Ed Begley

(On Cable TV, January 2021) I really expected a film about a young man coming back to his small-town with a fading Hollywood star in tow to be more interesting than Sweet Bird of Youth. Despite the mixture of Hollywood bitterness and small-town politics, the film is a bit of a damp muddle. Paul Newman plays the kind of overly hard-headed semi-hoodlum that he did so well at the time, but somehow seems miscast. Geraldine Page does better as the drug-addled Hollywood star on the decline (although she still looks too young for the part), and so does Ed Begley as the powerful politician with mob boss habits. The theatrical origins of the film can be seen in the small scales and restrained locations—and knowing that the film was adapted from a Tennessee Williams play automatically leads one to look for the way in which it was softened from the original. (And this one is a doozy.)  Still, even with the happier ending, Sweet Bird of Youth isn’t much of a sit: it drags, it meanders, it gives us the yearning to escape back to Hollywood by the nearest available bus out of town. Newman fans may want to have a look, but even they may overdose on the obnoxious persona that he had at the time.