At 94, the irrepressible Eli Wallach tells a good story. Of the film clips shown in the “Tennessee Williams
on Screen and Stage” evening at the Times Center, part of the Museum of the Moving Image Series, the one of Baby Doll was the most provocative. A young sly Eli Wallach seduces a naive Carroll Baker. As Eli tells it, the Catholic Church banned the film saying anyone who sees it may be excommunicated, and it was sold out for the first 3 weeks. Just before, his wife Ann Jackson, sounding a bit like a Tennessee heroine, had taken the podium to tell her story of first meeting Tennessee, but then forgetting: “Sorry, we are unprepared.”

In fact, this special night was to honor the iconic playwright, newly inducted into the Poet's Corner and feted throughout this his centennial year. With anecdotes galore, like Eli telling Rose Tattoo ingénue Maureen Stapleton's bon mot when she first met Tennessee: “he looked more like an Ohio,” this team was more than prepared.

Clips from a new movie, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, to
open on December 30, with a screenplay by Williams who died in 1983, were on the program.
This was one of several scripts, written for Elia Kazan, never produced. Starring an outstanding Bryce Dallas Howard with an excellent Ellen
Burstyn, the film features characters reminiscent of the dramatist's
most haunting women, Blanche Dubois of Streetcar, both Amanda and Laura
from Glass Menagerie, women of extraordinary power and dreams with no
access to a world in which to realize them. This fine film illustrates
a larger Williams picture of the South and the decline of its
pretensions and provincial world view.

Scenes from The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, as well as Marlon Brando as Stanley to Vivien Leigh's Blanche punctuated a panel discussion that included Howard, Burstyn, director Jodie Markell, Elaine Stritch, Wallach, and moderated by Charles Isherwood. Ellen Burstyn says of Elaine Stritch in hat and necktie, she's the only actress I know who gets a laugh just sitting down. And so this delightful and poignant evening went.

The actors emphasized Williams' gift: Ellen Burstyn: “The language carries you.” And Elaine Stritch: “To a fine actor, doing Tennessee Williams, you're finally home.”

Regina Weinreich

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