cienaga is the perfect film to watch.

[Lino]

Annie, you're taking your time to watch Baby Doll?!?!

Calm down! I already watched it along with Rose Tattoo and meant to write something about them yesterday but somehow got sidetracked to other things and forgot all about it.

First stop -- Rose Tattoo. My first viewing of this film is not very favourable, I'm afraid. I really wanted to like it but ultimately didn't. Oh, Magnani is great (as always) although her performance felt too much like Magnani-by-the-numbers (we've all seen what she can do and the Oscar that she won with this movie was to me a kind of "thank you for learning to speak english and saving us the trouble of decently dubbing you which is virtually impossible"). And I agree that Lancaster is a bit miscast (his portrayal of an italian emigrant felt too caricaturish and too comedy-like).

But the biggest problem for me was with the text itself. There is a glaring overuse of the ROSE motif throughout the whole movie to the point where it becomes too obvious and even annoying. Oh, God -- it seems that I did not like this movie very much, huh? Oh, well. Maybe on a second viewing.

Now for Baby Doll and Streetcar Named Desire (saving the best ones for last, of course!). What can I say about the latter that hasn't already been said, right? Classic all over. And the DVD is a killer too. Highly recommended, naturally.

And now we come to the biggest surprise for me of the whole Tennessee Williams set: yes, you guessed it -- Baby Doll. What a fun and mischievous movie! The prevading humour is very naughty and infectious and this completely caught me off guard. Who would've thought? The story is great althought it ends on a very ambiguous note (maybe too ambiguous for me on a first viewing) and the performances, especially the one by the lead Carroll Baker are right on the money. I simply loved her accent and the way she phrased her words. Definitely one I will go back to again and again. Great, fun-loving film!

[Michael]

After the long week of tropical raining subsided, halfdollar-sized mosquitoes finally woke up very thirsty and swarmed everywhere around here in the sticky air....especially after the unusually dry spring. So for the past weekend I decided to stay in than the usual outdoor biking or jogging, giving myself an excuse to devour the Tennesse Williams boxset that my mom got me for my birthday recently.

Not only the boxset but also The Rose Tattoo, The Fugitive Kind and Suddenly, Last Summer. That's a lot of movies for one weekend.

I really enjoyed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof again mainly for Liz Taylor. She never really looked this lush. Prancing about in a pearl-white dress. Gorgeous! Ditto for A Streetcar Named Desire except it's Marlon Brando especially in his sweat-soaked wife beater shirt. Both unbearably sexy, gorgeous people really made those films. And nothing more. (Am I the only one who feels that Viven Leigh is miscast as Blanche?)

Suddenly, Last Summer is the Gummo of 1950s - a freakfest involving experimental brain surgeries, incest, carnivorous plants. With Katharine Hepburn and Liz Taylor (again) playing Southern relatives. And Monty Clift! Those knockout stars seemed so clueless about this whole damn film, like davidhare described earlier "pointless". So that's what makes it really hilarious to watch. Everything about this film is so bizarre even by todays standard. The film is also incredibly disturbing in its way of veiling the gay theme. Keeping in mind the film was made in the late 1950s and it seems to expect the mainstream viewers to decode the "other side" as if they were already experts. Quite a messy piece that works better as a curiousity!

All Tennessee Williams film adaptations are interesting, unintentionally hilarious failures except for Baby Doll. I've seen this absolute stunner three times since receiving the boxset. Hands down, the most sexiest film I've ever seen. Breathtaking cinematography with an unique, distinctive look that is not found anywhere else.. I love how the blackness always appears to be subtly lit somehow from various angles by the Mississippi sun that is too lazy to set. And of course, searingly hot acting by everyone, especially Carroll Baker (who makes Lolita's Sue Lyon look ridiculously tame) and Eli Wallach. When films of the same caliber as Baby Doll remain so fresh in mind, its hard to express thoughts or feelings completely (....I would make a horrible critic anyway) so the following review from the New York Observer sums up nicely:

http://www.observer.com/20060612/200606 ... e_dvds.asp

Baby Doll is a whole other animal all together. It still seems racy today.

Yeah.. the cinematography is really pristine and luxurious, giving this film an exceptionally beautiful, almost surreal glow. It really looks like it could be filmed today. If you peel away the hypnotic directing, acting and cinematography, then you will get an impossibly ridiculous story - a 19 year old child bride (since when was a 19 year old a child? only in America!) promises to have sex with her much older husband - a psychotic wolf - on her 20th birthday. But a foreigner steps in and magically liberates the girl from her previously "baby" behavior, transforming her into a "woman" over the stretch of one lazy afternoon of empty cars, swings, lemonade and ghosts. How crazy that sounds! But Kazan turns this story (obviously penned in a boozy haze) into a completely beautiful masterpiece. Like Myra wrote earlier, the film ends on a very ambiguous note. It shows that no one really wins from one long day of playing "games".

[Lino]

File this under "Dear God, please don't let this happen" --

http://www.cinematical.com/2006/06/22/g ... in-remake/

[Michael]

I don't think that a remake would be a problem as long as the story gets updated. To make it current that is. Tennessee Williams' script is beyond absurd anyway - a 19 year old thumb-sucking girl sleeping in a crib while her much older husband counting seconds till her next birthday to have sex with her and you know the rest. So that script really needs a lot of changes to make it work for todays audience unless it falls in the hands of a right director (David Lynch? I nominate him because he's perfect at blending absurdity and Southern white trash a la Wild at Heart). It's not the script that makes me go crazy for Baby Doll. It's the to-die-for chemistry between all the characters and the luxurious cinematography that brings the whole film together seamlessly. And so much more. It has infectious dark humor, magic and charm all the way through. It's hands down the most sexiest film ever made.

How old do you think Carroll Baker looked in Baby Doll? I think she looks beautiful and sexy in such a natural way. The actress is Polish-American and her real name is Karolina Piekarski. Eli Wallach gave a performance that I could watch repeatedly without ever becoming tired.

[Lino]

The whole set gets reviewed here:

http://filmfreakcentral.net/dvdreviews/ ... .htm#stone

[Lino]

How Tennessee Williams saved a young John Waters' life.

(I will quote the text for the sake of posterity as apparently it will not be online for free viewing for very much longer)

The Kindness Of a Stranger

By JOHN WATERS
Published: November 19, 2006

Tennessee WILLIAMS saved my life. As a 12-year-old boy in suburban Baltimore, I would look up his name in the card catalog at the library and it would read ''see Librarian.'' I wanted these ''see Librarian'' books -- and I wanted them now -- but in the late 1950s (and sadly even today), there was no way a warped adolescent like myself could get his hands on one. But I soon figured out that the ''see Librarian'' books were on a special shelf behind the counter. So when the kindly librarian was helping the ''normal'' kids with their book reports, I sneaked behind the checkout desk and stole the first book I ever wanted to possess on my own. ''One Arm'' read the forbidden cover on a short-story collection by Tennessee Williams that I later found out had once been available only in an expensive limited edition, sold under the counter in ''special'' bookshops before New Directions released the hardback version. And now it was mine.

Of course, I knew who Tennessee Williams was. He was a bad man because the nuns in Catholic Sunday School had told us we'd go to hell if we saw that movie he wrote, ''Baby Doll'' -- the one with the great ad campaign, with Carroll Baker in the crib sucking her thumb, that made Cardinal Spellman have a nation-wide hissy fit. The same ad I clipped out of The Baltimore Sun countless times and pasted in my secret scrapbook. The movie I planned to show over and over in the fantasy dirty-movie theater in my mind that I was going to open later in life, causing a scandal in my parents' neighborhood.

Yes, Tennessee Williams was my childhood friend. I yearned for a bad influence and boy, was Tennessee one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny. I didn't quite ''get'' ''Desire and the Black Masseur'' when I read it in ''One Arm,'' but I hoped I would one day. The thing I did know after finishing this book was that I didn't have to listen to the lies the teachers told us about society's rules. I didn't have to worry about fitting in with a crowd I didn't want to hang out with in the first place. No, there was another world that Tennessee Williams knew about, a universe filled with special people who didn't want to be a part of this dreary conformist life that I was told I had to join.

Years later, Tennessee Williams saved my life again. The first time I went to a gay bar I was 17 years old. It was called the Hut and it was in Washington, D.C. Some referred to it as the Chicken Hut, and it was filled with early 1960s gay men in fluffy sweaters who cruised each other by calling table-to-table on phones provided by the bar. ''I may be queer but I ain't this,'' I remember thinking. Still reading everything Tennessee Williams wrote, I knew he would understand my dilemma. Tennessee never seemed ''gayly-correct'' even then, and sexual ambiguity and confusion were always made appealing and exciting in his work. ''My type doesn't know who I am,'' he stated, according to legend, and even if the sex lives of his characters weren't always healthy, they certainly seemed hearty. Tennessee Williams didn't fit into his own minority, so I had the confidence not to either. Gay was not enough.

It was a good start, however. ''I was late coming out, and when I did it was with one hell of a bang,'' Tennessee writes in ''Memoirs'' in 1972, the same year my film ''Pink Flamingos'' had its world premiere in Baltimore. While I was just getting my first national notoriety, Tennessee was struggling to finish the final version of ''The Two-Character Play'' and horrifying theater purists by appearing on stage in his new play ''Small Craft Warnings,'' and then answering questions from the Off Broadway audience afterward to keep the show running. I never once thought this was unbecoming behavior on my hero's part and tried to follow his example by introducing my star Divine at midnight screenings of our filth epic. ''I never had any choice but to be a writer,'' Tennessee remembered at the time, and he remained my patron saint. I followed his career like a hawk.

Why was ''Memoirs'' reviewed so badly when it first came out? ''The love that previously dared not speak its name has now grown hoarse from screaming it,'' Robert Brustein wrote, two years later, in The New York Times. Today, few critics would be so blatantly homophobic, but Tennessee did love to bait his enemies. ''They offered me a $50,000 advance,'' he said, ''and I thought I would be dead before the book came out.'' But more sensibly he admitted, ''Of course, I could devote this whole book to a discussion of the art of drama, but wouldn't that be a bore?'' ''Memoirs'' certainly isn't a bore and caused a sensation when it was released. In fact, the day Tennessee showed up at Doubleday Bookshop in Manhattan and signed more than 800 copies became known as ''The Great Fifth Avenue Bookstore Riot.''

Maybe I like ''bad'' Tennessee Williams just as much as ''good.'' This year a boxed set of DVDs was released containing all of Tennessee Williams's best-reviewed movies: ''A Streetcar Named Desire,'' ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,'' ''Sweet Bird of Youth,'' ''The Night of the Iguana,'' and ''The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.'' But I want the ''bad'' Tennessee Williams boxed set: ''Boom'' (the greatest failed art film ever made) directed by Joseph Losey and starring Elizabeth Taylor as Sissy Goforth, the richest woman in the world, and Richard Burton as the angel of death; ''Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots'' (the film version of ''The Seven Descents of Myrtle''); ''This Property Is Condemned'' with Natalie Wood; and even ''Noir et Blanc,'' the 1986 Claire Devers film version of ''Desire and the Black Masseur.'' The ''bad'' Tennessee Williams is better than most of the ''good'' of his contemporaries.

Was Tennessee nuts when he wrote ''Memoirs,'' or just high? Would his original agent, Audrey Woods (from whom he sadly broke in 1971), even have allowed him to publish this book if she had still been in charge of his career? ''Since that summer of 1955 I have written usually under artificial stimulants,'' he confesses before adding, ''aside from the true stimulant of my deep-rooted need to continue to write.'' Did Tennessee ever really get over the 1960s, which he calls ''my stoned age?'' ''To know me is not to love me,'' he allows, remembering the ''seven-year depression'' he went into after the death, from lung cancer, of his longtime boyfriend, Frank Merlo. ''I'm about to fall down,'' Tennessee would announce to whoever was present in those years, ''and almost nobody, nobody ever caught me.''

When Tennessee suddenly is level-headed, it can come as a surprise. ''I have never doubted the existence of God,'' he writes soberly before later admitting to a ''disbelief in an after-existence.'' His guarded optimism always seems to save the day. ''Mornings, I love them so much!'' he enthuses, celebrating ''their triumph over night.'' Self-pity? Never. ''I've had a wonderful and terrible life and I wouldn't cry for myself: would you?'' Hardly.

''Is it possible to be a dirty old man in your middle 30s?'' Tennessee writes in ''Memoirs,'' remembering his very active sex life -- a kind of sex life we are much more used to reading about in memoirs today than we were then. ''Baby, this one's for you,'' he tells himself whenever Mr. Right Now appears, but he seems to be realistic about safe sex with strangers even before the onslaught of AIDS. Recommending ''that penetration be avoided'' with hustlers ''as they are most probably all infected with clap,'' he may be the only Pulitzer Prize winner to write about A-200, a product used for ridding your body hair of crab lice.

Tennessee falls in love a lot too. ''I have a funny heart,'' he admits. ''Sometimes it seems to thrive on punishment.'' What other memoir has ''loneliness'' listed in the index? Provincetown, Mass., that beautiful beach town on the very tip of Cape Cod, seemed to bring out the best in him romantically. Not only did he meet two of his best boyfriends there (and Tallulah Bankhead), he wrote the line ''I have always depended on the kindness of strangers'' while holed up in a cabin before the summer season began. I felt the same way about Provincetown. I hitchhiked there in 1964 just because somebody told me, ''It's a weird place,'' and boy, were they right. A very gay place too, but a different kind of gay. ''I may be queer, but I AM this,'' I remember thinking. I've gone to Provincetown for 43 summers and every time I pass by Capt'n Jack's or the Little Bar at the A House, two places Tennessee got lucky in love, I mentally genuflect in respect.

Tennessee knew how to have fun with fame, too, and it seems he met all my idols: Jane Bowles, Luchino Visconti, Jean Marais, Johnny Ray, Yukio Mishima. So what if Jean-Paul Sartre once stood Tennessee up -- I bet Sartre was a bum date anyway. Tennessee helped William Inge, the great playwright who lived in Tennessee's shadow, through alcoholism (the blind leading the blind?), and tried to understand the folie de grandeur of his best friend, Lady Maria St. Just, one of the most difficult women who ever lived. Even Truman Capote comes across sympathetically in ''Memoirs.'' But unlike Truman, Tennessee never took the upper class that seriously. He hung around with street queens in New Orleans and prostitutes in Key West, and later in life, the Warhol superstar Candy Darling became a best friend. He isolated himself, far away from New York and Los Angeles, to write and whenever he panicked, travel seemed to be the answer. ''My place in society,'' Tennessee remembers, ''then and possibly always since then, has been in Bohemia.''

Suppose Tennessee Williams had lived? What if he hadn't choked on that prescription drug vial cap that he supposedly used as a launching pad for his meds? Would his career have had a second wind like Edward Albee's? Or would he have despaired and crumbled further when the AIDS epidemic hit and wiped out many of his new younger friends? Surely he would be appalled at the end of ''trade'' as he knew it, but would he be like some of the older gay men I see now in one-time hustler bars in Baltimore who wait for the trade, even though they know it will never ever come? Would Tennessee have teamed up with Paul Morrissey? ''I would like him to make a film of one of my short stories,'' Tennessee writes, and who knows -- maybe these two mavericks could have reinvented each other the way Sirk and Fassbinder did. Most important, could Tennessee have ever really hit bottom and gotten sober once and for all? On the wagon, would he have been able to continue to think up the best titles in the history of theater, the way he had always done? Even with all the self-prescribed substance abuse, Tennessee seemed to age well and remained cheerfully handsome, but if he had reached his late 70s would he have ruined it all by getting a face lift? Could anyone have saved Tennessee? Critics? Fans? Tricks? We, the readers? One thing for sure, flattery would have gotten us nowhere. ''When people have spoken to me of 'genius,' '' he writes with a wink, ''I have felt an inside pocket to make sure my wallet's still there.''

I never met Tennessee Williams, but I saw him once at the Boat House restaurant in Key West, surrounded by admirers, looking a little woozy, and decided maybe this wasn't the time for us to be introduced. But reading ''Memoirs'' is the next-best thing -- it's like having a few stiff drinks with Tennessee on one of his good nights as he tells you juicy stories that were once off the record. Listening could save your life too.

[R0lf]

Price on Amazon at the moment is $16.99.

[neal]

Price on Amazon at the moment is $16.99.

Marketplace seller, if that matters. Amazon's actual price is still $51.99.

[domino harvey]

A Streetcar Named Desire Blu-ray April 10, 2012

[dx23]

Blu-ray.com has the specs:

Next year, Warner Home Entertainment will release A Streetcar Named Desire in a special 60th Anniversary Blu-ray edition. Director Elia Kazan's landmark adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play focuses on the physical and mental battle of wills between fading socialite Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh, Gone with the Wind) and Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando, The Godfather), her savage and domineering brother-in-law.

Nominated for twelve Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Actor: Marlon Brando, and Best Director: Elia Kazan, the film ultimately won four at the 1952 Oscar Ceremony - Best Actress: Vivien Leigh, Best Supporting Actor: Karl Malden, Best Supporting Actress: Kim Hunter, and Best Black-and-White Art/Set Direction: Richard Day and George James Hopkins.

Warner's 60th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray presents the restored version of A Streetcar Named Desire in its 1.37:1 original aspect ratio. Other technical details are still unknown, though the disc will have the following supplements:

Commentary with Karl Malden, film historian Rudy Behlmer, and Jeff Young
Elia Kazan movie trailer gallery
Movie and audio outtakes
Marlon Brando screen test
Elia Kazan: A Director's Journey documentary
Five behind-the-scenes featurettes:
- A Streetcar on Broadway
- A Streetcar in Hollywood
- Desire and Censorship
- North and the South
- An Actor Named Brando

The 60th Anniversary Edition also comes packaged in a forty-page book set that contains on-set/promotional photographs and film history trivia.

A Streetcar Named Desire streets on April 10th, 2012.

[domino harvey]

Not particularly impressive, sez DVDBeav