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Tennessee Williams Film Series: Sweet Bird of Youth

Presented by Harry Ransom Center at Harry Ransom Center

July 21, 2011

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The Harry Ransom Center continues its Tennessee Williams Film Series with Richard Brooks’ Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), featuring Paul Newman and Geraldine Page, on Thursday, July 21, at 7 p.m. at the Ransom Center.

Aspiring actor Chance Wayne (Newman) returns to his hometown of St. Cloud, Florida, along with faded actress Alexandra Del Lago (Page), with hopes that she will help him into the movie business. There, he runs into his old sweetheart, Heavenly, whose father ran Wayne out of town years before.

The Tennessee Williams Film Series highlights films featured in the current exhibition, Becoming Tennessee Williams, which runs through July 31.

With his plays The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), the American playwright Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) reinvented the theater. Drawing on the Ransom Center’s extensive collection of Tennessee Williams manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and artwork, this centenary exhibition explores the idea, act, and process of artistic creation, illuminating how Thomas Lanier Williams became Tennessee Williams. Williams asserted that most of his plays dealt with the “wild at heart kept in cages,” a description, perhaps, of his own life. Throughout the exhibition, Williams’s personal biography is compared and contrasted with the dramatic structure of his plays.

Visit the galleries, open until 7 p.m. on Thursdays, before attending the screenings.

Please be aware that the Ransom Center’s Charles Nelson Prothro Theater has limited seating. Line forms upon arrival of the first person, and doors open 30 minutes in advance.