Showing posts with label Tennessee Williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tennessee Williams. Show all posts
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| Robert Hooks and Lynn Redgrave |
"Go home with you? -- but I don't even know you." -- Myrtle
Myrtle Kane (Lynn Redgrave), who once belonged to a group called the "Mobile Hot Shots," gets a stranger, Jeb Thornton (James Coburn), to pretend he's engaged to her so they can win some prizes on a local game show. Unfortunately, the host also wants to marry them on the program. Jeb takes Myrtle back to his dilapidated plantation, Waverly, where he lives with his black half-brother, "Chicken" (Robert Hooks). The dying Jeb agreed that Chicken would have the plantation after his death if he helped him work it, and signed a paper to that effect, but now he sends Myrtle out to get back the paper by any means possible. But Chicken knows something that may make all of Jeb's manipulations unnecessary. Loosely based on Tennessee Williams' play "The Seven Descents of Myrtle," it's a wonder why anyone thought Mobile Hot Shots would make a good movie. Everyone is miscast, and Lumet is certainly the wrong director. The movie can't seem to make up its mind if it's a comedy or not -- there are a couple of chuckles, but that's it, and the final revelation is a pip -- but its biggest failing is that with all that's going on it's still a bore [even a climactic flood doesn't help much]. Redgrave seems to be channeling Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth (although her character is completely different), but she makes one of the the least convincing Williams' heroines ever. Coburn makes some effort but gets nowhere, and Hooks comes off best, but in this movie that's not saying much. Still it's hard to play Williams just right, and mediocre Williams is even harder. Gore Vidal's screenplay at one point seems to hint at homosexual incest, but as it comes out of nowhere and is unconvincing anyway, it was probably just to set up a quick, dumb gag late in the movie. The premise of the picture is intriguing but the development is just dismal. With Hooks playing a character who denies his being black, one would have to say Hot Shots is horribly dated as well. [If one wonders why anyone would want to own a property like Waverly in the first place, all I can say is real estate!]
Verdict: This should just be washed away with the flood. *1/2.
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| Deborah Kerr and Richard Burton |
"Don't make me take steps, Dr. Shannon ..." -- Judith Fellowes.
The former minister T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton), who was locked out of his church, is now guiding ladies on a tour bus through Mexico. Young Charlotte Goodall (Sue Lyon) can't keep her hands off Shannon, inspiring the ire of her formidable guardian Judith Fellowes (Grayson Hall). Shannon takes the gals to a small hotel run by an old friend, Maxine Faulk (Ava Gardner), whose husband died a short while ago. While some of the tourist ladies put up a fuss, Maxine reluctantly admits the impoverished artist Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) and her aged poet father, Nonno (Cyril Delevanti) to her hostel. As these characters interact and Shannon faces dismissal from the tour business, will the man finally find himself "at the end of his rope," like one of the iguanas tied to the stairs? Like many Williams' adaptations The Night of the Iguana is a mix of the poetic and the pretentious, but it does have some very tender moments. Burton, Lyon and Delevanti walk off with the acting honors. Grayson hall [House of Dark Shadows] is a bit overwrought, almost ridiculous at times, as Judith, but the whole idea of the fire-breathing repressed lesbian is terribly dated. Deborah Kerr [Edward, My Son] is good, but she doesn't quite get across the weary defeatedness of someone who is a caregiver to a man in his nineties [walking him around Mexico in the heat with little money could almost be considered elder abuse], and is apparently homeless besides -- where is the sheer desperation she would be feeling? Gardner [Seven Days in May] is not bad at all and suitably earthy; Bette Davis played the role on the stage. The poem that Nonno completes, written by Williams, of course, is beautiful. Despite its flaws, the movie casts a certain exotic and haunting spell.
Verdict: Imperfect but entertaining and well-acted, with some interesting characters. ***.
This is an interesting biography of stage, screen and television actress Grayson Hall, who was nominated for a supporting Oscar for The Night of the Iguana, but who will always be best-known for playing Dr. Julia Hoffman on the afternoon Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. The book looks into her early days before she reinvented herself as "Grayson Hall," her two marriages, her complicated relationship with her father, and the many people she knew and worked with in New York City. Jamison looks at the film that Hall denied she ever made, wherein she played a madame, Satan in High Heels, as well as the low-budget End of the Road, not to mention the two theatrical features based on Dark Shadows. Her stage work was eclectic and controversial: La Ronde, Genet's The Balcony, and even a couple of musicals. She was doing previews of The Madwoman of Chaillot when she was diagnosed with lung cancer. I remember watching Dark Shadows and wondering in how many different ways Hall could intone the phrase "I don't know" which she seemed required to say many times in every episode. Never conventionally attractive -- one might even say she possessed sublime ugliness -- Hall nevertheless proves quite glamorous in some youthful shots in the photo section. Jamison does a good job exploring the life and work of Hall, and suggests that back in the day she was almost some kind of gay icon.
Verdict: For Dark Shadows fans and theater enthusiasts. ***.