Peter Glenville (1961)

I read Summer and Smoke and saw it as BBC Play of the Month (with Lee Remick in the lead) more than forty years ago.  Both these things are a dim memory now:  not for the first time with a film based on a Tennessee Williams play, it was hard to tell how much of what was ludicrous derived from the original and how much was a result of adaptation.   (The screenplay is by James Poe, who also adapted Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Meade Roberts, who worked with Williams on the screenplay for The Fugitive Kind.)   The setting is Glorious Hill, a small town in Mississippi, in the early years of the twentieth century.  The two main characters are Alma Winemiller and John Buchanan.  She, the tensely proper and affected daughter of a minister, is on the verge of becoming an old maid.  He is the boy next door who’s grown into a dashing, loose-living young man, following in the professional if not the moral footsteps of his doctor father.   Alma represents the spiritual, John the sensual.  In a prologue featuring the two of them as children, she talks gravely about eternity and informs John that her Christian name is Spanish for soul.  He counters derisively with mention of an anatomy chart, on the wall in his father’s surgery, and its proof that the soul doesn’t exist.  The wall chart appears later in the movie, when Alma and John are adults, and she can hardly bear to look it:  whether because it doesn’t show the soul or because it does label other body parts is arguable.  The principals’ contrasting natures are crudely polarised throughout Summer and Smoke – until the traumatic events of the summer in question cause them virtually to swap their outlooks on life.

When they go out for the evening together, John takes Alma to a local joint called Moon Lake, a carnal-infernal den of hot-blooded Latinos who drink and dance, play guitars, leer and sweat.  The visit to Moon Lake culminates in the couple’s watching a cock fight.  Alma’s the only woman in a macho, chicken-leg-chomping audience.  She seems a good sport to be there at all but, when blood from one of the birds spots her virginal dress, it’s too much for her – Alma screams and has to get out.  This very understandable reaction is presented as proof of her failure of nerve when sexual proximity threatens.  Her flight from the red-blooded cock (how else can you describe it?) anticipates her escape from John when he tries to make love later in the evening.   It’s one of many ridiculous passages in Summer and Smoke.   A key location is a drinking fountain at the edge of a wood, watched over by a melancholy stone angel.   This is where the childhood conversation between Alma and John takes place and where she returns to sit and think twice in the closing stages.  (It gets to remind you of that park bench in Albert Square.)   On the first of these occasions, the girlishly high-spirited Nellie Ewell happens to come along, laden with Christmas shopping.  She expresses surprise to see Alma but then promptly hands over a Christmas present and card for her to open.  The card is signed by John Buchanan and it’s very clear from what Nellie says that she’s heard a lot about Alma from John – yet it comes as no less of a shock to Alma, when she visits John in his surgery in the next scene, that he and Nellie are engaged to be married.   This sequence ends hilariously with the happy couple embracing – she in a red dress – while pallid Alma picks up from the desk her prescription for the ‘little white pills’ she needs from Dr John to calm her nerves.

Geraldine Page’s performance as Alma on stage in 1952 is legendary and her recreation of it on screen is a demonstration of extraordinary skill.  Each line reading, expression and gesture is perfectly executed.  Her exquisitely placed hand movements – her fingers nervously straying to her throat and the upper reaches of Alma’s high-buttoned blouses – are a work of art in themselves.  But Page’s acting is too finished:  her tremulous neuroticism is so detailed that it seems thoroughgoing – you can’t get beneath it to sense anything suppressed in Alma.  It’s hard to agree with John Buchanan when he accuses Alma of condemning the animal in others because she can’t accept it in herself.  Dressed by Edith Head in lavenders and light blues, Geraldine Page makes these the colours of Alma’s soul – you never feel that she’s a disguised lady in red.   Laurence Harvey seems not unreasonably unconvinced by what he’s asked to do.  Both of the leads, though, have too much power and integrity as actors for their character’s personality to change in the way that the schema of Summer and Smoke dictates – as John Buchanan comes to believe there’s more to human love than physical love (and, as a doctor, turns suddenly into an heroic lifesaver) and Alma Winemiller recognises and accepts the sexual imperative inside her.  In the closing scene, Alma, having lost John to Nellie (Pamela Tiffin is often clumsy but occasionally effective in the role), is back at the drinking fountain and starts a conversation with a passer-by – a travelling salesman called Archie Kramer.  Alma talks to him of Moon Lake, still in a tone of prim reproof, even though the film ends with the pair of them heading off there together.  The resilience of Alma’s spinsterish manner and Earl Holliman’s agreeable playing of Archie mute the absurd and objectionable implications of this finale – that there’s no middle ground between denial of and surrender to the demands of the flesh, that the new Alma, now that she’s stopped being repressed, is promiscuous.  Talking with Archie, Alma laughs happily for the first time and you feel that she does so not because she’s turned into a whore but because he’s a pleasant, amusing young man.

What gets relatively overlooked in the exploration of Alma’s psyche is the baleful influence of her father, the Rev Winemiller.  Malcolm Atterbury gives a one-note performance appropriate to a one-note character but this bony killjoy is hard to ignore nevertheless.   Alma’s mother had an unexplained breakdown some years ago from which she’s never recovered – Alma has had to run the family home and Mrs Winemiller is a social loose cannon:  she gets noisily agitated at the Fourth of July party that also marks John Buchanan’s return to Glorious Hill early on in the movie.  He and Alma get talking together as the fireworks go off – John makes fun of the circumlocutory Alma when she refers to them as a ‘pyrotechnical display’ – but he ends the conversation with the offer of a drive in his car sometime soon and tells Alma to wear ‘a hat with a plume’ for the occasion, although she says she hasn’t got one.  It’s a hat with feathers that Mrs Winemiller then steals from a milliner’s shop and subsequent scenes with Alma suggest that, now that she’s gone bonkers, the mother is her daughter’s id.  Although Mrs Winemiller, vividly and well played by Una Merkel, simply gets forgotten about in the closing stages, there’s a strong implication that the father, who spends his days sitting around and voicing disapproval, thwarted his wife’s sensual side and wants to ruin his daughter’s life in the same way.  (After John Buchanan learns his lesson and tries to mend his relationship with Alma, the minister crucially lies to John that she doesn’t want to see him.)  Fathers don’t come out of Summer and Smoke well.   Dr Buchanan senior (John McIntire) is tediously self-righteous; Papa Zacharias (Thomas Gomez), the Moon Lake honcho, has a daughter, the vampish Rosa, who’s all too eager to give John Buchanan what Alma won’t or can’t.  As Rosa, Rita Moreno (who was at the BFI for this screening) delivers a few effective glances but her sultry, jealous-woman dance (a warm-up for the cock fight) is daft and it’s hard to imagine any actress being able to redeem Rosa’s monologue about her impoverished Mexican upbringing and how she fancies John Buchanan because ‘he smell good’.  It will be obvious that the presentation of the Hispanic characters is startlingly racist throughout.

Although Peter Glenville’s direction is pedestrian, Elmer Bernstein does his best with the impossible task of scoring this farrago.   In the chronology of Tennessee Williams’s major plays, Summer and Smoke follows immediately on from A Streetcar Named Desire and there are several echoes – from the ironic names of places (Elysian Fields / Glorious Hill) to the significant names of characters.  When she explains what her own name means, Alma recalls Blanche Dubois’ exclamation, at her first reunion with her sister, ‘Stella, oh, Stella, Stella!  Stella for Star!’   The idea that, beneath her ultra-respectable exterior, Alma is a sex maniac also gives her a flicker of kinship with Blanche.  It seems clear that Williams continued to be dissatisfied with Summer and Smoke.  The piece has its origins in his short story Oriflamme, about a woman buying a red dress.  In the 1960s Williams revised the play and renamed it The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.

3 November 2013