Menagerie `a Trois

Tennessee Williams has always made three demands: On himself, to give poetic lie to Nietzsche's dictum that tragedy is dead. On his audiences, to see through his melodramatics to the philosophical skeleton. On his adapters, to preserve the illumination as well as the heat of his intense personal vision.

On all counts, the Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots fails. The Seven Descents of Myrtle, on which it is based, was one of Williams' most unprepossessing works. Audiences found it difficult--or impossible--to sit through, and it had a Broadway run of less than a month. Still, the movie is not so much a version as a perversion.

The fault is partly in the cumbrous plot. After a TV giveaway marriage, Myrtle (Lynn Redgrave) and Jeb (James Coburn) find themselves hostile strangers. Winded, impotent, pulling marijuana smoke into a cancerous lung, Jeb courts death instead of his bride. In a Louisiana mansion as corroded as he is, Jeb introduces Myrtle to his half-brother Chicken (Robert Hooks). From the newlyweds' point of view, Chicken has several drawbacks: he is surly, he is vengeful and he is black--"a mistake" claims Jeb, "of my father's." Like two halves of the same soul, the siblings are rivals for the property and the woman, while outside a summer flood seems to threaten all creation. At last Chicken exhumes the ultimate family skeleton, and Jeb, the levee and the film simultaneously collapse.

Under Sidney Lumet's flashbackward direction, the acting proves a match for Gore Vidal's hysteroid script. Coburn emotes in a style that was once the exclusive province of Popeye. Lynn Redgrave, tricked out in a miniskirted bridal gown, looks rather appealingly like a marshmallow on toothpicks. But her accent, a mixture of two Birminghams--Alabama's and England's--must be heard to be disbelieved. Even Hooks --normally a powerful and discreet actor--is lost in this raucous menagerie `a trois.

All of his professional life, Tennessee Williams has explored the terrain of failure. But it has been the noble failure of the human spirit. The real tragedy of the Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots is that its failure comes not from the text, flawed as it is, but from the ignoble adaptation.

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