SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962)

With the play as well as its antihero emasculated, this Richard Brooks film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ florid meller (Paul Newman’s prodigal son comes home & gets castrated!) was the sort of commercial success that destructively fed off of the playwright’s worst self-parodistic aspect. Never the most fluid or natural of directors (to put it kindly), Brooks brought off Williams’ CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF/‘58 by playing in italics, but what there was slightly coarsened with miscalculated emphasis now becomes his starting point. Geraldine Page, only a year older than Paul Newman, can’t make sense of her role as faded film star (who could?) while an overbearing cast underlines every line for emphasis and only Rip Torn gets his effects across without going all Southern Gothic on us.