Putting on the Cat

Sweet Bird of Youth (MGM) messed up its cage for a season on Broadway, and has now been plumed with Metrocolor.

Surprisingly, the play--which contains some of the sleaziest writing done by Tennessee Williams since he became an important playwright--has emerged from its ordeal by camera, thanks principally to Writer-Director Richard Brooks (Elmer Gantry}, as a fast, smart, squalid melodrama that offers its customers three of the year's top film performances.

Like the play, the picture tells the story of a Hollywood beach bum (Paul Newman) who rolls on the casting couch with an aging cinemama (Geraldine Page).

Most of the time the dame is socked in with vodka or pot, and the no-talent hero tows her around like a whale on a flatcar.

Figuring to show the home folks what a big fish he has caught, he Caddies her down to the small Southern town where he grew up. The big blowhard is unaware that on his last trip home he left the daughter of the state's political boss (Ed Begley) pregnant, and that she subsequently had an abortion. Now the political boss is a real mean man, and when he hears that the hero is in town . . .

Newman, as the young dog who is putting on the cat, creates a memorable portrait of a phony. Begley is pluperfect as the sort of jolly old political Santa who wouldn't harm a flea--he's much too busy squashing people. But the picture belongs to Actress Page, who starred with Newman in the Broadway play. She swirls to the girls' room as if to a coronation, she cuddles her oxygen mask as a normal woman might cuddle a newborn babe, she dimples in maidenly dither at her gigolo's advances, she proceeds a moment later with hard-nosed efficiency to collect what she has paid for. She is a mascaraed monument to the era of the superstar, a veritable muse of publicity.

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