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Plural Spaces, Fictional Mysteries 153 EXPLORING WORLDS, IDENTITIES, AND GENRES THE GLASS MENAGERIE (1950): A GENRE ADAPTATION VESNA TRIPKOVIĆ-SAMARDŽIĆ University “Mediterranean”, Podgorica Abstract: The paper examines the transformation of Tenessee Williams’s expressionist tragedy The Glass Menagerie into a film melodrama of the ‘50s in light of the recent theory on adaptation as intertextual dialogism and the concept of genre as an intertextual aspect of adaptation. New readings of Williams’s play, rewritten in a film medium according to the conventions of a “woman’s picture“, are suggested. Keywords: adaptation, film, genre, intertext, play 1. Introduction The Glass Menagerie (1944) was the play that brought Williams literary fame and his first play that was adapted for film. Since then, it has been adapted for the big screen in different eras and in various cultures and languages and has communicated with a variety of audiences. The earliest film adaptation, directed by Irving Rapper, was made in 1950. Three decades later (1987), a new film version directed by Paul Newman appeared. In recent times, two new film adaptations have emerged: Akale (2004), a faithful and critically acclaimed Indian film adaptation directed by Shyamaprasad in the Malayalam language, and the Iranian drama film Here without Me (Inja Bedoone Man, 2011), directed by Bahram Tavakoli. The late 20th century scholars who studied Williams’s work adapted for the screen agreed that the Glass Menagerie (1950) was an unsuccessful film adaptation, regardless of the fact that it was an adaptation of the play that developed from the film script (The Gentleman Caller) and the theatre work with a filmic structure (the plot unfolds through a series of scenes resembling flashbacks, narrated through the narrator’s memories) and a number of filmic techniques, such as screen, on which the most important moments in the scenes are projected (Phillips 1980: 50; Yacowar 1977: 9, 14). Contrary to Williams’s instructions in the Production Notes, in which he writes about the importance of expressionism and other “unconventional techniques” (Williams 1984: 7) such as music, which highlights the dominant tone of the play, and unrealistic lighting, which gives “a mobile, plastic quality” (ibid.) to the play, the film was reduced to “literal realism” (Yacowar 1977: 9) in which the poetic spirit was sacrificed for the sake of conventional romanticism (ibid.). Recent scholars (Palmer, Bray 2009: 57), however, state that the film, though transformed to a woman’s picture of the fifties, was the successful adaptation which managed to avoid sentimentality and to preserve Williams’s modernism in the portrayal of the “drab situation“ infused with “a poetry that reveals the depth of love and discontent that unites the characters”. B.A.S. vol. XXV, 2019 154 2. The film production of The Glass Menagerie (1950) The enormous success of the stage performance and the popularity of the play among the critics made Hollywood film studios compete over the rights to film the play. Eventually, Warner Brothers Studio bought the rights and selected the following cast: Jane Wyman as Laura, Arthur Kennedy as Tom, Gertrude Lawrence as Amanda and Kirk Douglas as Jim (Palmer, Bray 2009: 46). Williams wanted the film to be a faithful adaptation of his play and was absolutely sure that with such a film, Hollywood would turn to a more mature, realistic course (ibid.). The producer, Charles K. Feldman, who was fascinated with the play, seemed to have similar intentions, but it turned out that the studio executives had a different view of the things that the film audience might like. 2.1. Williams’s compromises with Hollywood In the film adaptation of the play, director Irving Rapper, who in the film circles was not considered a strong, authorial filmmaker (Kozloff 2000: 247), had to make a lot of compromises. The first one concerned the choice of an actress for the role of Amanda: studio executives insisted on a megastar in order to sell the film throughout America, and even though Rapper preferred Tallulah Bankhead, their final choice was Gertrude Lawrence (Phillips 1980: 51). Although it was agreed that Tennessee Williams and Peter Berneis should work together on the script, there was no creative collaborative work between the two scriptwriters, because Williams thought that Berneis could not keep the play’s “true and fresh observations, its dignity, its poetry and pathos” (Palmer, Bray 2009: 48). At first, Williams intended to use Laura’s character to send an encouraging message to all the girls who failed to find the young man of their dreams, but since a pessimistic ending could not make a box-office success, he created another version, in which he suggested that there was still hope and that someone else would be coming for them, but that “someone” remained insubstantial, in line with “the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for” (Williams 1984: 16). This film ending was supposed to mean that the fulfillment of Laura’s romantic dreams remained only an open possibility and not its achievement. However, the producers, dissatisfied with such a compromise, went one step further, and, without Williams’s knowledge, kept Berneis’s happy ending in which a real gentleman caller appears. By materializing the gentleman caller, who even gets his full name (Richard Henderson), the film got the ending that, in Williams’s words, ruined the “quality of poetic mystery and beauty which the picture badly needs in its final moments” (Palmer, Bray 2009: 54). The ending of the film makes the image of Laura as an adapted, courageous and mature person complete. In one of the earlier scenes in the film, in which she comforts her brother, she shows she believes in the beauty of the world of art: “The world isn’t ugly. While I was waiting for you that night, I listened to the music from the Paradise. It was beautiful. The whole world was beautiful.” Her true transformation (and the turning point) in the film happens in the scene in which Laura, aware that the broken unicorn will be “more at home with the other horses” (Williams 1984: 113), accepts Jim’s invitation to dance not in the house, but out, in a dance hall, where, among all those people, she starts to believe she is unique. After the dance, Laura’s delighted face filmed in close-up shows that she was transformed into an open and cheerful person. The twist (and another disappointment) in the film occurs when 155 EXPLORING WORLDS, IDENTITIES, AND GENRES Jim tells Laura about his fiancée. Instead of retreating into solitude, as in the play, Laura summons up all her strength and invites Jim to come with his fiancée to visit them. Furhermore, Rapper’s Laura encourages her brother Tom to leave his home and do what he has always wished for: write and travel. In the final scene, Laura is standing at the window waiting for her new suitor. A couple of seconds later, we can see Richard walking towards her and, through Tom’s voice-over, hear that Richard is “the long delayed but always expected something that we live for” (Williams 1984: 16). In the artistic sense, of course, a happy ending to the film was not the happiest solution. For Williams, “the long delayed, but always expected something that we live for” (ibid.) has a much more complex meaning: that we all expect and want something we know will not come true, and that, despite this, the only thing that remains is our hope. Scholars agreed that the ending was the biggest drawback of the film (Yacowar 1977: 13), and that it was inconsistent with the logic of the film (Phillips 1980: 60). For Williams, the ending was a complete disappointment: it made the film the “most dishonest of all film adaptations of [his] work” (idem: 61) and “the worst parody made of the play” (Palmer, Bray 2009: 42). Another controversial point in the film was the scene in which Amanda’s reminiscence of her idyllic past is shown as a flashback, which was “inserted in the film primarily to counteract Ms. Lawrence’s misgivings about playing the role of a woman several years her senior” (Phillips 1980: 56), but also to take maximum advantage of the film medium (ibid.). The inserted flashback in the film provides a stark contrast between Amanda’s popularity and Laura’s alienation, but also shows the gap between Amanda’s illusion and her reality. The flashback is triggered by the photo of Amanda as a girl, after which goes the scene in which Amanda’s suitors fight for her attention. For Williams, the flashback was absolutely unsuitable in the film, because it looked like a scene from an MGM’s musical, which, inserted in the middle of a film that had a serious tone, only trivialized its meaning (Palmer, Bray 2009: 54). Once it was shot, Williams bitterly commented that the scene bore more resemblance to an epic about the Old South, such as Gone with the Wind (Phillips 1980: 56). Besides, the visualisation of Amanda and her suitors, as stated by M. Yacowar (1977: 12), disrupts the consistency of Tom’s perspective, because it shows what Tom could not see and what he could not remember, but also makes Amanda’s fiction authentic and thus inconsistent with the way she was portrayed both in the film and in the play – as a character who recreates the truth about her own past and the past of the South, in order to emphasize its superiority over the present, as well as her own vitality and flexibility over Laura’s passivity and inability to adapt. Williams’s other objections referred to the way Berneis overwrote the scene in which Tom appears drunk, which turned out to be completely “incongruous to the spirit of the film as a whole” (Palmer, Bray 2009: 54) and to Laura’s final scene with Tom in which a viewer could hear “exchange of some more lines from the cornball department” (ibid.).
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