Wholesome Williams

Period of Adjustment. In 1960, with the sly delight of a cannibal devouring a cookie, Shock Merchant Tennessee Williams shocked everyone by writing a play about normal people. Well, almost normal. His hero, though wholesomely heterosexual, is scared sick of sex. In the film the poor boy (Jim Hutton) gets crocked on his wedding night to give himself courage, bellows at his bride (Jane Fonda) like a bull ("Take yer clothes off or I'll rip 'em off!"), then passes out meekly on the nearest sofa.

Next day Jane and Jim arrive at the house of Jim's best friend (Tony Franciosa). "Don't worry," the friend burbles with beery condescension, "you're just going through a period of adjustment." But so is he. After six years of unholy deadlock, his wife (Lois Nettleton) has just taken their four-year-old son and run home to mother--it seems she found out that he married her for her money. In any other drama by Williams, the men would probably have wound up watching the women barbecue the little boy. But this time the playwright is aglow with bourgeois de vivre, and at the fade everybody enthusiastically ends up in the right beds.

As a marriage counselor, Williams is somewhat less than convincing, but as a carpenter of situation comedy he knows his trade--and so does Director George Roy Hill. Furthermore, the film is favored with the fine young foolishness of Hutton and Fonda, and with one brutal bit of Williamsy whimsy, interpolated by Scenarist Isobel Lennart, that catches in a phrase the horror of filial relations in a Spock-marked generation. Only once in the entire film does the father speak in a soothing, amiable tone of voice to his son. "Hello, son," he says. The little boy flinches, glances about guiltily, and then in querulous confusion replies: "I'm not biting my nails."

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