I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Fantastic!

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Chance Wayne (Newman) has only one talent—sexual prowess—and he's been bumming around for several years, satisfying rich women in the hope that he can find fame in Hollywood… He picks up a faded screen star, Alexandra Del Lago (magnificently played by Geraldine Page), who takes constant refuge in vodka, hashish, oxygen masks and young studs… She promises to get him a movie contract, and they drive to his Southern hometown, where he plans to find his sweetheart, Heavenly Finley (Shirley Knight), and take her along to Hollywood… He doesn't know that on his last visit he left her pregnant, that she had an abortion, and that her father, the corrupt and vigorous politician Boss Finley (Ed Begley), is out to get him… Through a strong, powerful performance, Newman managed to be a celebrity—dropping names, giving large tips, arrogantly stating: "Just because a man's successful doesn't mean he has to forget his hometown."He's also extremely sneaky and gently tolerant, as he charms Alexandra while recording what she's saying for blackmail purposes… But he's finally pathetic: a desperately insecure man, addicted to amphetamines, attending to Alexandra and performing as a lover at her whim… His mask of swaggering bravura really disappears when he tries to see Heavenly… He becomes confused and desperate—walking with regular steps, rubbing his hands together, pleading urgently over the phone

While setting about Sweet Bird of Youth, be fond of the good fragments before the sum total. There are charming notions in which to take pleasure here: The superior pages of a screenplay modified from Tennessee Williams's play, Ed Begley's crooked village official, and above all Geraldine Page's boozy, embittered, failed movie star. Nonetheless, other than those, the film is a damp melodrama. Richard Brooks tailored and directed this pulpy adaptation of Tennessee Williams's dystopian sensationalist script that's told by and large in sporadic flashbacks that fill the mysterious blanks of the present-day battle of molds.Williams's story, and this is essentially Williams's movie, has the central character, a blonde, blue-eyed, hunky ladies' man played by Paul Newman, in a hotel room in a sweaty, humid, miserable town in Florida, while aging actress Geraldine Page sleeps in the bed. She settles on giving the manly man a leg up for a career in acting. Later on, we determine that he has returned to patch things up with a girlfriend whom he gave a venereal disease, much to the passionate fury and embarrassment of Boss Finley, her father and a commanding political official.This decent but forgettable filmed reading inelegantly adjoins Williams's reflections on the potentially unbearable certainty of our past with affected and glaringly scripted dialogue that is meant for stage and not screen. Williams's lyrical tinges and involvedness are stabilized, and the damaged characters firmed to caricatured fonts, however eloquent and articulate ones.Via alterations and amendments, Knight's dilemma is unquestionably implied as an abortion, the sensational shock of Newman and Page's "contract" are minimized, and when Rip Torn's character alerts powerless Newman that he's about to take away "lover boy's meal ticket," what ensues is nearly laughably construed as misleading.Then again, each person we see visibly acting all the way through the words does a pleasant chore of it. Newman's stage-sharpened buoyancy in the role is subdued but by no means staggers. Begley's hamming does intensify the vigor in a gloomy exercise whose gloom could have been stronger. Additionally of note are Madeleine Sherwood as Boss' vindictive mistress.

Even though this film version of Sweet Bird of Youth was compromised by Hollywood's Almighty Code in its last days, there's still enough of Tennessee Williams's drama to enjoy and savor.A lot of the cast like Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Madeline Sherwood and Rip Torn came over from Broadway. That certainly helped, no doubt about it. They and the new cast members make extra base hits every time they're at the plate.One of the new cast members, Ed Begley who took the place of Sidney Blackmer as Boss Finley and won an Academy Award for playing Boss Finley. This is hardly new territory for Begley, playing the rapacious and lustful town boss, he's certainly done these kind of parts before. That experience is probably what got him the Oscar. Begley had some stiff competition that year with Telly Savalas from Birdman of Alcatraz, Victor Buono from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Terence Stamp for Billy Budd and Omar Sharif for Lawrence of Arabia. Finley is one evil dude, quite along the lines Sidney Greenstreet in Flamingo Road. It's a part I could see Greenstreet doing with relish. What he threatens to do to Paul Newman and what actually gets done is the letdown ending of the play.Richard Brooks directed and adapted Tennessee Williams's play for the screen. Brooks started out as a writer and later branched into directing. Into his hands came the changes described above. Another big compromise was exactly the nature of the disgrace Paul Newman left with the Finley family over daughter Shirley Knight. Newman plays Chance Wayne, would be actor and now just kept boy toy of fading film star Alexandra Del Lago who is Geraldine Page. Her character is remarkably similar to Vivien Leigh's from that other Tennessee Williams work, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. She turns out to have more character than originally thought.Newman arrives in his hometown in Florida where Ed Begley and his family reign supreme, presumably under the protection of Page. But he's got to see Knight and explain he's finally going to hit it big. The scheme involves a little blackmail on Page. That doesn't deter Ed Begley and his son Rip Torn. They will avenge the family no matter what.Even with the changes for the screen, Chance Wayne maybe the sleaziest character Paul Newman ever played or possibly Tennessee Williams ever wrote. Newman wants to be a film star and wants to do it the easy way. If he's got any acting talent that's besides the point. Tennessee Williams was not as far fetched in his character as you might suppose. One does wonder who among our Hollywood hunks might have taken the road Chance Wayne tries, even part of the way.Page and Knight were nominated for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, but both lost to the duo from The Miracle Worker another Broadway play, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke respectively.Maybe at some point we'll see a faithful version of Sweet Bird of Youth and you can see the kind of compromises Brooks made. Until then, this one will do nicely.

"Sweet Bird of Youth" came towards the end of Hollywood's Tennessee Williams cycle of the fifties and early sixties, being preceded by such films as "A Streetcar Named Desire", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "Suddenly Last Summer", and closely followed by "Period of Adjustment" and "Night of the Iguana". Indeed, Williams is an author whom I know better from the cinema than from the theatre; he lacks the following in Britain that he enjoys in his native America, and performances of his plays here are infrequent. ("Sweet Bird…..", for example, was not performed in London's West End until 1985, nearly 30 years after it was written).The main character is Chance Wayne, a drifter who returns to his Southern home town. He left the town several years ago with high hopes of becoming a Hollywood actor, but he has enjoyed little success, and has ended up as a gigolo, preying on lonely older women. (His name is highly significant. Wayne is a "chancer", one who lives by his wits and enjoys taking risks. The surname at this period would have evoked the great Hollywood star John Wayne, but Chance has had none of his namesake's success).Wayne's latest conquest is a film star named Alexandra del Lago. Alexandra was once beautiful and highly successful, but is now ageing, addicted to drugs and alcohol, lacking in self-confidence and terrified of losing her looks. Wayne is only interested in Alexandra because he wants her to use her influence to advance his stalled acting career; his main purpose in returning home is to rekindle his love affair with his former girlfriend, Heavenly. Heavenly is the daughter of the local political boss Tom Finley, a Huey Long-style politician, who maintains a grip on State politics through corruption and strong-arm tactics. It was Finley who forced Wayne to leave town after he got Heavenly pregnant, a pregnancy which was terminated by abortion.The emotional, passionate nature of many of Williams' characters made his plays very popular with film-makers, but in the fifties the American theatre tended to be more liberal than the American cinema as regards the portrayal of sexual themes, and a number of his plays were somewhat bowdlerised when turned into films. "Sweet Bird of Youth" is no exception. The reasons why Finley ran Chance out of town are not the same in the two versions; in the play he infected Heavenly with a venereal disease, something unmentionable in Production Code Hollywood. (Pregnancy outside marriage and abortion were quite controversial enough). The ending is very much softened compared with the one Williams originally wrote.Paul Newman plays Wayne in the same cool, nonchalant, laid-back style which characterised a number of other his roles. (It was Steve McQueen who earned the nickname "King of Cool", but Newman could have been a pretender to his throne). Several of these were also drifters, such as Cool Hand Luke or Ben Quick in "The Long Hot Summer". For me, however, the real stars of the film are not Newman but Geraldine Page as Alexandra and Ed Begley as Finley. Page (who was nominated for "Best Actress") was excellent as the drunken, self-pitying junkie, and perhaps even better at the end of the film when Alexandra recovers her self-confidence after discovering that her latest film has proved an unexpected success. Begley certainly deserved his "Best Supporting Actor" award for his portrayal of the ranting demagogue Finley; the one nomination which rather surprised me was "Best Supporting Actress" for Shirley Knight (Heavenly), as she did not seem to have all that much to do."Sweet Bird of Youth" is not quite in the same class as some of the other entries in the Williams cycle, such as "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (which was also directed by Richard Brooks and also starred Newman) or "A Streetcar Named Desire" with its four towering performances in the leading roles. It perhaps represents a rather conservative style of film-making, looking back to the fifties rather than to the stylistic revolution of the late sixties. (After "Night of the Iguana" in 1964 Hollywood was to fall out of love with Tennessee Williams). It is, however, well-made and well-acted, and still remains enjoyable today. 7/10