Sweet Bird of Youth (Roxbury Productions, MGM, 1962)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, March 4) I watched the 1962 film Sweet Bird of Youth on Turner Classic Movies, largely because there wasn’t much better to do. Sweet Bird of Youth was based on a 1959 play by Tennessee Williams, who’s not one of my favorite writers anyway. I’ve long suspected the peak of his popularity, between 1947 and 1959, came largely because of the ascendancy of the Method school of acting, including the tenet that an actor should draw on his or her own memories to play a scene by looking back on instances in their lives that paralleled what was happening to their characters. Williams wrote plays that lent themselves to that type of acting style because all too many of his characters are tortured by memories of events that happened in their backstories. Sweet Bird of Youth was produced at MGM by former RKO studio head Pandro S. Berman (when his credit appeared I joked, “Where are Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers when we need them?”), written and directed by Richard Brooks, and with Paul Newman as the male lead. Newman and Brooks had worked together on a previous film of a Tennessee Williams play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), with Elizabeth Taylor as the female lead (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/11/cat-on-hot-tin-roof-avon-productionsmgm.html). (Ironically, in 1989 Taylor would appear in a TV-movie remake of Sweet Bird of Youth as the alcoholic, drug-addicted former movie star played here by Geraldine Page, with Mark Harmon from Star Wars in Newman’s role.)

Newman plays Chance Wayne, who grew up in St. Cloud, Mississippi until he left town to seek a career on Broadway. He made it as far as a featured role in a musical with two other men, and all three made it onto the cover of Life magazine. Then fate intervened in the form of the Korean War. Back home in St. Cloud, local political boss Tom “Boss” Finley, Sr. (Ed Begley) saw a chance to get rid of Chance, who was having an affair with Finley’s daughter Heavenly (Shirley Knight) very much against dad’s wishes, since dad would prefer to pimp her out to powerful older men who could advance his political interests. Finley puts Chance in command of a regiment raised in St. Cloud to fight in the war (incongruously setting him off to battle under the Confederate flag), and when Chance is wounded in combat he returns to the U.S. He settles in Hollywood, hoping to make it as a movie star, but the best he can do is become a beach boy. He attracts the attentions of fading movie star Alexandra Del Lago (Geraldine Page), who essentially hires him as a gigolo – it’s hard not to make the connection between this plot line and the story of the 1950 film classic Sunset Boulevard – who’s on the outs after a drunken scene at the premiere of her attempt at a comeback film. (She was upset when her close-ups revealed how old she really was.) Chance returns to St. Cloud in Alexandra’s Cadillac convertible and tries to pass himself off as a success, but the townspeople know better. Chance tries to resume his affair with Heavenly, but Finley uses his political power in town to frustrate them and keep them apart.

Finley is about to stage an Easter Sunday political rally on TV to respond to allegations being made against him by an outside candidate for the governorship, Brutus Haven Smith (James Chandler), a professor who’s discovered Finley’s big secret: he’s keeping a mistress outside of town, Miss Lucy (Madeleine Sherwood), and paying her rent and lavishing gifts on her in exchange for sexual favors. (One wonders why this is considered such a big deal, especially since Finley is a widower; his wife died years before the story we see takes place.) Finley is upset because his son Tom, Jr. (Rip Torn in a performance that steals the film) organized a “Youth for Finley” group that retaliated against Professor Smith by crashing his office and literally burning his books. If you had to do that, Finley tells his son, you should at least have dressed in white hoods instead of clown masks and burned a cross instead of books, so it could have been blamed on the Ku Klux Klan. While that political intrigue is going on (and frankly, it’s a lot more interesting than the romantic story!), Chance is attempting to extract a screen test and a movie contract from Alexandra while at the same time courting Heavenly and trying to get her to return to him, which is a tall order because (though we don’t find this out until the film is almost over) at one point Chance got her pregnant. Finley ordered an illegal abortion from Dr. George Scudder (Philip Abbott), who screwed it up and left Heavenly permanently infertile. Now he’s trying to marry Heavenly off to Dr. Scudder, and both Finley himself and his staffers and allies use various techniques to order Chance and his drunken, drugged-up movie-star companion out of town. There are a number of scenes between Heavenly and Chance that make it seem like she’s still interested in him as well as he in her, but she’s all too aware of how much her dad hates Chance and will do everything he can to make it impossible for them to get together.

Eventually the film’s climax takes place outside Finley’s big political rally, where Professor Smith drives by in a convertible with a bullhorn giving away Finley’s big secrets – not only that he had a mistress but he literally beat her and broke her fingers as revenge for her having written a note in the women’s bathroom of the hotel with red lipstick saying that Finley couldn’t get it up anymore. Tom, Jr. and three of his goons corner Chance outside the rally in the chaos of the situation, beat him within an inch of his life and threaten him with a D.I.Y. castration. (In the play they actually did that, but Richard Brooks had to change that because the Production Code, albeit slightly liberalized over the years, was still in effect.) They think they’ve beaten Chance so badly he’ll no longer be attractive to women and therefore won’t be able to make a living as a gigolo, but after some uncertainty Heavenly finally runs off with him and the two leave town together as lovers. That rewritten ending earned a lot of criticism at the time, including from Tennessee Williams himself, who called it “a contradiction to the meaning of the play.” One reviewer for a publication called FilmInk wrote, “You can have a popular film with a happy ending or a sad ending, that doesn’t matter – what matters is that it’s a just ending. Justice must be served. Chance didn’t deserve a happy ending in Sweet Bird of Youth. (If the filmmakers wanted that ending, they needed to make more changes throughout to justify a happy ending.)” Brooks agreed to lose the castration but worked out an alternate ending in which Alexandra and Miss Lucy would leave town together on a ferry and see Chance’s broken but still living body on a garbage scow, but the “suits” at MGM refused to let him shoot it.

As he had done with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brooks had his cinematographer (Milton Krasner here, William Daniels on Cat), shoot the film in pretty picture-postcard color instead of the black-and-white noir look the story’s darkness demanded, and justified it by saying, “It’s a very harsh picture, and I didn’t see why the photography had to be as harsh as the content.” One thing Brooks did right was recruit four actors from the original stage cast – Newman, Page, Begley, and Torn – to be in the film, though he had to fight the studio over Page because they didn’t think she was glamorous enough to be believable as a movie star, even a fading one. He was rewarded by the Academy, which gave a nomination to Page for Best Actress, to Knight for Best Supporting Actress, and to Begley for Best Supporting Actor. Begley actually won even though his character is a typical Tennessee Williams overbearing villain and a pale echo of Burl Ives’s work in the analogous role in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Once again, Boss Finley reminded me of Donald Trump, especially in the similarly mindless adulation he attracts from his supporters, who carry signs at the rally with slogans like, “Save us, Boss.” Given the flashback we see of Finley’s first campaign for office in the late 1920’s, I got the impression that we were supposed to read Huey Long as the real-life basis for his character: a man who emphasizes his humble origins, wins office with all the best intentions to serve the people, is drawn deeper and deeper into a swamp of corruption and self-dealing, but manages to retain his support with a “man of the people” image that no longer fits (if it ever did) what he’s actually doing with his power. Finley also reminded me of Trump in his determination to tar his political enemies as “Reds,” “Bolsheviks,” and “un-American,” and his visceral upset whenever anyone in the media criticizes him. In one scene he’s being shown a newsreel copy of a TV show exposing his regime as the corrupt, fraud-ridden mess it is, and he gets violently upset, demands that the film be stopped, and says that people shouldn’t be allowed to make films like that about him. But then by now, 11 years into the Trump Era of American politics, it’s almost a reflex-conditioned response for me to think of Trump whenever I see a film about a megalomaniac political leader using his power to corrupt absolutely!