THE STRIPPER 1963

This forgotten little film has long been a favorite of mine and used to show up fairly regularly on late-night television when I was a kid. Until it resurfaced recently on YouTube, I can say it’s easily been 40 years since I last saw this last-gasp effort in Hollywood’s love affair with the works of Faulkner, O’Neill, Williams, & Inge.  

Adapted by Meade Roberts (The Fugitive Kind, Summer & Smoke) from William Inge’s little-known 1959 play A Loss of Roses, and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (Patton, The Planet of the Apes, Sphinx); The Stripper is, like a great many of my favorite films from the '50s—especially those written in the Southern Gothic/Midwest Melodrama tradition—a heavy slice of mordant Americana served up with plenty of lost illusions and broken dreams on the side.

Joanne Woodward as Lila Green

Richard Beymer as Kenny Baird

Claire Trevor as Helen Baird

Robert Webber as Ricky Powers

Shot in somber black and white (then de rigueur for contemplatively downbeat movies), The Stripper is the so-familiar-you’ll-swear-you’ve-seen-it-before story of Lila Green (Woodward); a down-on-her-luck wannabe actress touring with a seedy theatrical troupe (The Great Renaldo & Madame Olga: Magic & Mirth Par Excellence). Abandoned mid-tour in a small Kansas town by her equally seedy boyfriend Ricky (Webber), Lila is forced to depend on the kindness of strangers. Not literal strangers, mind you, for this just happens to be the town where Lila grew up before a Betty Grable look-alike contest provided her with a second-class means of escape to Hollywood. No, the strangers Lila seeks out are merely friends from her past. Friends to whom Lila now appears as gaudy and out of place as a fur coat in July.

Kenny Thinks Lila Is Hot
And indeed, she is, for it's mid-summer in Kansas and Lila flounces about in a leopard fur coat.
Before settling on the grossly misleading The Stripper, other titles considered for this screen adaptation of A Loss of Roses were: Celebration, Woman of Summer, and A Woman in July

Lila secures temporary lodgings with Helen Baird (Trevor), a widow for whom she once babysat in her youth. Helen, now a full-time nurse pulling swing shift as a fault-finding, overprotective mother-hen to her only son Kenny (Beymer). Helen is initially glad to be of assistance to the prodigal cooch dancer, but she begins to doubt the soundness of her philanthropy when it becomes clear that the restless son she has such high hopes for has developed a major infatuation for the glamorous, at least ten-years-older new tenant in stretch pants.

Much in the same way the arrival of a train-hopping drifter shook up the small-town residents in William Inge’s Picnic, the emotional (and sexual) disruption instigated by the intrusion of Lila—a peroxided, emotionally-wounded, aging starlet with a squalid past and a childlike disposition—into the vaguely oedipal Baird household is the source of The Stripper’s central conflict.

For Lila, the return to the birthplace of so many of her unrealized dreams rekindles a desire to reclaim her lost innocence. For Kenny, irresolute in his manhood over failing to fill the idealized shoes of his late father; Lila’s age and superficially worldly charms are like a beacon of maturity. Helen, conflicted in wanting Kenny to grow up and stand on his own two feet, yet prone to clingy exclamations like "You're all I have to live for!" grows concerned when Kenny's intensifying infatuation with Lila turns to mutual attraction. 
Adding fuel to Helen's anxiety that Lila's bad influence will hasten her son's inevitable departure is the simultaneous concern that the flashy older woman will corrupt Kenny's interest in pretty Miriam Caswell (Carol Lynley), their "good girl" (aka, virginal) neighbor. In this environment, everyone seems to be looking to someone else for salvation, rescue, liberation, or redemption.

Carol Lynley as Miriam Caswell

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
The Stripper is something of a “Best of” collection of what had become, by 1963, the over-familiar clichés in the Tennessee Williams/William Inge oeuvre (it was Williams’ The Glass Menagerie which inspired Inge to write his first play). Set in the fictional small town of Salinson, Kansas (the same town Kansas-born William Inge chose for his play, Picnic), The Stripper has it all: the emotionally fragile fallen woman; familial discord; small-town provincialism; sexual restlessness; Freudian psychology; and the eternal battle between idealism and truth. And, of course, heat and summer used as metaphors for passion.

Seeing the film again after so many years, it’s so clear to me why I was all over this genre when I was young. First, they were situationally accessible to my limited frame of knowledge and experience. Unlike James Bond movies which took place all over the world, or exotic action adventures featuring acts of derring-do and non-stop danger; these films took place in the familiar, low-tech settings of town and neighborhood. The drama was often operatically over-the-top, yet human-scale enough in that it concerned itself with relationships, family tensions, and the applicable-at-any-age struggle with how our character flaws work to keep happiness at bay. 

Legendary real-life stripper Gypsy Rose Lee as Madam Olga St. Valentine
Louis Nye as Ronnie "The Great Renaldo" Cavendish

On the more “entertaining” side, not only were these films “daring” and “sex-obsessed” in ways suitable to a young person’s comprehension level (aka, all talk and no action), but the main characters were invariably women who could just as well have been gay men. Overwrought, theatrically histrionic gay men. I of course wasn’t aware of it then, but due to the times, Williams and Inge (both closeted gay playwrights during a time when homosexuality was criminalized in most states) were only able to express their truth through their female characters. Thus, their female protagonists were often imbued with a depth and dimensionality lacking in most roles for women written during this period.

As a youngster, the stoic, heteronormative macho leading man never spoke to any reality I knew. But I did recognize parts of myself in the bruised, vulnerable, idealistic outsiders Inge and Williams wrote so empathetically about.

Dreamers
Lila shows Kenny her prized possession: Film clips of her failed Hollywood screen test
 for the 1955 Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As much as I enjoy this film, I’m inclined to agree when I encounter reviews labeling this movie “lesser Inge.” The Stripper has a lack of subtlety and obviousness of intent that made me think it was early William Inge (it's a little like an episode from one of those '60s anthology TV programs like Playhouse 90). In reality, it’s one of Inge's late-career career misfires. One of the playwright’s first Broadway flops following a string of unbroken successes starting with Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1945), Come Back Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953), and Bus Stop (1955). 

Indeed, as A Loss of Roses signaled the beginning of a reversal trend in Inge’s career, the problematic play has a legacy of misfortune surrounding it rivaling that of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Michael J. Pollard as Geoffrey "Jelly" Beamis
Pollard and Webber are the only members of the original Broadway cast to recreate their roles in the film

The first victim was Shirley Booth, who had previously won both a Tony and an Oscar for her work in Inge’s Come Back Little Sheba, and accepted the role in A Loss of Roses when promised the character of Helen would be made more prominent. Alas, Booth wound up quitting the show just days before its Broadway debut for the rumored reason that Inge was shifting the production to favor a Broadway neophyte he had developed a crush on: an actor by the name of Warren Beatty, making his Broadway debut.

The second victim was William Inge himself. For although he had faith in the play and expressed the belief that A Loss of Roses was a “sure thing,” the play opened to disastrous reviews and closed after a mere 25 performances. It was Inge’s first flop, and one that so devastated him, he never had another stage success again.

The third victim was Warren Beatty. For although his performance in the play garnered a Tony Award nomination, the experience was so unpleasant, it is said to be the reason he has never appeared onstage again. On the plus side, Inge's enduring crush on Beatty (when Jane Fonda met Beatty for the first time in New York, she thought he was Inge's boyfriend) gave the young actor a foot-up in Hollywood. He made his film debut in Inge's Splendor in the Grass, and starred in the Inge-penned All Fall Down, a 1962 film with an older woman/younger man theme similar to The Stripper.

Victim number four was 20^th Century Fox production head, Buddy Adler, who, on the strength of Inge's reputation and track record, purchased the rights to A Loss of Roses for a whopping $400,000 (in 1950s dollars, yet!) before it even opened on Broadway. As he told columnist Louella Parsons at the time: “Yes, we paid a big price, but Inge writes only hits. He wrote 'Bus Stop,' 'Picnic,' and 'Dark at the Top of the Stairs.' There were a number of producers trying to get 'A Loss of Roses' so we were lucky to get it.” 

Something's Gotta Give
As she strips, Lila sings the 1954 Johnny Mercer song Fred Astaire introduced in Daddy Long Legs--the movie she unsuccessfully screen-tested for. Ironically, the song is also the title (grammatically cleaned up as Something's Got to Give) of Marilyn Monroe's last film. The Stripper was released a year after Monroe's death in August of 1962, and the movie is loaded with reminders of its originally being a Monroe vehicle.

Victim number five was Fox Studios. Adler purchased A Loss of Roses for then-under contract Marilyn Monroe, and teen heartthrob Pat Boone (!). Both turned the film down. Monroe (who enjoyed great success with the film version of Inge’s Bus Stop in 1956) likely found the Lila character - a stripper with lousy taste in men, who at one time tried to kill herself and was institutionalized - a tad too close to home; while Boone objected on moral grounds, finding the illicit affair between the young man and slightly pathetic stripper all wrong for his image.

Victim number six was actor Richard Beymer. Boosted to leading man stardom after West Side Story (1961), The Stripper jinx apparently hit a bullseye, for this was his last major motion picture.

Finally, victim number 7, Joanne Woodward. An Academy Award winner for The Three Faces of Eve (1957), Woodward retired from the screen not long after marrying Paul Newman and having two children. The Stripper was to be her comeback vehicle, but its DOA performance at the boxoffice got her career reemergence off to a rocky start from which it never fully recovered.

Helen Interprets Kenny's Birthday Gift as a Gesture to Replace his Father
A great many of the unhealthier aspects of the mother-son relationship in
A Loss of Roses were excised when it became The Stripper

PERFORMANCES

While many found fault with Inge’s original play and Meade Roberts' considerably less sordid adaptation, critics were largely in agreement over the quality of Joanne Woodward’s performance. Overcoming a stiff, blonde, cotton candy wig that always appears to hover at least an inch above her scalp, Woodward has some really remarkable moments playing a character who’s part Blanche DuBois and part Charity Hope Valentine.

Looking pretty spectacular in her Travilla wardrobe (Monroe’s designer), Woodward occasionally falls prey to the gimmicky tricks of smart actors trying to play dumb (laying it on a bit thick). But she truly shines in the film’s final scenes and achieves several moments of heartrending poignancy.

"I want my roses back."
Promotional stills of several sequences not in the film suggest the already problematic storyline
of The Stripper underwent a significant amount of post-production editing.
Below, a segment of an 1891 Emily Dickinson poem quoted in the film: 

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

Then there’s a pair of us - don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

The rest of the cast is solid, if perhaps let down a bit by a script that doesn't offer supporting characters much beyond making a quick superficial impression. Richard Beymer is good as the juvenile, but never succeeds in getting me to understand Kenny's darker, brooding side. The always-welcome Claire Trevor is a standout as the mother who fills an empty life with overconcern for her nearly-adult son.
Carol Lynley doesn't get much of a chance to be anything but gorgeous in a thankless "girlfriend" role, and there really is far too little of the quirky Michael J. Pollard and the Auntie Mame-ish Gypsy Rose Lee. TV stalwart Robert Webber is convincingly oily.

In spite of the film's sensationalist title, Woodward makes for a very covered-up stripper.
Happily, the same can't be said for her co-star

THE STUFF OF FANTASY 

In all these years I have never forgotten The Stripper's opening, pre-title sequence. It's just that terrific. It promises a level of camp sleaze the movie never delivers, but how can you lose with a movie that opens with a shot of the original, iconic Myra Breckinridge showgirl billboard?

Bus Driver: "We are approaching the world-famous Sunset Strip. Here you will see in the flesh the great names of show business you've only watched on the screen before." 

Tourist #1: "Look! There's Jayne Mansfield!"
Tourist #2: "No it isn't, it's Kim Novak!"

Bus Driver: "No it isn't, lady."
Tourist #1: "Then who is it?"

Bus Driver: "Nobody."

BONUS MATERIAL
"The Stripper" Watch the complete film on YouTube. HERE

The Stripper's sole Oscar nomination was for the costume designs of William Travilla (Valley of the Dolls, Black Widow, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). 

"It's what I want more than anything. More than winning contests or being a movie star,
or anything like that. 'Cause if you know you've got one person who loves and respects you,
then you don't need love from a lot of people, do you?"

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2015

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF 1958

I’ve always been a sucker for playwright Tennessee Williams’ overheated Southern gothics.
By the time most of the films adapted from his plays began airing regularly on late-night TV, Williams’ trademark psychoanalytic, sweat ‘n’ lust domestic melodramas—so popular in the '40s and '50s—had long gone out of fashion. But watching these movies as a kid gave me the impression of adulthood as this distant, mysterious wonderland where one’s life would be ruled by fiery passions, profound psychological epiphanies, and turbulent emotions. Where people with the simplest, most unassuming countenances concealed deep wellsprings of insight and poetic sensitivity. Ah, youth.

Admittedly, I couldn’t always distinguish actual Tennessee Williams movies from look-alike works from William Inge (Come Back Little Sheba), Eugene O’Neill (Desire Under the Elms), Carson McCullers (The Member of the Wedding), Lonnie Coleman (Hot Spell), or William Faulkner (The Long Hot Summer). But, as each of these films seemed to me to reinforce such similar themes, they might well have sprung from the same imagination.

Maggie- "Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you—gently, with love, and hand your life back to you. Like something golden you let go of—and I can! I'm determined to do it—and nothing's more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof—is there? Is there, baby? " 

The Emotionally Unavailable Man

When I was young and my entire world not much larger than the size of my family, I responded to the way Williams’ domestic dramas gave the mundane conflicts of the American household the scope and grandeur of Greek tragedy. In my adolescence, I related to his characters’ flawed humanity and struggle with self-forgiveness. In my teens, when I grew more aware of the hormonal drives propelling Williams’ narratives, I was fascinated by the way he introduced implicit and codified homosexual longing—inevitably tortured—through characters seen (Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof); unseen (Blanche’s husband in A Streetcar Named Desire); male (Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer); and female (Karen Stone in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone).

In young adulthood, when illusions of maturity come cloaked in the fragile armor of sarcasm and cynicism, I discovered camp humor and found much to jeer and scoff at in the more outdated aspects of Williams’ oeuvre. Particularly the quaint notion of what was considered to be "steamy" material by 1950s Hollywood standards. 

I also think it was around this time that I became hooked on those brutally trenchant “Family” skits on The Carol Burnett Show. So well-written and so over-the-top, these acerbic episodes of familial dysfunction were like mini-operatic satires of everything I liked so much in the whole Southern Gothic movie genre. Those skits had the effect of rekindling my love for Tennessee Williams and his ilk by reminding me that it was possible to both appreciate the sensitivity of human drama and still have a good chuckle over some of the dated, southern-fried histrionics.  

Elizabeth Taylor as Margaret (Maggie) Pollitt 

Paul Newman as Brick Pollitt

Burl Ives as Big Daddy

Judith Anderson as Ida "Big Momma" Pollitt

Jack Carson as Gooper "Brother-Man" Pollitt

Madeleine Sherwood as Mae "Sister-Woman" Pollitt

Changing times and shifting social attitudes have sapped many Tennessee Williams film adaptations of much of their initial profundity for me, leaving in its place a kind of winsome nostalgia for a time when Williams’ ennobling of the outcast and defense of the delicate-of-spirit proved the perfect balm for my adolescent insecurities. But the richness of his characters, the poetry of his language, and the finely observed details of domestic tension that comprise so many of his works still have the power to enthrall. And if every so often I find his works lapse into campiness…well, these days that only serves to sweeten the experience.

One of Williams’ more accessible films is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. His 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play adapted for the screen (Williams would probably say bowdlerized) by director Richard Brooks (Looking for Mr. Goodbar) and screenwriter James Poe (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?). Parodied, imitated, and discussed to a fare-thee-well, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and the saga of the Mississippi Pollitts—a family of epic dysfunction long before such a term existed—is too familiar to warrant a summary, save to say family patriarch Big Daddy is dying, and the kinfolk tie themselves in knots trying to avoid any number of truths that the finality of his impending death makes necessary to confront.

Maggie the Cat, Brick, Big Momma, Big Daddy, Gooper & Mae and their troop of little no-neck monsters all occupy a short list of Williams characters so colorfully drawn and finely realized onscreen; just their names alone evoke images of real-life, flesh-and-blood beings with lives which extend beyond the celluloid frame. Not all of Williams’ characters strike me this way, but to this list, I’d add Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski, and Sebastian Venable; the latter whom I've always been able to picture, plain as day, in spite of his never being shown.

"They've brought the whole bunch here like animals to display at a county fair."
Monster of Fertility Mae Pollitt (nee Flynn) and Her Brood of No-Necks

I think Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the very first Tennessee Williams-based film I ever saw. Certainly, coming as I do from an extended family arguably as dysfunctional and just a shade more Machiavellian, it’s the first Tennessee Williams movie I actually “got.” Which is to say, at my young age, I was able to follow what was going on without actually grasping any of its insights. Themes like the dual nature of lying—that it can be used to protect and harm; the useless self-destructiveness of guilt; the relativity of love and truth; and the indomitability of the self-preservation instinct (aka, that cat staying on the tin roof as long it can) were layers yet to be revealed to me.

Like those shiny shells the surf leaves on the beach that require minimal effort to spot and pick up, the things that most entertained me about Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were primarily on its surface. For example, I loved the simplicity of the setup: over the course of one long, hot summer day (I learned early that there's no such thing as a winter in a Southern Gothic), members of an estranged and at odds family are forced to interact and put on a good face on the occasion of Big Daddy's 65th birthday. Possibly his last.

Shot in a slick, glossy style, cast with appealing actors giving stirring performances, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is an enjoyable finger-lickin', family-size, southern-fried fracas with overlays of Freudian psychology. As often as not, the characters lie to each other with the same alacrity with which they lie to themselves, and when not repressing some deep, dark secret, are usually pressing forth some hidden agenda. Resentments, revelations, and epiphanies flow as freely as the bourbon from Brick's bottomless booze bottle, while unsure southern accents clash musically in the background. It's great stuff that I've come to appreciate more as I've grown older.

Mendacity Manor

I saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof long before I was aware of the Hollywood Production Code-mandated excision of all references to homosexuality from Williams’ original play. This likely annoyed the hell out of those familiar with the play, but to me, the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof always came across like every other overly coy, repressed-yet-obsessed-with-sex ''50s-era movie I'd ever seen. Another one of those movies that never shuts up about the very thing it isn't allowed to speak of. 

I thought the entire hubbub in the movie surrounded Brick's belief that Maggie slept with his football buddy, Skipper, a man whom Brick, feeling unloved by Big Daddy, held up as a hero. That's it. I never picked up on any gay subtext beyond the fact that Paul Newman was impossibly gorgeous, but I did find all that evasive dialogue maddening. A sizable chunk of my early memories of watching Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on TV is scene after scene of characters proffering endless variations on: “Don’t say it, Maggie!”, “I’m gonna talk about it!”, “Tell him! Go on, tell him the truth!”, "It’s got to be told!”, "First, you've got to tell me!"

Yeesh! Just say it already!

"When a marriage goes on the rocks...the rocks are there, right there!"

The anthology TV program, Love, American Style was still on the air the first time I saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. An identical brass bed was featured in several of the comedy show's episodes and black-out skits (above) contributing to my feeling that sections of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof played out like an episode titled "Love and the Deep Dark Secret" 

I also remember being distracted by Paul Newman’s largely immobile, insanely photogenic face. Easy on the eyes as he is, he goes through the entire film with but a single, all-purpose expression: smoldering insouciance. Sure, he's playing a character all bottled up and cut off, and perhaps my biggest complaint might be rooted in how the character is conceived in the first place; but even with all that taken into consideration, I don't find those cool blue eyes registering very much. Every close-up looks like the same GQ Magazine cover. I guess they didn't call him "Brick" for nothing.

Winner of the Keanu Reeves/Kristen Stewart/Sean Combs one-face-fits-all Sphinx Award

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Over the years, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has been restored to Williams’ preferred version in any number of permutations (two are linked in the Bonus Materials section below). But, as gratifying as it is to finally see the entire play as it was originally intended, the film version remains my favorite.
Why?
Because even at its most frank, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a seriously closeted play. Nearly 2½ hours are devoted to a man turning himself inside out over the "shameful" prospect that he might be gay. Another man kills himself over the fact. I recognize that as the work of a repressed playwright in a repressed era, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is daring and groundbreaking as hell, but contemporary actors tackling this material today always come across as rather forced and false. They tend to over-emote and practically burst blood vessels portraying characters who are motivated by pretense and a need to play things close to their vest.
My feeling is that if I’m going to enjoy a work of closeted art, there’s something to be said for seeing it with all its repression intact.

The movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof feels every inch a product of the 1950s. It’s an uptight, skirting-the-issue kind of movie that was made and takes place within the very era that created the closet-case Bricks and Skippers of our society. In some odd, meta kind of way, there is something perfect about Paul Newman starring in a movie dealing with latent homosexuality, which, in its telling, leaps through hoops and fire in an effort to avoid even mentioning the word. The drastic alterations Cat on a Hot Tin Roof underwent to make it to the screen still communicate Williams' themes pretty accurately, while subtextually giving the nod to the real-life Bricks and Maggies of Hollywood and those marriages of convenience rumors that follow the uncommonly long show-biz marriages of gossiped-about stars like Newman and Woodward.

Madeleine Sherwood (who I only knew as Reverend Mother on The Flying Nun) and Burl Ives
 (who will always be Sam the Snowman from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer) recreated
the roles they originated on Broadway

PERFORMANCES
What makes Cat on a Hot Tin Roof so re-watchable for me are its performances. Everyone delivers and is in fine form (even Newman, the immovable Brick, has his moments). The feel of a great ensemble cast is captured in the easy, familiar way in which the characters interact, and happily, the screenplay affords each at least one moment to shine. Madeleine Sherwood and Jack Carson are letter-perfect and major scene-stealers. I particularly delight in Sherwood's southern accent and single-minded, Lady Macbeth-ish maneuvering.

"One more crack, Queenie..."

Although he gave a near-identical performance that same year in the film version of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, Burl Ives is perhaps my all-time favorite Big Daddy. And while my vote for favorite Big Momma has to be split evenly between Maureen Stapleton and Kim Stanley (in the 1976 and 1984 TV movie versions, respectively), Judith Anderson's atypically refined interpretation of the character is surprisingly moving.

And then we come to Elizabeth Taylor. Given how many of her films have made their way onto this blog, it should come as no surprise that her Maggie the Cat is the central reason why Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has been a favorite of mine for all these years. For me, it really isn’t a matter of how well she embodies the character Tennessee Williams created (the screen Maggie is less tense, catty, and consumed with a clawed-her-way-up-from-nothing fear of poverty); it's that she succeeds in making Maggie both the heat and life force of the film.
Taylor is vivid and so celestially beautiful in the role, Brick doesn't come off as troubled so much as having rocks in his head. His heterosexual disinterest in her seems so unlikely that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reclaims Williams' inked-out gay subtext without even trying. 

Taylor's third husband, Mike Todd, was killed
in a plane crash three weeks into the film's production

Even with that questionable southern accent of hers (“I caint! I caint!"), no one (at least no one I've seen in the role so far) can touch Elizabeth Taylor's Maggie. In this film she's more than a jewel; she’s the entire crown.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
It’s no secret that Tennessee Williams didn't care for the film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but Williams, like a lot of artists conflicted by a desire for legitimacy and popular success, tended to hedge his bets after the fact. Williams had a habit of willingly complying with requested alterations to his text put forth by directors (Elia Kazan, most explosively) with a history of knowing what appealed to popular tastes. Williams did so with open eyes, but once a show proved successful because these changes were made, he berated himself with feelings of compromise and self-betrayal (all the way to the bank). Williams' self-recriminations habitually led to his making a great show of giving self-serving statements to the press about how he was forced to compromise his principles in order to satisfy provincial sensibilities (John Lahr’s exceptional biography Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh recounts this pattern of behavior in delicious detail.)

Virtually the entire third act was rewritten for the film. Among the changes: a sentimental
backstory for Big Daddy, and a father and son reconciliation

Certainly, the film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof thoroughly subverts the entire theme of Williams’ play, but given his run-ins with the censors and Hollywood Production Code during the making of A Streetcar Named Desire six years earlier, one wonders what else he possibly could have expected. Exactly what he got, it seems, for the half-million dollars he accepted from MGM for the rights to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof proved to be his guilt-ridden deal with the devil.

"I do love you, Brick. I do!"

"Wouldn't it be funny if that were true?"

Above is how Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's last scene might have played out had the film kept Williams' original ending. But for the movie version, Hollywood knew that after 108 minutes of sexual advance and retreat, audiences would have torn down the theater if these two beautiful specimens weren't granted their hard-won happy ending.

BONUS MATERIAL

The 1976 made-for-TV adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof starring Natalie Wood, Robert Wagner, Laurence Olivier, & Maureen Stapleton. (Features the Broadway ending.)

The 1984 made-for-TV adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof starring Jessica Lange, Tommy Lee Jones, Rip Torn, and Kim Stanley, features Williams' preferred "original" ending, restored text, and at a running time of almost 2 ½ hours, is the most complete filmed staging to date. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015

FOR LOVE OF IVY 1968

After more than a decade of shouldering, with both dignity and grace, the damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t burden of being Hollywood's first African-American superstar; being the representative movie face of the entirety of Black America, while at the same time liberal Hollywood’s unofficial Civil Rights symbol-- Sidney Poitier’s appearance in the well-intentioned, but nonetheless cringe-worthy 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? successfully brought his trademark Noble Negro character to its logical conclusion. I number myself among those who felt that by 1967, if Poitier's godlike paragon of Afro-American perfection was the kind of sugar necessary to make the medicine of racial equality go down, then the time had indeed come for a complete overhaul of the cinema image of the American Black male.

Sidney Poitier as Jack Parks

Abbey Lincoln as Ivy Moore

Beau Bridges as Tim Austin

Lauri Peters as Gena Austin

Leon Bibb as Billy Talbot

Carroll O'Connor as Frank Austin

Nan Martin as Doris Austin

I was just ten years old at the time, but I recall Sidney Poitier being all over the place in 1967. First, there was To Sir With Love, which I went to see more times than I can count; In The Heat of the Night, which was powerful (that slap!), but I can’t say I enjoyed it much; and the release of the much-ballyhooed and then-controversial Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? was such a major event in our household (my mom both adored Poitier and was a Katherine Hepburn fan), it occasioned the rare movie outing for the entire family. (As much as I can't really abide the movie now, you have no idea what a groundswell of controversy it sparked when it came out. I also remember how weird and eye-opening it was that no matter how divided opinions were about the film's themes, Blacks did not wage any public protests against the film. All levels of picketing, angry protests, violent threats, and acts of hostility leveled at theaters showing this almost comically circumspect movie were the usual domestic terrorists: white racists and extremists.

With Poitier starring in three such profitable and high-profile films in the same year, signs would seem to indicate the Academy Award-winning actor’s already illustrious career (1964 Best Actor -Lilies of the Field) was on the ascendance. But, irony of ironies, after being virtually the sole lead Black actor working consistently in films for many years, Poitier's popularity started to decline in direct proportion to the emergence of the youth-market-fueled, Black film explosion of the 1970s. With a new decade dawning, and with it an exciting array of new Black talent and afro-centric narratives filling movie screens, Poitier must have found it dismaying to have the very doors he had been so instrumental in opening for actors of color, feel as though they were beginning to be closed to him.

40-year-old Sidney Poitier grooves at a '60s Happening
Poitier's comforting, buttoned-down image began to look dated as the more militant '70s approached 

Sidney Poitier’s screen persona—that of the non-threatening, nobly acquiescing, almost saintly Black male—embodied the assimilationist ideals of the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. But it wasn’t long before factions of the Black community began to find the sexless, selfless characters Poitier played in films like A Patch of Blue (1965) and Lilies of the Field more representative of white fantasy than Black reality. In the tumultuous social climate of the late '60s, as Civil Rights assimilation gave way to the more self-identifying thrust of the Black Power Movement, and galvanizing events like the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (four months after the release of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?) signaled a new self-determination and militancy; Poitier's image (inseparable from Poitier the actor) had become an anachronism.

Thus it was perhaps with no small sense of relief on his part when Poitier at last discarded his socially-appointed halo and embarked upon a series of human-scale roles designed to update and reconstruct his image. That he essentially had to write, produce, and eventually direct most of these roles in order to achieve this points to the level of reluctance he faced within the industry when called upon to relate to him as anything other than a symbol of tolerance. In 1969s The Lost Man Poitier played a militant revolutionary (!), a single father in A Warm December (1973), and a thief in A Piece of the Action (1977). But his very first attempt at downsizing the saintly Poitier mystique was in the charming romantic comedy, For Love of Ivy.

Debunking the myth of the contented domestic
who's happy to be treated "Like one of the family." 

Jack - "Looks like you've got a pretty good setup here."
Ivy - "Too good!. I don't want to die here."
Jack - "You've got to die somewhere."
Ivy - "Well, isn't it better not to go ignorant and alone?"

The upscale suburban household of the Austin family is thrown into a tailspin when Ivy (Lincoln), the family maid of nine years, decides to quit, move to New York and attend secretarial school. In other words, make a life for herself. Certain she’s simply suffering from loneliness, the younger members of the family, Tim & Gena (Bridges/Peters), elect to find her a boyfriend. Not just any suitor, since they certainly don’t want her falling in love and leaving to get married or anything, but someone who’s altar-shy and willing to wine and dine Ivy with no strings attached. Their best candidate for the job is Jack Parks (Poitier), the wealthy owner of a trucking company whose reputation as a swinger assures Ivy won’t be whisked away, and whose illegal mobile gambling operation makes him a shoo-in for a little maid-courtship extortion.

With Ivy thinking she's dating Jack just to help the family business (the Austins own a department store and contracts with Jack's trucking company), and Jack taking Ivy our to avoid exposure of his illegal nighttime activities, each assumes they know what they're getting into as they embark on their arranged rendezvous. And if you’ve ever seen a rom-com before, there’s likely to be no mystery as to how things between Ivy and Jack will play out.

The Set-Up

The farcical plot is negligible, but the context is what fascinates. The well-intentioned Austins mistake their need for Ivy with actual concern for her welfare. She's a buffer between the acrimonious father and son, a sister of sorts to the daughter, and she completely runs the household. White liberalism is lampooned, Black self-reliance is championed, and among a cast of characters at loggerheads over how to best live their lives, Ivy emerges as the one clear-headed individual who never strays from her desire to strike out on her own and make a life for herself.

Genre-wise, it's all very familiar territory that feels delightfully fresh due to how much fun it is to see (at long last) these well-worn Doris Day/Rock Hudson rom-com cliches employed in the service of a Black couple. Black characters at the center of a romantic narrative in which they are allowed to be relaxed, funny, determined, amorous, conflicted, self-assured, independent, and imperfect were a rarity in 1968. And it's not exactly a commonplace occurrence now.

For Love of Ivy was taken to task for being corny in the Swinging '60s. In today's atmosphere of misogynist, mean-spirited rom-coms, the respectful, genuinely sweet romance at the center of the film looks positively cutting-edge. 

With a screenplay adapted by Robert Alan Aurthur (All that Jazz) from a 19-page story treatment written by Poitier himself (that was turned down by three studios), For Love of Ivy is one of those familiar, old-fashioned romantic comedies built around a grand deception. A lie first contrived to bring the lovers together, followed by a misunderstanding, ending with a romantic reconciliation. It’s exactly the kind of movie Hollywood has churned out for years. And therein lies the twist. 

For the longest time, Hollywood’s depiction of African-Americans in movies has been defined by the narrow parameters of symbols, stereotypes, sidekicks, or vessels of suffering in need of white rescue. Black characters just being human in a motion picture is still such an original concept, you could probably use plots from silent movies and the film would come out looking like an innovative act of cultural insurgency by the mere casting of Black actors in the lead roles.

Paraphrasing the sentiments of a movie critic from the time—after having played so many solemn, “uplift the race” roles, Poitier, as a Black movie star, was more than entitled to exercise his right to appear in the same mindless, escapist movie fare white stars like Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis had been making for years. Sidney Poitier had earned the right to be in an amusing, escapist diversion.

After nearly 20 years in the business, leading man Sidney Poitier finally gets a love scene

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

When a film dismissed at the time of its release for being too light and conventional provides: 1) One of the screen’s most independent, dimensional Black female characters, 2) The still-rare occurrence of a Black romance at the center of a mainstream, non-niche motion picture, 3) An Afro-centric narrative in which the goals and objectives of the Black characters are in no way invested in, nor dependent upon, the happiness of white characters—perhaps there’s a bigger statement to be made about why it is today, during the Administration of our first Black President, Hollywood still seems unable to move beyond butlers (The Butler- 2013), maids (The Help- 2011), and slaves (not enough space to list them all).

Though she's always being told she's like one of the family, Ivy is the only Austin "family" member required to use the service entrance. This silent, throwaway shot of Ivy returning home from a date contains the crux of the reason she wants to leave. A reason right under the noses of the people who profess love for her, yet are unable to understand why she needs to quit.  

I have a real soft spot in my heart for For Love of Ivy...and not just because I find Poitier and Lincoln to be such an engaging couple. The broadly farcical aspects of its plot notwithstanding, I respond sentimentally to For Love of Ivy because the character of Ivy Moore is one of the most satisfyingly believable Black female characters I've ever seen in a film.

Surprisingly, this feather-light comedy was directed by Daniel Mann, the director behind the film adaptations of the dramas Come Back Little Sheba, The Rose Tattoo, and I'll Cry Tomorrow. Sidney Poitier was inspired to write For Love of Ivy to provide his four daughters with an alternative to the usual glamorized (fetishized?) images of Black women onscreen. Stars like Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, and Diahann Carroll (with whom Poitier once had an affair) were favored for their Eurocentric features and exotic sexuality. Poitier wished to present his daughters with a more authentic representation of Black womanhood.
And authenticity is exactly what I find in the character of Ivy, as embodied by the late Abbey Lincoln. Ivy is a dignified, independent woman who wants love and a better life, and best of all, isn’t looking to be rescued or saved by anyone but herself. She's a woman who only works as a maid...it's only what she does, not who she is.

"What do you want?"
"I'm not sure. I just know I haven't got it now."

When I watch For Love of Ivy, I see my four sisters, my mom, and every Black woman who has ever had to define herself, for herself, because society, by and large, can't be bothered. I've no doubt that the main reason the character of Ivy resonates with me is that, when I was small, my mother worked for a time as a maid. Later, when I was a pre-teen, my parents divorced. I remember my mom going to night school and getting her driver's license, eventually working her way to a managerial position in government at San Francisco’s Federal Building. All the while sending all of us kids to private Catholic school.
That she eventually came to meet and marry a terrific, well-to-do gentleman who was her own Sidney Poitier figure (and a dynamite father figure for me), making it possible for her to quit her job and live out her days in comfort, is the kind of real-life "Hollywood" ending for a deserving woman that makes the fairy tale romanticism of For Love of Ivy feel a good deal less sappy for me than perhaps it does to others.

Self-reliant and proud, my mother, as remarkable as she sounds, isn’t really unique among Black women. There are lots like her around. But I never saw any Black women like my mother represented in the movies (glamorized and glorified, to boot!) until I saw For Love of Ivy.

Principally a jazz singer and songwriter, here is 25-year-old Abbey Lincoln as she
appeared in the 1956 film, The Girl Can't Help It

PERFORMANCES

For all its abundant charm, For Love of Ivy is a bit of a puzzler when it comes to comedic tone. It’s like when I was a kid and easy-laugh sitcoms like Gilligan’s Island aired before laugh-free “heartwarming” humor shows like The Ghost & Mrs. Muir. In trying to adjust to this shift in tone, I always felt as though my funny bone had a short in it or something.

Watching For Love of Ivy, comedically speaking, I get a sense of where it’s coming from. It’s part one of those fraught-with-complications Cary Grant romantic comedies like That Touch of Mink; part class satire along the lines of Goodbye Columbus; and part bourgeois romantic comedy, like Cactus Flower. Unfortunately (and in many ways puzzlingly) the bubble-light comedy of For Love of Ivy has trouble staying aloft.

Making her film debut (far right): Jennifer O'Neill of The Summer of '42 (1971)

Making her film debut (far right): Gloria Hendry, the first Black Bond Girl in Live & Let Die (1973)

I get a sense of where the comedy in the film is coming from, but too often it never really arrives. Which may be a matter of direction more than writing. Farces like this thrive on pacing, wit, and a kind of effortless effervescence, but the comedy rhythms in For Love of Ivy always feel a little off. Beau Bridges, as one of those super clean-cut hippies that only exist in the movies, has great comic energy. He’s a terrific actor capable of conveying sincerity while inhabiting the genre-mandated hyperactivity of expression, inflection, and body language. But too often it feels as if he’s working a particularly tough room.

Tim Harbors A Not-Too-Secret Crush On Ivy
No stranger to onscreen interracial relationships, Bridges fell in love with Diana Sands in 1970s The Landlord, and most recently, portrayed Tracee Ellis Ross' father on the TV show, Black-ish

Sidney Poitier, playing a morally dubious character for the first time since Blackboard Jungle (1955), looks to be enjoying himself and is more relaxed than he’s been in years. Cutting a dashing figure in his tux, and fairly oozing sex appeal and star quality, Poitier finally gets the chance to look the part of the matinee idol he’s always been. Poitier has a splendid chemistry and rapport with co-star Lincoln, but when it comes to the comedy; the palpable intelligence behind his piercing eyes has a way of grounding even the most convoluted of plot contrivances in an emotional reality antithetical to the breeziness of tone required of material like this. (It would be six years before Poitier loosened up enough to give his disarmingly funny performance in Uptown Saturday Night -1974.)

Not really given much to do in this film, Nan Martin would go on to play a tougher version of the same role the following year in Goodbye Columbus. Carroll O'Connor, along with his fame from All in the Family, would play the Rod Steiger role in the  long-running TV series based on Poitier's film In The Heat of the Night 

But while the broader comedy doesn't always catch fire in For Love of Ivy, the very gentle, very affecting character humor and touching relationships are handled rather extraordinarily. Beau Bridges' character may be a misguided liberal, but his very real affection for Ivy is rather endearingly portrayed.


THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Displaying that rare brand of professional generosity I tend to associate with Clint Eastwood (he being one of the few leading men willing to hand over a film to a female co-star) Sidney Poitier allows For Love of Ivy to be Abbey Lincoln's show completely. And the picture is all the better for it.

For Love of Ivy should have made the beautiful and gifted Abbey Lincoln a movie star.
Nominated for a Golden Globe, she wisely (in terms of holding onto her sanity and dignity) stuck to her music career. Lincoln didn't make another film until 1990 - Spike Lee's Mo' Betta Blues.

Abbey Lincoln is a natural at capturing the essence of a uniquely contemporary type of female character: an intelligent, self-possessed individual who nevertheless projects a kind of old-fashioned dignity. Word has it that Lincoln, a singer and Civil Rights activist for whom Ivy represents just her second film role (following the must-see 1964 drama Nothing But a Man), beat out 300 actresses for the role. I can easily see why. She's one of a kind.

From beginning to end, Lincoln commands the screen in a way born not so much of technical skill, but rather, an ability to appear 100% genuine every minute. In the film's brightly-lit, Love American Style  TV sitcom gloss, Lincoln stands out as the real thing.
Not a single one of her scenes is ever less than compelling because she comes across as incapable of being false. Her performance so fills my heart up, I confess that in the many times I've seen the film, I have yet to make it through dry-eyed. Her character is so endearing, and Lincoln's performance at times so emotionally raw, I've pretty much got the waterworks going full-throttle by the film's conclusion.

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs 
I have many favorite scenes, but this one slays me. Poitier has never been more charming,
and Lincoln is a heartbreaker 

Along with Two for the Road and A New Leaf, For Love of Ivy is one of my top favorite romantic comedies. Nostalgia plays a role (after all, it was released the same year as so many of my most beloved films: Rosemary's Baby, Barbarella, Secret Ceremony, etc.), as does sentiment (Poitier & Lincoln have chemistry to spare). But there's also a bittersweet element. I think of Sidney Poitier's heroic career and all he sacrificed in the way of personal choice, taking on roles because of his deeply felt sense of social responsibility. I think of Abbey Lincoln and all the other Black actresses whose gifts we've all been deprived of because nobody was writing roles like this for Black women.

And then I think of how things are today, and how it is clear that more progress needs to be made. For all the outcry for women to play a larger role both in front of and behind the camera in films, the call seems to come mostly from a white feminist faction that doesn't always recognize the contributions of women of color. And when it comes to Black filmmakers creating roles for women, I have to make sure my mind doesn't entertain thoughts of what someone like Tyler Perry would do to a remake of For Love of Ivy (For Love of Medea?), and instead ponder what the vast underutilized armies of Black women filmmakers would contribute.

Although For Love of Ivy has been a favorite of mine for years, how I came about rewatching it is due to my being asked to participate in a podcast where we were to discuss the contrasting depiction of Black women as domestics/maids in 1968's For Love of Ivy vs  2011's The Help. Although the podcast is no longer online, to sum it up, I felt the 2011 film was retrogressive in the worst way. Both in its superficial Black characters and its dominant white gaze. In 1968 For Love of Ivy seemed quaint...but compared to The Help, it's almost revolutionary. What a difference 43 years can make. 

BONUS MATERIAL
Quincy Jones' title song (sung by jazz singer Shirley Horne in the film and on the soundtrack LP) was For Love of Ivy's sole Oscar nomination. Listen.

Unused title song commissioned for the film. Composed by John Phillips and performed by The Mamas and the Papas. Listen. 

Nothing But a Man (1964)  - Complete film available on YouTube

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2015