SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962) **1/2 Even emasculated by the studios and censors Tennessee Williams was pretty damn racy. As always with his work there are plenty of incisive and insightful lines; contemplations on the price of stardom and power and family. The two most evident aspects of Williams thought here are (1) his love of the South, and (2) his hatred of the South. As in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof we get plenty of what's wrong with "Big Daddy," (Ed Begley as the old south replete with fascist overtones), Paul Newman drinking and mumbling a passable drawl, and very strange editing in a bizarre effort to make Williams "decent," or "palatable," or at least not "terribly offensive." The censors apparently had no problems with the Begley character. Evidently no one on the set was willing to speak up and admit that they knew the difference between marijuana and hashish, so an erroneous reading is fossilized for all time to amuse any teenagers whose parents make them watch it. It's also a bit strange hearing such a youthful Paul Newman denounced as "old," and I can't help but wonder if this had anything to do with the fact that he didn't age much for the next 40 years. Geraldine Page is tremendous and true as Hollywood on vacation, but Shirley Knight is shorthand for the film: she looks right and has little difficulty with the lower energy portions of her role, she works in a milieu in which the editors worked against presenting morality issues instead of nakedly overwraught aesthetics, and she takes far too long to rise up against what it is that oppresses her.
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