by Stephen Vagg
Stephen Vagg looks at the commercial track records of films based on the works of Tennessee Williams.
Tennessee Williams was “hot” in Hollywood for around twenty years, 1950 to 1970, which isn’t bad. It’s only a little shorter than the time he was a fixture on Broadway (roughly 1944 to 1968), and a better run than many contemporaries enjoyed in the movies, notably Arthur Miller and William Inge. Much has been written (deservedly) about Williams and his works, including the films made from them, but there has never been an attempt to analyse why some of those movies did well at the box office and others didn’t.
A couple of things to keep in mind while reading:
We are limiting this to Hollywood versions of Williams’ works, i.e. no television adaptations (which were particularly popular in the 1980s), or non-US film versions.
When we say “success”, it refers to the commercial fate of the films, not their quality.
When we say a film did “poorly”, we refer to the film’s initial theatrical release – even the weaker performing films may have eventually gone into profit due to television, DVD, streaming, etc.
We are going to focus on that “hot” 1950 to 1970 period (which ended with the triple flop whammy of This Property is Condemned, Boom! and Last of the Mobile Hot Shots). We acknowledge the occasional Williams adaptation has emerged since, such as the 1987 Paul Newman-directed Glass Menagerie, but would argue they are very much outliers.
Our main sources for box office returns are the Eddie Mannix Ledger for MGM films, and Variety magazine. These figures need to be taken with caution, but they are still a useful guide.
All good? Right, let’s proceed.
So, by our count, from 1950 to 1970, there were 15 Hollywood feature films based on Williams works (fourteen from stage plays, one adapted from a novel):
– The Glass Menagerie (1950)
– A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
– The Rose Tattoo (1955)
– Baby Doll (1956)
– Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
– Suddenly Last Summer (1959)
– The Fugitive Kind (1960)
– Summer and Smoke (1961)
– The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961) (this is the one from the novel)
– Sweet Bird of Youth (1962)
– Period of Adjustment (1962)
– The Night of the Iguana (1964)
– This Property is Condemned (1966)
– Boom! (1968)
– Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (1970)
How did these films fare commercially at the time?
These ones were big hits (as in, among the most commercially successful of their year):
– A Streetcar Named Desire
– The Rose Tattoo
– Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
– Suddenly Last Summer
– The Night of the Iguana
Everyone kind of knows this – maybe they’d forgotten Rose Tattoo [pictured, main image], but it was one of the most popular movies of 1956. Likewise, Night of the Iguana has fallen out of the zeitgeist a little – it doesn’t seem to be revived much – but it was a monster movie hit in its day.
A film more popular than we had been led to believe:
– Period of Adjustment
No kidding, this little-remembered pictured from one of Williams’ most obscure Broadway plays was a profitable earner for MGM according to the Eddie Mannix Ledger, costing around $2 million and bringing in over $4 million.
These films were big flops:
– The Fugitive Kind (the first Marlon Brando film to lose money, apparently)
– Boom! (a legendary fiasco)
– The Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (less legendary but still a fiasco)
Everyone knows those movies didn’t do well. No shocks there.
Films that, when looked into, were less popular than we thought:
– The Glass Menagerie
– Baby Doll
– Summer and Smoke
– The Roman Spring of Miss Stone
– Sweet Bird of Youth
– This Property is Condemned
These movies made an impact and brought in dollars, but all seem to have lost money – on their initial release anyway. Sweet Bird of Youth was the most surprising, but the Eddie Mannix Ledger says it lost quite a bit – and this matches with contemporary reports in Variety. Baby Doll made a lot of noise on release, didn’t cost too much, but Elia Kazan says in his memoirs that it lost money. The others were definite commercial disappointments – Summer and Smoke and Roman Spring did not even appear on Variety’s list of top earning movies for their release years, while Glass Menagerie and This Property were well down on those lists, and came with high costs, so they would’ve lost money.
Now, was there anything that all the profitable films had in common?
We came up with three things.
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Fidelity to the spirit of the source material, if not the actual text.
To make a financially successful Tennessee Williams adaptation, you didn’t need to be literally faithful to the source material – some of the biggest hits made key changes, notably Cat and Streetcar.
What was crucial was being true to the spirit of the source material. The censor forced adjustments to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Streetcar Named Desire but both films still “got” the plays on which they are based. Williams was upset at the heterosexualisation of Brick (Paul Newman) in Cat, but the 1958 film adaptation still conveyed the key underlying themes of his play. And while the censor made Stella (Kim Hunter) leave Stanley (Marlon Brando) at the end of Streetcar, every viewer with a brain knew that she’d go back to him eventually.
In contrast, several key flop films based on Williams plays totally undermined their source material. The two leading culprits were Glass Menagerie and Sweet Bird of Youth, which took superb plays, then totally wrecked them with stupid endings.
The 1950 Glass Menagerie had the visit of the Gentleman Caller (Kirk Douglas) “inspire” Laura (Jane Wyman) to “come out of her shell” and turn out to be a positive influence on her. WTF? It’s totally contrary to the point of the play! Remember how the 1958 film version of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll destroyed its chances of success by adding a dumb upbeat ending? The first Glass Menagerie did exactly the same thing. There were other problems with the film, true, but the fatal one was changing the ending.
The end of Sweet Bird of Youth builds naturally to Chance (Paul Newman) being killed by the loathsome relatives of his ex, Heavenly (Shirley Knight), as in the play… However, in the film this is changed so… Chance and Heavenly go off into the sunset together. Huh? Chance, the drifter, male prostitute, sponger, who wrecked Heavenly’s life, who only a few minutes towards the end is still scamming off the Princess (Geraldine Page)… gets a happy ending?
Look, we get that execs didn’t want to have Chance castrated like he was in the stage play but sorry, he had to die – otherwise it’s not fair. You can have a popular film with a happy ending or a sad ending, that doesn’t matter – what matters is that it’s a just ending. Justice must be served. Chance didn’t deserve a happy ending in Sweet Bird of Youth. (If the filmmakers wanted that ending, they needed to make more changes throughout to justify a happy ending.)
The 1961 film Summer in Smoke is an interesting case. In the main, it’s faithful to its source material in a literary sense – the words are there – but there’s no feeling behind them. At heart, Summer and Smoke is a story about, like so many Williams plays, a prissy woman sexually tempted by a hot young – we know, we know, there’s other stuff going on, but the core of it is the issue of “the flesh” versus the spirit. However, director Peter Grenville produced an utterly sexless version. There’s lots of dialogue, and decor, and fluttering acting from Geraldine Page and Laurence Harvey, and cuteness from Pamela Tiffin, but no sense of actual sex. Yes, it was only 1961 and you couldn’t show much, but compare it with other Williams adaptations around this time by directors such as Elia Kazan, Richard Brooks, John Huston, Joseph L Mankiewicz and even Delbert Mann. They drip sex. Sex needs to be at the heart of Summer and Smoke and Peter Grenville doesn’t put any in there.
Another misjudgement is 1966’s This Property is Condemned. This film should clearly be about Natalie’s Wood’s infatuation with no-good lout Robert Redford, but is fatally sunk by continued attempts to make Redford’s character sympathetic. He gets all these scenes where he’s into her, then all of a sudden, he isn’t again, and then he is again and isn’t again and… oh, it’s a mess. Producer John Houseman admitted in his memoirs that these scenes were confusing, the result of five different screenwriters (we’re also guessing that Robert Redford kept complaining about wanting his character to be likeable – he was prone to do this, even before Butch Cassidy, wanting to turn his gay character in Inside Daisy Clover into a bisexual, and so on). Natalie Wood gave the performance of a lifetime on This Property is Condemned, but it was for naught.
Now, capturing the spirit of the source material doesn’t guarantee you’ll have a hit (eg. Roman Spring of Mrs Stone, Baby Doll – both of which we’ll discuss later) but it’s essential for you to do it if you’re to be in with a chance.
Aside: the commercial success of the original source material isn’t that important. Certainly, some hit Williams plays resulted in a popular film (Streetcar, Rose Tattoo, Cat, Iguana) and flop/obscure plays resulted in a flop film (Boom!, Mobile, Baby Doll) but flops came out of hits (Sweet Bird of Youth, Glass Menagerie) and hits came out of flops/obscurity (Suddenly Last Summer, Period of Adjustment). End of aside.
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You don’t need big stars, but the leads must be well cast (or at least not spectacularly miscast).
Big names working on a Tennessee Williams adaptation are no guarantee that it will be successful. The Fugitive Kind had Brando, Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward and Sidney Lumet. This Property is Condemned had Natalie Wood, Robert Redford, Charles Bronson, Ray Stark, Francis Ford Coppola, John Houseman, and Sydney Pollack. Boom! had Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, Joseph Losey and Noel Coward. Last of the Mobile Hot Shots had Gore Vidal, Sidney Lumet, James Wong Howe, Lyn Redgrave and James Coburn. Glass Menagerie had Gertrude Lawrence, Kirk Douglas and Jane Wyman (the latter coming off an Oscar win). Roman Spring of Mrs Stone had Vivien Leigh, Lotte Lenya plus Warren Beatty coming off Splendor in the Grass. Baby Doll had Elia Kazan and Karl Malden. Sweet Bird of Youth had the same director (Richard Brooks), star (Paul Newman), producer (Pandro Berman) and screenwriter (Brooks) as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof but it made something like one-third the money. By way of contrast, Period of Adjustment did well with B listers: Jim Hutton, Tony Franciosa, Lois Nettleton and a before-she-was-a-star Jane Fonda under the direction of never-made-a-feature-before George Roy Hill.
So, major stars are not required.
But the leads have to be well cast. Or, at least, not be severely miscast.
A Williams adaptation that is spectacularly miscast (eg Boom!, Last of the Mobile Hot Shots) will always sink like a stone.
The most financially successful Williams adaptations are always spectacularly well cast. Cat. Streetcar. Rose Tattoo. Iguana (perhaps the most delightfully well cast Williams adaptation of them all).
But it’s sufficient to be “not badly miscast”. In Suddenly Last Summer, Montgomery Clift’s clear physical disintegration is a little off putting but it doesn’t kill the film. In Period of Adjustment, Tony Franciosa and Lois Nettleton are a little dull but it’s not fatal to the movie.
So, we have two elements required so far for a commercially successful Tennessee Williams adaptation: (a) fidelity to the spirit of the source material and (b) the leads aren’t spectacularly miscast.
But why then did some films with these two elements still flop (Fugitive Kind, Baby Doll, and Roman Spring of Mrs Stone)
Because, they didn’t have the third element…
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A young character who actively sets out to have sex with men.
Tennessee Williams is famous for writing about horny older women lusting over young bucks, and certainly there’s enough of them in his plays, but all the successful film versions of his work have young people in them – especially, ones that pant over men.
Streetcar. Cat. Period of Adjustment. Rose Tattoo. Suddenly Last Summer. Night of the Iguana.
They all feature young characters – mostly female but one male (Suddenly Last Summer) – who aggressively pursue sex with men.
In Streetcar, it’s Kim Hunter (as Stella); in Cat, it’s Liz Taylor (Maggie); in Period, it’s Jane Fonda (Isabel), in Rose Tattoo, it’s Marisa Pavan (Rosa); in Suddenly Last Summer, it’s Julian Ugarte (Sebastian); in Night of the Iguana, it’s Sue Lyon (Charlotte).
This was tremendously exciting to audiences at the time because it was so rarely shown on screen and was fresh and titillating. It was not, it seems, as appealing/different to show the sexual desires of middle-aged women and/or men, although these pop up too. We are not talking about the rights or wrongs of this, this is an analysis of popular taste in the 1950s and 1960s. Having middle-aged women or men pursue sex was a feature of some commercially successful Williams adaptations (Streetcar, Rose Tattoo, Iguana), but is nowhere to be seen in others (Period of Adjustment, Suddently Last Summer, Cat), and features in plenty of flops (Boom!, Roman Spring, Fugitive Kind).
For instance, why did Streetcar Named Desire hit it big commercially while Fugitive Kind lost money? Both had Williams/Brando/“name” female co-stars/significant directors. Both were sexy and violent tales in the South. Certainly, Streetcar is a better play than Orpheus Descending (the source of Fugitive Kind) but the latter is still pretty good.
Here’s our take on a possible reason… In Streetcar, Kim Hunter’s Stella loved having sex with Brando’s Stanley and said so, constantly. It was very unusual for the time for a young female character to show such desire. In Fugitive Kind, no one young person wants to have sex with Brando’s character – or any other man. Yes, Joanne Woodward’s in it, she was young at the time and her character lusts after Brando’s, but Woodward is made up to appear as this eccentric middle-aged bag lady on the streets.
This is a theory impossible prove, but if Woodward had played her character as young, attractive and up for it, like the characters she’d just depicted in The Long Hot Summer and From the Terrace (both box office successes), that would’ve given The Fugitive Kind some juice and turned it into a hit.
Why did Period of Adjustment, based on a play that had been disappointing on Broadway, featuring a B-list cast and then-unknown director, and recipient of mixed reviews, become a sleeper hit? Our theory: because Jane Fonda, young and gorgeous, spends most of the film trying to have sex with new husband Jim Hutton. That was fresh. Audiences were intrigued, and titillated, in sufficient numbers for the film to make money.
Night of the Iguana is famous for its galaxy of superbly cast legends – Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr – but the secret sauce in that film’s appeal was Sue Lyons’ character. Only two years after she became legendary in Lolita, here she is playing another young sexpot throwing herself at a middle-aged man (Burton).
The Rose Tattoo is famous for Anna Magnani and Burt Lancaster, but there’s a key subplot about her high school-aged daughter, Marisa Pavan, who wants to have sex with (sorry, “get married to”) sailor Ben Cooper. This acts as a vibrant counterpoint to Magnani’s reluctance to get between the sheets with Lancaster and gave the movie an extra layer of energy/titillation.
Elizabeth Taylor’s unsatisfied sexual desire for Paul Newman is famously the core of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and the biggest single reason for that film’s huge success.
In Suddenly Last Summer, Elizabeth Taylor’s character wears a wet bathing suit to attract men – she’s doing this unwillingly, but it’s at the behest of her brother Sebastian (only glimpsed but constantly referred to), a young man who aggressively pursues sex with men.
The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone features a young woman, Jill St John, interested in Warren Beatty – but he’s the one who does the chasing (at the behest of Lotte Lenya). St John doesn’t pursue him. If she had, maybe the film would’ve been commercially successful.
What about Baby Doll, we hear you ask? This film became famous for its provocative poster of Carroll Baker (who played Baby Doll) in a cot sucking her thumb – isn’t that about a horny young woman? Actually no. In the movie, dirty old men Karl Malden and Eli Wallach both want to sleep with Carroll Baker, but she clearly doesn’t want to have sex with anyone. Baby Doll is basically a child who Eli Wallach seduces through manipulation and guile. Maybe if Wallach had been played by a conventionally sexy actor – some Actors Studio spunk, say, like Newman, Ben Gazzara or George Peppard – and/or Baker was more knowing, there would be an entirely different reading of the movie. As it is, Baby Doll is basically a film about a victim. The film was marketed as something titillating but when you watch it, the end result is far more complex.
Everyone assumed Baby Doll would be a big hit – even Variety predicted so in its review. The film was excellently made, scandalous, launched an exciting new star, and the whole country knew about it. But enough people went to turn a profit, – and it wasn’t a super expensive film. This poor box office performance is routinely attributed to opposition towards the movie from Catholic organisations, but it’s more the fact that Carroll Baker’s character is a genuine innocent. If she was actively engaged in the seduction – as, say, Brigitte Bardot was in And God Created Woman or Sue Lyon was shown as being in Lolita – the film would’ve had broader commercial appeal. Again, we are not talking the rights or wrongs of these, very aware of issues surrounding consent and character ages for Lolita and Baby Doll. We are talking about the commercial taste in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Audiences enjoyed seeing young women pursue sex: Brigitte Bardot movies, God’s Little Acre, Picnic, Butterfield 8, the James Bond films, Tom Jones, The Long Hot Summer… and successful Tennessee Williams adaptations.
Now, having a sexually hungry young thing doesn’t ensure you’ll have a popular Williams adaptation: Pamela Tiffin chased after Laurence Harvey in Summer and Smoke, and Natalie Wood pursued Robert Redford in This Property is Condemned. But, as mentioned earlier, those films had other problems.
So, there you have it – based on our analysis, if you do a Williams novel/play, and you want it to be a hit, make sure you:
(a) are faithful to the spirit of the source material rather than the literal words;
(b) have leads who are not spectacularly miscast, and;
(c) have a young character pursuing sex with men.
The first two things are pretty much a standard rule for any film adaptation – although execs will constantly try to force “happy” endings on material, even where that is inappropriate, and will always try to shoehorn in a “star”, even if they’re miscast, and even though both things can kill their film commercially. The third requirement is a little more out there… until you think about it some more. Part of Williams’ popular appeal – aside from his artistry – is the way he used transgressive sex.
Oh, and to finish this article with a random suggestion – we think that it’s a great shame that no one filmed In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, that would’ve made a terrific movie.
