Sweet Bird of Youth (1962)

Strictly average movie

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

If you are a Paul Newman, (Chance Wayne) fan, this is the film for you, he was young and at the height of his career and gave an outstanding performance. Chance Wayne plays the role as a young man who starts many careers and never seems to get anywhere at all. Chance decides he wants to go to Hollywood, however, he has a girl named Heavenly Finley, (Shirley Knight) who he is very much in love with. Heavenly has a father named Tom Finley, (Ed Begley) who does not like Chance and he does everything in his power to keep this couple apart from each other. It is not very long when Chance returns from Hollywood with a burned out actress, Alexandra Del Lago, (Geraldine Page) who adds a great deal of comedy and romance in this film as well as, an outstanding performance. Enjoy.

While setting about Sweet Bird of Youth, be fond of the good fragments before the sum total. There are charming notions in which to take pleasure here: The superior pages of a screenplay modified from Tennessee Williams's play, Ed Begley's crooked village official, and above all Geraldine Page's boozy, embittered, failed movie star. Nonetheless, other than those, the film is a damp melodrama. Richard Brooks tailored and directed this pulpy adaptation of Tennessee Williams's dystopian sensationalist script that's told by and large in sporadic flashbacks that fill the mysterious blanks of the present-day battle of molds.Williams's story, and this is essentially Williams's movie, has the central character, a blonde, blue-eyed, hunky ladies' man played by Paul Newman, in a hotel room in a sweaty, humid, miserable town in Florida, while aging actress Geraldine Page sleeps in the bed. She settles on giving the manly man a leg up for a career in acting. Later on, we determine that he has returned to patch things up with a girlfriend whom he gave a venereal disease, much to the passionate fury and embarrassment of Boss Finley, her father and a commanding political official.This decent but forgettable filmed reading inelegantly adjoins Williams's reflections on the potentially unbearable certainty of our past with affected and glaringly scripted dialogue that is meant for stage and not screen. Williams's lyrical tinges and involvedness are stabilized, and the damaged characters firmed to caricatured fonts, however eloquent and articulate ones.Via alterations and amendments, Knight's dilemma is unquestionably implied as an abortion, the sensational shock of Newman and Page's "contract" are minimized, and when Rip Torn's character alerts powerless Newman that he's about to take away "lover boy's meal ticket," what ensues is nearly laughably construed as misleading.Then again, each person we see visibly acting all the way through the words does a pleasant chore of it. Newman's stage-sharpened buoyancy in the role is subdued but by no means staggers. Begley's hamming does intensify the vigor in a gloomy exercise whose gloom could have been stronger. Additionally of note are Madeleine Sherwood as Boss' vindictive mistress.

Paul Newman is outstanding as the ultimate gigolo gold-digger. This movie also features the quintessential "Heavenly" daughter/ big bad daddy performances by Knight and by Begley, who is frighteningly effective.Geraldine Page is perfectly imperfect and unattractive- remember she is this way for dramatic effect. You aren't supposed to like her. Anti-heroes and character studies were really featured in that era's plays and films. Such characters don't have to be likable and seldom are. Wonderful 1960's actresses Mildred Dunnock and Madeleine Sherwood also give their usual gem-like performances.If you want to see what 1960's-style movie-making was really all about, view this one. Sure it is uneven and maybe a little old-fashioned by today's standards, but you can get an idea of why some of us are nostalgic for a decade that is known for big changes in movies, but otherwise somewhat forgotten. Here you get a good dose of the cynicism and fine acting of the 60's but without the annoying pretentiousness that was so prevalent in films of the era.Also, you don't have to be familiar with the stage play or Tennessee Williams in order to appreciate this movie-making effort by Richard Brooks.

"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.