1973: Tennessee Williams' South

Tennessee Williams' South (Rasky, 1973) 5/10

The theatre of Tennessee Williams is indelibly associated with the South. With its steamy passages and sweaty textures, the work of the famed American playwright has become crucially inseparable from the American south in its dialect heavy language, settings and themes.

In 1973, the Canadian Broadcasting Company released Tennessee Williams' South, an eighty minute documentary directed by Canadian documentarian Harry Rasky that aimed to analyze Williams' relation to the South: its geography, its culture and its people. The result was a curious amalgamation of interviews, theatrical performances and poetry readings that overall reinforces the mythology of Tennessee Williams, rather than de-construct his personal and literary biography.

Filmed over the course of a year, Tennessee Williams' South traces the roots of Williams' work in a series of interviews at the author's Key West residence and former New Orleans haunts. The film's recorded conversations between Rasky and Williams unearth elements about his influences and his relationship to the South. Describing himself as an "angry old man,"Williams conversely appears jovial throughout the majority of his interactions.

Despite frequently discussing the South as both a geographical place and a state of mind in his art, Williams readily stresses the importance of personal experience in his work. The dualistic influences of the experiential and the cultural penetrate into a host of unique influences from his Ohioan grandparents to his absent father, his schizophrenic sister to African-American culture. Although Rasky frequently tries to imbue a sense of Williams as the preserver of a broken Southern identity, the renowned writer is quick to stress his eccentric ways and his status as the head of his own unique country.

Subsequently, the authentic South in Rasky's film clashes with the "South" of Williams' work. As the progenitor of a personalized realm of broken Southern damsels and a frittered plantation culture, Williams' "South" is one of a fading aristocratic environment reluctant to change, a society gone with the wind. Nevertheless, there is little in Williams' central output emphasizing the spiritual and social plight of the Southern working-class or African-American populations who represented the real South. Williams' conception is thus one unique to his work, a fact that Rasky fails to centrally address throughout the documentary.

Instead Rasky attempts to incorporates elements of Williams' work that found their influence in his life. Rasky achieves this by fusing interviews and poetry readings with slices of Night of the Iguana, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and other plays to inject Williams' personality and biography onto his literary legacy. Featuring performances by actors such as Burl Ives, Jessica Tandy and Michael York, the theatrical bits are hit-and-miss. Dated in their approach, these pieces suffer from stiff performances (see, for example, John Colicos and Colleen Dewhurst's rendition of Night of the Iguana) and an overly textual approach that emphasizes Williams' words, over the performers' respective renditions.

Paralleling the efforts of the film's thespian interpretations, Rasky's film suffers partially due to its slavery to the script; its adherence to the Williams' legend. There are no critical insights into his relationships, his political opinions or his feelings towards cinematic representations of his work. Nor is there any genuine disassembling of the themes in Williams' oeuvre beyond the grandiose idea of "the South." Consequently, Rasky's benign and myopic questions fall into Williams' eager hands, producing a film that warmly addresses with panache the roots of Tennessee Williams, but fails to explore his broken branches and torn stems.

* Tennessee Williams' South is released on DVD by Warner Home Video and is only available in their excellent Tennessee Williams Film Collection box set.

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque