Sweet Bird of Youth

(Richard Brooks, US 1962, 120 min., 35mm)

Senior Matinee. By 1962, Tennessee Williams had become one of America’s best-known playwrights, not just among the Broadway cognoscenti but regular moviegoers as well; eleven of his works had been turned into Hollywood films in as many years. The twelfth would be this adaptation of his 1959 sensation, starring Geraldine Page as Alexandra Del Lago, an aging Hollywood star who fears her latest comeback was an embarrassing failure, and has descended to a self-protective cocoon of booze and drugs. She’s easy pickings for Chance Wayne (Paul Newman, who starred opposite Page in the original Broadway production), a handsome, opportunistic gigolo who is on his own downward slide. Chance drives Alexandra down to his Florida hometown where the wreckage of his past and a shocking comeuppance await.