Tennessee Williams: One Man, Two Roles

In the history of American literature, Tennessee Williams animates the middle years of the century. In a very real sense, then, Tennessee Williams inhabits a central place within the American theatre. He worked assiduously in creating poetic stage moments, moments in which social fact, psychological collapse, and eroticized encounter form a still point in which the imagination, itself, becomes the last refuge for his fated characters. Within a paradoxical world Williams succeeded in expanding the boundaries of theatricality itself, combining a lyricism and experimentalism that revolutionized American drama after World Warâ…¡. While O'Neill was the tragic dramatist, Williams emerged as the poet of the heart.The purpose of this essay is to offer a critical history of the early and most important stage of the relationship between Tennessee Williams and the Hollywood cinema. That relationship, extending for more than two decades, is complex and multileveled, much more so than in the case of other American playwrights whose popularity resulted in movie versions of their works. The film business and the commercial theatre are institutions with quite different histories, requirements, traditions, and positions with the culture industry. For unlike other noted playwrights, Williams's work strongly influenced the development of the film industry itself. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the course of fifties and early sixties cinematic history without his plays as source material.