poetcomic1
When an actor like Geraldine Page or even an old timer like Una Merkel gets to sink their teeth into those inimitable, poetic, deliriously 'over the top' Tennessee Williams lines of dialogue one cannot help but share in their thrill. Gerry Page never 'moons' over her Buchanan boy - that is why she is so powerful here where so many other revivals of the play have failed. Rather than having Alma acting like a 'love-struck teenager', Page plays Alma as fiercely engagé with Buchanan in an adult and complex way. Few people mention the cruelly ironic aspect of the ending in that the now 'respectable' bourgeois Dr. Buchanan is Alma's 'drug dealer'. "You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful these pills are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!"
Martin Bradley
Hardly the best of Tennessee Williams and this film version does nothing to improve on it. The director was Peter Glenville who may have been highly proficient on stage but who had no real idea of what made good cinema and this is turgid at best. Geraldine Page may have been ideally suited to the role of the repressed spinster Alma but her tremulous, hesitant and, of course, highly mannered performance is just annoying and you know something is askew when the usually wooden Laurence Harvey more than manages to hold his own against her. He's the good-for-nothing young doctor who seduces her and whose body just drives her wild with desire as a certain Miss Bowles might say. As the local tramp Rita Moreno barely gets a look in though Una Merkel makes a brave stab at playing Page's dotty mother, (she and Page were both Oscar-nominated). Williams later revised the piece under the title "Eccentricities of a Nightingale" which was filmed for television with Blythe Danner and Frank Langella.
moonspinner55
Geraldine Page received an Oscar nomination for her sterling portrayal of a small town spinster hoping to kindle a spark with the ne'er-do-well doctor's son who has lived next door since they were kids. Adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play (in which Page scored a personal success off-Broadway some nine years before the film) is brightly-painted and full of nervous, fluttery life (it's like a neurotic Disney movie--Pollyanna herself might just live down the street). It never takes off into its own emotional sphere however, mainly because the melodrama inherent in the story is so wan (it isn't encumbered by character neuroses, like many of Williams' other works--this one could actually use more). Laurence Harvey is somewhat mild-mannered as Page's leading man (one can't imagine this guy getting too wild), and the supporting players are a variable lot, ranging from Una Merkel's dotty mother to Rita Moreno's strutting flooze. Page is the one to watch; with the tiniest sparkle of dementia in her alert eyes, and the quiver of her uncertain mouth, she nearly transforms this material, an amalgamation of Tennessee Williams and Hollywood in 1961. ** from ****
drnarsty
In my opinion, Geraldine Page was the greatest American Actress in the 20th Century. I believe that had she not spent much of her time on the New York Stage, she would have won several more Oscars, but was considered somewhat a Hollywood outsider.She should have won for Summer and Smoke, and Sweet Bird of Youth. She carried these movies by her great acting skills and hard work.All of her movies need to be on DVD. It is particularly surprising to me that Summer and Smoke has not been converted to DVD.Does anyone know if any of her Stage Plays have been captured on video, and if so, where such videos could be obtained?
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