“Summer and Smoke” at mid-day

Press, 29 June 1983, Page 10

“Summer and Smoke” at mid-day

Geraldine Page repeats her award-winning stage performance in the film version of “Summer and Smoke,” today’s mid-day movie on Two. Based on the play by Tennessee Williams, the story is about two people, a preacher’s daughter who represents spirit and a doctor's son who represents flesh. Each influences the other and they end up exchangine roles: she becomes a loose woman and he becomes a dedicated, selfish man. Geraldine Page was nominated for an Academy Award as “best actress” for her portrayal of Alma, a lonely inhibited spinster. “Summer and Smoke” also stars Laurence Harvey, Rita Moreno and Pamela Tiffin in her screen debut. Many of the successful plays of the Pulitzer Prizewinning writer Tennessee Williams (1914-1982) have been adapted to the screen, some by Williams himself, alone or in collaboration. Several suffered because of censorship problems and others had “happy endings” tacked on by Hollywood producers. The film version

of "Summer and Smoke,” however, is faithful to the original play. In his “Memoirs,” Williams describes “Summer and Smoke” as a tough nut to crack. “Miss Alma Winemiller may very well be the best female portrait I have drawn in a play. She simply seemed to exist somewhere in my being and it was no effort to put her on paper. However, the boy she was in love with all her youth, Johnny Buchanan, never seemed real to me but always a cardboard

figure and it distressed me, but I kept at the play.” Williams was writing “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the same time and alternated between the two plays. “In 1946,” he writes, “it was Carson McCullers who sat at one end of the long Nantucket work table and I at the other, she dramatizing ‘The Member Of The Wedding’ and I struggling with the tortures of the damned, meaning Miss Alma Winemiller of ‘Summer and Smoke’.”