Irving Rapper (1950)
One of Tennessee Williams’s best-known plays became one of the lesser-known screen versions of his work – perhaps because the eclipsing A Streetcar Named Desire was released as soon as the following year, perhaps because this adaptation (Williams did the screenplay with Peter Berneis) isn’t, in most respects, very good. The film exudes lack of confidence in the possibility of keeping its audience entertained by ‘static’ theatre; but the opening up of the play is perfunctory and, in the early scenes at least, the actors playing the Wingfield family seem uneasy – in a no man’s land between stage and screen. The Glass Menagerie is a stage work through and through. Williams’s detailed production notes (‘The play is memory’) stress the non-realistic presentation. The single set – the Wingfields’ poky St Louis apartment with a fire escape (a way out to a world that contains other people: a world offstage) – is essential in order for the play’s symbolism, and the sense of the characters being trapped in their lives together, to work. Staying in the same physical space is an obvious but dramatically effective representation of their psychological situation. In the theatre, an unchanging set is as likely to intensify the material as to make the viewer restless. Taking it as read that ‘action’ is intrinsic to cinema, the film-makers here are as impatient as their putative audience to get the camera out of the apartment.
Inventing some bits for Tom at the warehouse works to the extent that Arthur Kennedy gets a chance to suggest that, dreary as his job there is, it’s light relief compared with his claustrophobic family life. But there are pointless scenes of Laura flunking a typing test then – staying out of the house to make her mother think she’s still at secretarial college – limping round all day to museums and the local zoo (as if this is at least a change from the glass version at home). Jane Wyman, more physically robust than you might expect for Laura, certainly looks miserable in these sequences but in a way that anyone in such circumstances might look – without any suggestion that Laura is especially maladapted to real life. Most ludicrous of all are the flashbacks as Amanda recounts her young womanhood as an A-list Southern belle. Even in long shot and though she’s thin as a rail, Gertrude Lawrence looks well into her forties as the cynosure of the ballroom.
This nervous ‘development’ of the material leads too to a serious misjudgment in the climax of the piece. Jim, the ‘gentleman caller’, persuades Laura not only to dance with him round the living room but also to go to the ‘Paradise’ dance hall across the alley from the apartment block. This is an overstatement – indeed a misrepresentation – of the idea of Laura ceasing to be physically and emotionally crippled, of being introduced into normal society. There’s also a bizarre insertion of dialogue – again it seems to endorse the idea that Laura has become normal – at the point at which Jim takes his leave, after dropping the bombshell that he’s engaged to be married. As well as giving him, as a memento, the glass unicorn whose horn he’s broken while they’re dancing in the apartment (‘Now he can be the same as all the other horses’), Laura invites Jim and his wife-to-be to come back for dinner sometime. This completely contradicts another invention for the film – albeit one that, in terms of the original material, makes more sense: Tom, after his escape from St Louis to a life sailing the seven seas, reminisces during the dog watch and imagines his mother and sister still at the flat, mired in a folie à deux, fantasising about the arrival of gentleman callers.
All in all, Irving Rapper seems very wary of the (in all senses) fragile theatricality of the material. Tom describes Laura as ‘living in a world of glass animals and playing old phonograph records’. In the event, Laura puts on a record for the first time when Jim’s at the door so that she can avoid going to open it; during the first two thirds of the film, she shows an interest in the menagerie only once, when Tom, storming out after a row with Amanda, accidentally breaks one of the ornaments, sweeping it off the shelf with his trailing coat. (The menagerie has – even allowing for its place in the symbolic scheme of the story – an improbably hazardous location in the apartment.)
What saves the picture is the sequence in which it doesn’t attempt to be much more than a filmed stage play – when Jim arrives for dinner. Kirk Douglas gives proceedings a real lift: we see him first at the warehouse, which he also lights up. The work scenes are worth having because Douglas and Arthur Kennedy are evidently enjoying their exchanges in these relatively easeful bits (both look a little mature for their parts – although the fact that Kennedy appears nearly young-middle-aged has its own edge, given the story). Of course these warehouse bits also have the effect of reducing the effect of Douglas’s arrival in the apartment. If we’d not seen him up to that point, he’d have maximum impact as a charismatic new arrival in the lives of daughter and mother; seeing him in other contexts before then has already reminded us that Douglas is a good actor but that forceful zest is his trademark. He gives a fine performance, though: his bright-eyed, affably coercive encouragement of Laura to believe that she’s as good as anyone else is perfectly judged; Douglas does it in a way that makes you see how Laura thinks Jim’s interested in her – he also lets the audience understand his character’s smilingly anxious self-preoccupation. Jane Wyman blooms in her scenes with him – so does Gertrude Lawrence’s Amanda, flirting with Jim at the dinner table.
Lawrence looks not just careworn but ill here (she died in 1952) – but perhaps it strengthens her performance, takes the stage-star gloss off it. I can’t remember ever having seen her on screen before; she’s more fluid than I expected, even though there are times when her accent slips and she tends to overdo the singsong rhythm to keep hold of it. Amanda – hard up, cheated by life, desperate to get a second chance at it by living through her doomed-to-failure children – is the sort of character sometimes described as ‘a bad actress herself’, and the phrase is used to excuse an overdone interpretation of the role. There is, nevertheless, a sense in which – because this nagging, exhaustingly over-insistent woman so dictates the emotional climate of the apartment – the actress playing Amanda becomes self-validating. That happens here with Lawrence (and this is not to say that she gives a bad performance).
The Glass Menagerie was adapted for television in the early 1970s (with Katharine Hepburn as Amanda) and remade for the cinema in 1987 (by Paul Newman – with Joanne Woodward as Amanda and John Malkovich as Tom). I’ve not seen either of these but I would guess that the makers of a screen version nowadays (not least because it would almost certainly be a made-for-television adaptation) might be likely to avoid the worst faults of Irving Rapper’s film but be inclined too to treat the material too reverentially. What’s really good about the dinner sequence here is that it’s absurdly, touchingly funny. The actors spark off each other. They make you appreciate the rhythmical, eccentric verve and humour of Tennessee Williams’s early writing.
3 November 2008
