Sweet Bird of Youth Reviews

Despite recycling most of the original Broadway cast for this film adaptation, Sweet Bird of Youth misses the demented melancholia of the work by grafting on a sappy, unnecessary Hollywood ending. This is a pity for several reasons, highest amongst them is the stunningly high caliber of work that each of the actors brings to their roles, no matter how large or small.

Of course, when you’ve got actors like Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Ed Begley, Shirley Knight, and Madeleine Sherwood. Newman in particular always seems to grasp the correct vibe and tone of Tennessee Williams’ language and style. His laconic drawl, mesmerizing eyes and general good-ol’-boy looks (admittedly of the very pretty, seemingly inhuman Hollywood variety) are used effectively to turn us into dark emotional corners and guide us through disturbed sexual acts. Page plays the great screen star and fading beauty, while she always makes you believe she was once an intoxicating screen presence and grandest star around, she never really sells us on the sex symbol part. No matter, she’s electrifying as the egomaniacal cougar who is hanging by a thread to sanity so long as she imagines her career is over. Begley and Knight are a father-daughter with ties to Newman’s past, and Sherwood is the shrill, vain, greedy mistress that Begley has kept for decades.

All of the tropes and basic elements are ripe for the picking, but they’re never let off the leash. And, yes, some of it is downplayed thanks to the Production Code standards of the time, it almost doesn’t matter because it seems to be so sad and the musicality of the language to be so right. Then we reach the end, which trades in a literal castration, for a small bit of disfigurement and a runaway happy ending. Way to totally miss the point on the work as a whole, and go against everything we have seen in the preceding events leading up to the rushed and hurried climax.