Hollywood's Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America

by R. Barton Palmer, William Robert Bray

No American dramatist has had more plays adapted than Tennessee Williams, and few modern dramatists have witnessed as much controversy during the adaptation process. His Hollywood legacy, captured in such screen adaptations as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly, Last Summer, reflects the sea change in American culture in the mid-twentieth century. Placing this body of work within relevant contexts ranging from gender and sexuality to censorship, modernism, art cinema, and the Southern Renaissance, Hollywood's Tennessee draws on rarely examined archival research to recast Williams's significance. Providing not only cultural context, the authors also bring to light the details of the arduous screenwriting process Williams experienced, with special emphasis on the Production Code Administration—the powerful censorship office that drew high-profile criticism during the 1950s—and Williams's innovative efforts to bend the code. Going well beyond the scripts themselves, Hollywood's Tennessee showcases findings culled from poster and billboard art, pressbooks, and other production and advertising material. The result is a sweeping account of how Williams's adapted plays were crafted, marketed, and received, as well as the lasting implications of this history for commercial filmmakers and their audiences.

353 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

R. Barton Palmer is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University.

Reviews

[David Sterritt]

Palmer & Bray’s well-titled “Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America” mostly avoids the interpretations and hermeneutics usually found in such studies, focusing more on production histories, historical contexts, censorship accounts, issues of genre and adaptation, and networks of creative collaboration that push auteur theory out of the main spotlight. Tennessee was unique in a zillion ways, and I found this a very illuminating volume – highly recommended for anyone interested in the field(s) it cogently explores.

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Academic study of films based on the work of Tennessee Williams. Its main point seems to be to examine how these films helped expand the limits of the kinds of content about sexuality, morality and psychology that could be presented in Hollywood films. Each chapter feels padded out with occasionally repetitious points. Though I read it straight through, this is probably best approached by dipping into the chapters that focus on specific films the reader is interested in.

[Jason Mock · Rating 3 out of 5]

A drily written account of the translation of Williams'
oeuvre from stage to screen. Interesting subject matter
but DRY. It should have been more entertainingly written.