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Customer Reviews
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"Failure is a contagious disease".,
"Sweet Bird of Youth" (1962) was directed by Richard Brooks who also wrote the screenplay based on one of the darkest and most pessimistic plays by Tennessee Williams. Paul Newman stars as Chance Wayne, handsome, charming, lusty, and fame-hungry young gigolo who returns to his Southern home town after long stay in Florida and Hollywood where he tried to make a career as a movie star. He hoped to reconnect with two women he loved and left behind, his mother and his first love, Heavenly Finley. He hopes to make it this time because he brought with him a famous and once beautiful but now fading movie star with drinking problems, Princess Cosmonopolous aka Alexandra Del Lago (Geraldine Page). She needs a companion, he needs her connections. Once again, he will realize and bitterly admit that "Failure is a contagious disease". His mother died just before he returned and Heavenly's father, a local political boss (Ed Begley), hates him and swears revenge for having broken his daughter's heart. The film works thanks to the wonderful performances from Page, Begley, and breathtaking Paul Newman who looked like he was able to catch the sweet bird of youth and who gave an outstanding performance. Brooks changed the play's ending to give Chance and Heavenly hope for the better future but in the light of what we've seen, the movie's final feels like forced and unsatisfying.
Rating: -
One of Newman most deeply felt and affecting screen portrayals...
Again Newman is the attractive young man ruthlessly pursuing the American Dream of success, coldly exploiting people and rejecting the love that might save him...
Chance has only one talent--sexual prowess--and he's been bumming around for several years, satisfying rich women in the hope that he can find fame in Hollywood... He picks up a faded film star, Alexandra Del Lago (magnificently played by Geraldine Page), who is hooked on vodka, hashish, oxygen and young studs... She promises to get him a screen test, and they drive to his Southern hometown, where he plans to find his sweetheart, Heavenly Finley (Shirley Knight), and take her along to Hollywood... He doesn't know that on his last visit he left her pregnant, that she had an abortion, and that her father, the powerful Boss Finley (Ed Begley), is out to get him...
Newman is impeccable as the smiling, confident phony who acts like a celebrity--dropping names, giving large tips, arrogantly stating: "Just because a man's successful doesn't mean he has to forget his hometown." He's also frighteningly sneaky and sympathetically tolerant, as he charms Alexandra while recording what she's saying for blackmail purposes... But he's ultimately pathetic: a desperately insecure man, addicted to amphetamines, so self-abasing attending to Alexandra and performing as a lover at her whim... His mask of swaggering bravura really disappears when he tries to see Heavenly... He becomes confused and desperate--walking with regular steps, rubbing his hands together, pleading urgently over the phone...
Flashbacks (not in the play) show him as a younger man--smiling, innocent, eager to marry Heavenly, but persuaded by Finley (who scorns Chance's poor background) to leave town and pursue success... Thus Chance was corrupted, and began to use his sexuality to get ahead...
Chance doesn't make it, but he keeps dreaming... On his previous visit, he tells Heavenly that he's learned how to "beat the game." Newman has never been more convincing as an intense man on the make... With a ruthless look, he says he will return a success next time: "I got the key, baby--I got the know-how ... for me there's one quick way." She wants him as he is, but he can't stop: "All my life I've been on the outside, and time is running out ... they got places for the old and the sick and the homeless, but there is no place at all for the failures." He rejects her to become a beach boy: "Don't ask me to give up my dream."
Now it's too late, and in another effective scene, Heavenly refuses to come with him, ignoring his agonized pleas, and leaving him stunned, anguished, alone with his dream...
Newman says that Chance must take his beating to expiate his sins: "He's saying to you--all of you--'look at me and recognize whatever there is of me in you'." Like Fast Eddie, he must be punished for his arrogance...
Despite the film's many contrivances and excesses, "Sweet Bird of Youth" has worked as a story of a man's pathetic downfall, but his getting the girl after all is absurd... The guilty, as in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," is director-writer Richard Brooks, although perhaps the real blame belongs to Hollywood, the Kingdom of Compromise...
Rating: 
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Chance's last desperate chance
Paul Newman is stunning based on both his thespian proficiency and handsome screen presence as Hollywood never has been Chance Wayne in the Tennessee Williams drama "Sweet Bird of Youth". Williams again shows a great aptitude for crafting a wonderful piece based on the complex interrelationships existent between his characters. The film transposed well from the stage thanks to both the writing and directorial expertise of Richard Brooks. The Deep South based film features an impressive array of acting performances from its players.
Newman returns back to his Gulf Coast hometown of St. Cloud having failed repeatedly to make it into show business. He is serving as a chauffeur/gofer/sex toy for fading and alcoholic screen siren Alexandra Del Lago played wonderfully by Geraldine Page, who is accompanying him. He hopes to reconnect with his hometown sweetheart Heavenly Finley played by Shirley Knight. Wayne, however grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Heavenly's father Tom Finley is a powerful Southern political boss played superbly by deserved Oscar winner Ed Begley. "Boss" Finley had banished Newman many years ago from St. Cloud to remove him from daughter Heavenly's world.
Newman's return to town forces Begley and his minions including his kowtowing son Tom Jr. played nicely by Rip Torn to again force him out of town. We find out however that Heavenly had become pregnant by Chance during a secret tryst some months previously.
Newman desperately tries to both secure a professional commitment from the drunken and insecure Page and consumate his feelings for his true love Knight.
Rating: 
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"This is America. Today you're nobody, tomorrow you're somebody."
Sweet Bird of Youth is initially a hard movie to get into, the first ten minutes are talky and oblique and it's sort of hard to figure out what the movie is going to be about. But once Geraldine Page's boozy, bitter, has-been movie star Alexandra Del Lago comes onto the screen and clashes with Paul Newman's naively ambitious gigolo Chance Wayne, viewers know they're in for a real treat.
Controversial for it's time, Sweet Bird of Youth is all about the price one pays for fame and beauty, cleverly exposing the greed and hypocrisy of Hollywood and the South. The action centers on the small squalid Florida town of St. Cloud, currently mired in corruption and sleaze.
Years ago the nasty misogynist Boss Finley - who runs the town with a fierce demagoguery - ran Chance out of town with a one-way ticket and the temptations of the American Dream. In fact, Chance - with his startling good looks - hoped to score it big in Hollywood as a matinee idol.
When Finely finds out that Chance has returned accompanied by a whorey, drunken Hollywood actress, he's not happy at all. Chance was having an affair with Finley's beautiful daughter Heavenly (Shirley Knight) much to the chagrin of Finely and her evil brother Thomas (Rip Torn). Finley's spinsterish sister, aunt Nonnie (Mildred Dunnock), a victimized, frightened browbeaten woman, is the only person who still likes Chance, cherishing his love to Heavenly.
Chance desperately wants to reconnect with Heavenly, but her father constantly surrounds her with the law and won't let her out of his sight. Chance is also unaware of the terrible secret - an illegal abortion - that shamed the family and almost bought the dynasty down. Flashbacks to their "sweet bird" time reveal that Chance once had the potential for a real relationship and a life better than a two-bit hustler.
Now he spends much of his time with Alexandra, negotiating sex with her and desperately trying to get her to sign a contract and promote him Hollywood. He pops Benzedrine while she sinks back bottles of vodka, getting rolling drunk, and they think nothing of smoking pot when the mood takes them. There's a quiet anxiety to them both - she sees it as a relationship of convenience and he sees her as his one chance to make it big.
The scenes between Chance and Alexandra are indeed the best parts of the movie, as a formidably beautiful bared-chested Newman struts around the hotel room, waxing lyrical to Alexandra how great he is, whilst she is so shattered at what she thinks is the bad reception of her latest film. After all, she's an aging starlet who has banked much of her career on her looks and she comes apart when she can't face those close-ups anymore.
Transferring Tennessee Williams' material from the stage to the screen is always a risky endeavor. Sweet Bird of Youth incorporates a lot of flashbacks to keep the plot moving and to explain the various characters' pasts. But oftentimes the narrative comes across as clunky and awkward, the text is mannered and stagy and sometimes I wonder whether director Richard Brooks could have streamlined it a bit better from the stage to the screen.
Still, the acting is mostly spectacular from the leads down to the supporting - you just never see performances like this on screen today. With Newman, Page and Begley getting the lions share of the hysterical scenes. Page is an absolute standout as Alexandra the aging, fading movie star; and Paul Newman is of course totally sexy as Chance, the selfish, self-involved stud. Mike Leonard May 06.
Rating: 
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More Of The Same Re-Heated Angst-Ridden Futility Of It All
That's it, after having watched "Sweet Bird Of Youth" I officially refuse to consider Tennessee Williams a "dramatist" any longer - I honestly haven't seen such deep-fried, hysterical, clutching-at-every-straw-in-a-100-mile-vicinity melodrama like this since I had to watch the Rock Hudson & Lana Turner 1950's melodramas "Written On The Wind" and "Imitation Of Life" for some classes at USC film school 10 years ago. There's really no difference between this over-the-top Williams nonsense and the weepy pre-Days-Of-Our-Lives piffle that the director Douglas Sirk trotted out back in the 1950's; only Williams' ludicrously campy & desparate attempts to shock the audience by 'revealing amazing & heretofore unspoken-of taboo revelations' make Sirk's brand of cheesy over-emoting seem downright tame and even (gulp) restrained in comparison. Heck, all you basically need's a few more people's brains being splattered across the pavement, and you've got David Lynch's "Wild At Heart" - but at least Nicolas Cage & Laura Dern had a halfways enjoyable sense of self-aware comic irony about their totally inane goings-on.
Don't get me wrong, Paul Newman's performance is incredibly appealing, if not terribly miscast - the movie all but collapses in total implausibility when Geraldine Page's shriekingly vampy & self-obsessed ex-movie-star harlot tells Newman, "look at me, and then look at you, who are you? A nobody, a bellhop." And all the while you're looking, in spectacularly gorgeous closeup, at PAUL @#$% NEWMAN, one of the fifty most handsome, charming and debonair men who's ever walked the earth!
I swear, I couldn't even enjoy the campy kitschiness of the whole overwrought debacle, because Tennessee Williams is such an insistently, overbearingly judgemental, moralistic, humorless, condemnatory, "oh-god-not-another-beautiful-f*cking-day," melodramatic QUEEN, whose main intention in writing seems to be to rub the audience's faces in the 'shocking depravity,' 'emotional doom,' 'spiritual apocalypse,' etc., etc., of it all. Williams' unbelievable level of writer-as-guillotine-operator makes Woody Allen at his most judgemental & societally critical look like the Prime Minster of Switzerland (the embodiment of neutrality). Of course the Hollywood actress-dinosaur is "hooked" on hashish as her way of coping with her career's decline. "Hooked" on hashish!? Oooh la la, what naughty, corrupt and yet fashionable decadence we wallow in, Tennessee! What, Haagen-Dazs wasn't good enough?
And as for the whole 'steamy, sordid, electrifying report from the front lines of the savage underbelly of the showbiz industry/American dream' aspect of this dreck, I thought David Mamet summed it up WAY more eloquently with a single tiny joke in his (far, far more accurate, and immensely more entertaining) take on Hollywood, "Speed-The-Plow":
Q: How is show business like a new relationship?
A: It's full of surprises, and you're always getting screwed.
See folks, that's dead-on commentary, and just as importantly, A. succintly put & B. funny to boot, two marvelous storytelling traits that I was desperately starved for throughout the long-winded and simplistic and reductive 'Sweet Bird of Youth'.
I'm beginning to think that the writer David Sedaris (Dress Your Family In Corduroy & Denim) and the movie directors Paul Haggis (Crash) and Todd Solondz (Happiness) are the inheritors of Tennessee William's aesthetic tendencies, only they (mostly) skip the high-pitched cocktails-hour melodrama (so very 20th-century) and goes straight for the woe-is-me, woe-are-all-of-us self-loathing and wallowing in supposedly-unthinkable-yet-oh-so-timely-and-titillating depravities. I could make a pretty good argument for the movie that just won the Best Picture Oscar earlier this year, "Crash," being yet another inheritor of Tennessee Williams' technique and approach to telling a story, and commenting on the state of humanity in doing so; it certainly serves up more of the same re-heated, hysterical, one-dimensional angst-ridden futility of it all.
If you're looking for a truly great movie along the lines of younger-professionally-unfulfilled-showbiz-type-hooks-up-with-ancient-movie-star-goddess, you really ought to check out Billy Wilder's absolutely brilliant "Sunset Boulevard" (1950) starring William Holden and Gloria Swanson. That movie hit an audacious new level of sinister black comedy & satire that even prefigured "Dr. Strangelove' 14 years later - for chrissakes, you've even got the lead character narrating the whole movie in flashback despite the fact that the movie opens with him laying face down in a swimming pool! The first ten minutes of "Sunset Boulevard," with Holden pulling his car into the driveway of Swanson's dilapidated, neglected Hollywood Hills mansion, has 100 times more chutzpah and cojones (and, underneath it all, a genuine level of emotional melancholy towards the vanished past) than the entirety of the last three Tennessee Williams movies I've seen (SBOY, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, This Property Is Condemned).
