Cinema: A Small Thing but His Own

Summer and Smoke (Hal Wallis; Paramount). Playwright Tennessee Williams often writes like an arrested adolescent who disarmingly imagines that he will attain stature if (as short boys are advised in Dixie) he loads enough manure in his shoes. In his most famous plays he has hallucinated a vast but specious pageant of depravity in which fantasies of incest, cannibalism, murder, rape, sodomy and drug addiction constitute the canon of reality. Yet Broadway’s bad boy has his sweet-mouthed moments, and Summer and Smoke (1948) is one of them: one of the few plays Williams obviously wrote primarily to please himself, one of the few in which artistic conscience was his only guide. It has many faults, and this film version sometimes makes the most of them; yet it has the sufficient (if not sanctifying) grace of sincerity. It is a small thing but it is his own.

The picture, faithful generally to the play, tells the story of a small-town prude (Geraldine Page), a Mississippi parson’s daughter who as she approaches her 30th year, finds herself unmarried; still pretty in a dim way but getting a bit odd and starchy; prone to nervous flutters of the heart; apt to sleep ill of nights; liable to warble La Golondrina at charity bazaars; beginning to resent her slavery to a kleptomaniac mother (Una Merkel) who is glad to be mad; beginning to be desperate for a man.

Suddenly, the man she wants (Laurence Harvey) comes home from medical school, a fast-driving, wild-boozing, hard-gambling skeesicks who goes snuffling after every girl in town, including the parson’s daughter. She rejects his propositions in horror, but in the ironic conclusion she comes tenderly round to his way of thinking, only to discover in horror and heartbreak that he has come round to hers.

As Playwright Williams wrote it, Summer and Smoke was a young man’s passionate, naive discussion of spirit and sex. In this scenario, the tension of these opposites is unwisely relaxed. The heroine, made less prim and more appealing, seems almost entirely in the right—all she wants, after all, is an emotional relation before she begins a physical one, and what sensible adult could possibly fault her for that?—while the hero seems almost entirely in the wrong.

These impressions are intensified in the performances. Actress Page, an artist of unusual richness and motility, soon melts any sense of frigidity in the heroine with her glowing warmth and charm. And Actor Harvey, a player with the frigid fascination of a lizard, is clumsily miscast as the hotblooded hero. Instantly the spectator senses that this reptilian type could never possibly pair off with the warmhearted heroine. Instantly the love affair loses its credibility and the picture its suspense. Nevertheless, the film conspicuously possesses Playwright Williams’ characteristic virtue: a pathetic-romantic atmosphere that lingers from scene to scene like an ineffable sachet of self-pity.