summer and smoke (1961)

Based on a Tennessee Williams' stageplay and lacking a DVD release, Summer and Smoke was mercifully shown on TCM recently.

Peter Glenville, primarily a stage director, only directed 7 films. Summer and Smoke preceded his most famous film, Becket, but is consistent with his acute strength in directing small casts in character roles that wrestle with repression and internal conflict. Laurence Harvey and Geraldine Page play John, a fast-living doctor's son, and Alma, a prudish spinster. Alma and her crazy mother languish under the iron fist of her minister father while John lives in the shadow of his father's humanitarian medical work. Both characters respond to their own unique repression, often using the other as a vent for their conflict.

After the film was released, Williams rewrote Summer and Smoke as Eccentricities of a Nightingale, focusing a bit more on Alma's drug addiction and the way in which the female characters are trapped, but I don't think a careful study of the film warrants further emphases of these points. Clearly Alma and her mother have both been crushed by the repressive fundamentalist Christianity and create their own escapes. In the end, John credits Alma with his 'conversion,' but his expression of his newfound faith varies greatly from Alma's prudence. By continuing his father's work, John is led to sanctified action, not prideful piety or mannered repression. When Alma laments that the two have traded places, she is unable to see that John has not adopted the mannerisms and platitudes of religion that she has finally broke free of. John's conversion does not yield the same idleness, but is humanitarian and compassionate; something that neither the repressed or reformed Alma has any true concept of.

Highly recommended.