Paul Newman and Sweet Bird of Youth: Dark Depiction Of The American Dream

Geraldine Page, who plays boozy, bitter, has-been movie star Alexandra Del Lago, originally crafted the role on Broadway in Elia Kazan's 1959-60 stage production. And she could hardly have asked for better screen chemistry than with her co-star Paul Newman as the good-looking and naively ambitious gigolo, Chance Wayne. (Kazan's original stage cast also included Madeleine Sherwood, Rip Torn, and Bruce Dern. Sherwood and Torn likewise reprise their roles here.) For the pretty blonde ingénue, Shirley Knight shines as Chance's ex-girlfriend, appropriately named Heavenly, Boss Finley's daughter. Years ago, Finley ran Chance out of town with a one-way ticket and the temptations of the American Dream: "This is America. Today you're nobody, tomorrow you're somebody." He's none too pleased when Chance rolls back into his hometown in a big-fin Cadillac with vodka-soaked "Princess" Del Lago sprawled in the backseat. 

It seems that when Chance headed out to New York and Hollywood with plans to become a matinee idol, he didn't know that he'd left Heavenly pregnant. Her father strongarmed an illegal abortion and has been nursing his revenge fantasies ever since. Holed up in a hotel room with Alexandra, bare-chested Chance connives to trade sexual favors (Alexandra's "only dependable distraction") for her connections in the movie business. Both are pathetic, pill-popping dreamers and desperate manipulators, both fatally damaged and discarded. Still, Tennessee Williams' gift is that we can sympathize with his monsters. Chance aims to reconcile with his one lost love, Heavenly, unaware of what happened to her since he last saw her. 

Flashbacks to their "sweet bird" days reveal that Chance once had the potential for a real relationship and a life better than a flamed-out hustler. But, as Heavenly tells her vindictive father, when Chance left to follow his dream the right doors never opened, so he went through the wrong ones. "Each of us has his own private hell to go to," Alexandra says, and Chance finds his—delivered by Boss Finley's vigilante gang of enforcer thugs led by Rip Torn. This film interpretation awkwardly abuts Williams' meditations on the inescapability of our past with dramatic jest that Brooks transferred well from stage to screen. On the other hand, everyone we see Actors Studio'ing through the material does a toothsome job of it. Newman's Broadway-honed surefootedness in the role (one of his long list of finely turned losers and misfits) never falters. Shirley Knight was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and powerhouse Geraldine Page really should have taken home her nominated Best Actress Oscar that night. (She did get the Golden Globe.) Her phone call soliloquy with Walter Winchell remains a plum audition piece for female actors "of a certain age." Also noteworthy are Madeleine Sherwood as Boss' vengeful mistress and Mildred Dunnock as Aunt Nonnie, who gets the last word.

In “The Glass Menagerie,” (1944) the American Dream for white Americans is portrayed as a pursuit of individual happiness though in the end the Wingfield clan fails to reach their goal. Paul Newman directed The Glass Menagerie film adaptation in 1987, starring Joanne Woodward and Karen Allen as Amanda and Laura Wingfield. In Arthur Miller's “The Death of a Salesman” (1949) the American Dream of Willy Loman's misconceived notion that superficial qualities like personal attraction and popularity among his peers will assure success for his family falls flat. Playwrights Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Lorraine Hansberry coming from different backgrounds reveal their own interpretation of the American Dream. Sweet Bird of Youth was actually written in 1956 and was a combination of two plays, The Pink Bedroom and Chance and the Princess. 

Williams's main characters are individuals who are in search of their identity. Mental anguish to a great extent and physical violence to a certain level had been a central part of his plays. Though critics argued that his drinking and drug taking combined with his fear of going insane could be the rationale behind the inclusion of violence in his themes, he could also be reflecting the milieu of the times. As Williams said: “What surprises me is the degree to which both critics and audience have accepted this barrage of violence. I think I was surprised, most of all, by the acceptance and praise of Suddenly Last Summer. I thought I would be critically tarred and feathered and ridden on a fence rail out of New York theatre, with no future haven except in translation for theatres abroad, who might mistakenly construe my work as a castigation of American morals, not understanding that I write about violence in American life only because I am not so well acquainted with the society of other countries.” 

Sweet Bird of Youth can be rightly said that the play is about loss of innocence and perception of responsibility. 1950s America was about power, sex and money, where all three were equally important for the disillusioned youth as portrayed in the literature of that era. By the end of the play, the readers realize that the great American Dream as a goal has lost its importance in a world which tries to achieve it through questionable means. Williams also quotes the Aristotelian idea that violence is purged by its poetic representation on the stage. The play is set in St. Cloud, Florida. Chance Wayne works as a waiter in Boss Finley's club. There he meets Finley's daughter, Heavenly, and he falls in love with her. Chance tries to seek Finley's consent to date Heavenly. Finley does not like the idea so he manipulates Chance into leaving the town by enticing him with the promises of achieving the American Dream. Chance pursues an acting career but fails to make it in Hollywood; instead he ends up as a drifter and a gigolo.

Chance comes back with an ageing actress, Princess Kosmonopolis to St. Cloud to help her escape negative publicity of a movie role. But Chance realizes that Heavenly is pregnant with his baby. In spite of knowing the severity of the punishment that awaits him, Chance decides to stay back in St. Cloud and face the consequences of his behaviour. The two main characters, Chance Wayne and Alexandra Del Lago represent the citizens in quest of realizing the great American Dream. But unfortunately they are blind in their quest to achieve their goals. Goaded by Boss Finley, the crooked father of the girl he loves, Chance Wayne dreams of becoming a Hollywood star. He does not comprehend Finley's scheme to try to get him out of Heavenly's life. Chance Wayne tries to use his sexual favours to Del Lago to be promoted as an actor in Hollywood. 

Alexandra Del Lago is a fading star who attempts to hide after what she thinks was a disastrous performance in a movie. She relies on drugs and drinking to get her through trying times. She relies on Chance as his devotion for her temporarily makes her feel younger. She represents individuals who are unstable and insecure at the helm of success. At the end of the play, she offers to help Chance to get away from an impending punishment for his role in ruining Heavenly. Chance decides to stay back and be punished by Finley's men in spite of knowing that the punishment is castration (in the film it was changed to disfigurement). Time has the power to change the priorities of Chance Wayne's American Dream into matured redemption. In truth, Chance and Heavenly's love for each other emerges constant, pure and strengthened, notwithstanding their trying times. Moreover, by the end of the play, Chance, Heavenly and Del Lago realize that standing for what they believe as right is more important than pursue the American Dream through unscrupulous means. In the New York Times Brooks Atkinson called the film version of Sweet Bird of Youth “one of Williams’s finest dramas” and declared that it was “brilliantly acted.” 

Walter Kerr in the New York Herald-Tribune called it “a succession of fuses deliberately—and for the most part magnificently—lighted.” The New York Mirror took special notice of Paul Newman’s intensity when it noted, “His disintegration, when he finally faces up to reality, has genuine emotional impact. Newman, as well as the audience, was moved by the concluding passages of the film. There were tears in his eyes as well as in those of the audience.” They might have been tears of emotional exhaustion as much as genuine emotion. Newman may have been especially nervous, because he and Joanne were expecting once again, and this time things were going well. It had been a little over a year since her miscarriage in London. Now she was ensconced at their New York apartment on West Eleventh Street waiting for the baby to come. Newman had found the meaning of true love in Joanne and—feeling loved for the first time—projected that mythical quality of being redeemed by love in Chance Wayne. —"The Flight: Depiction Of The American Dream In Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird Of Youth" - International Organization of Scientific Research (IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science -Volume 8, 2013)

Paul Newman didn't use those magnetic blue eyes promiscuously, as jeepers-creepers peepers. He hooded them, slit them, closed them tightly in pain. When open, they were sky blue with a milky haze. You could get lost in them; you could also see that he was sometimes lost behind them. Trim, smooth, chiseled, pretty, Newman was physically our most wide-open movie star, yet on one level he was also our most unfathomable. We feared for him onscreen, and he got battered (or even killed) unexpectedly—as the impulsive-country-boy Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun, and most famously, as the title character in Cool Hand Luke, a heavy-handed Christ-behind-bars picture. He senses the hell he's bringing on himself and acts out anyway, as if he's daring the universe to punish him. I don't know if his penchant for smart-ass renegade roles had its roots in his difficult relationship with his father, evidently a cold and disapproving man, but he had a knack as the prodigal son. Newman was ambivalent about his prettiness, but his voice—gruff and increasingly gravelly—balanced out his looks somewhat. He was mesmerizing in wounded Adonis parts (as in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), but he was better with a shot of self-satire. 

In The Long Hot Summer, he was Ben Quick, an enigmatic stud-muffin who brazens his way into a prominent Southern clan led by Orson Welles' patriarch. It was on that film when everybody could see that Newman and Joanne Woodward had a deep relationship. Woodward played Clara Varner, the brainy, rigid, somewhat repressed young woman who finally surrenders to him. As different as they are onscreen, their chemistry is palpable. In real life, he adored her eccentric ways and valued her advices greatly. His Oscar came for The Hustler sequel, The Color of Money, and unlike Tom Cruise, Newman was sly and funny; his self-containment was a marvel. But the showboat of that film was director Martin Scorsese, doing his rock-'n-roll whip-pan thing, and the movie has none of its predecessor's brilliant poignancy. In his late career, Newman tested himself in character parts, although he didn't have the greatest acting range. Great actors and great artists don't have to be role models in life to inspire you with their work. But when they are, like Newman was, they give a special kind of joy. Paul Newman's real character is found in his lack of self-centeredness, in the way it radiated out off-screen. Source: nymag.com