SUMMER AND SMOKE *

Hardly the best of Tennessee Williams and this film version does nothing to improve on it. The director was Peter Glenville who may have been highly proficient on stage but who had no real idea of what made good cinema and this is turgid at best. Geraldine Page may have been ideally suited to the role of the repressed spinster Alma but her tremulous, hesitant and, of course, highly mannered performance is just annoying and you know something is askew when the usually wooden Laurence Harvey more than manages to hold his own against her. He's the good-for-nothing young doctor who seduces her and whose body just drives her wild with desire as a certain Miss Bowles might say. As the local tramp Rita Moreno barely gets a look in though Una Merkel makes a brave stab at playing Page's dotty mother, (she and Page were both Oscar-nominated). Williams later revised the piece under the title "Eccentricities of a Nightingale" which was filmed for television with Blythe Danner and Frank Langella.