Based on a play by Tennessee Williams (expanded from his one-act piece Eccentricities of the Nightingale). From childhood, Alma (Geraldine Page) has loved John Buchanan (Laurence Harvey). Repressed by the pressure of a minister father and a mother who has never recovered for a nervous breakdown, she keeps these feelings bottled up. Her life becomes unbearable when John returns from medical school and takes up with the sultry Rosa (Rita Moreno), the daughter of the casino owner who is as open and willing, as Alma is shy and repressed. Geraldine Page delivers a smoldering, stellar performance, which won her the Golden Globe® and the National Board of Review® Best Actress Awards. The film received 4 Academy Award® nominations*, including Best Actress (Page), Best Supporting Actress (Una Merkel) and Best Music (Elmer Bernstein). Directed by DGA nominee, Peter Glenville (Becket).

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AThis film version of Summer and Smoke (1961), one of Tennessee Williams's earliest plays, compares favorably with more famous screen adaptations of his work, such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), and has the advantage over them of starring the actress who played the lead on stage to great acclaim.

Summer and Smoke had its genesis in a short story, "Oriflamme," written by the young Williams in 1944, well before his theatrical breakthrough, when he was still living with his family in St. Louis and struggling to find his literary voice. The story later served as a sketch for a short play, The Yellow Bird, similar in theme and lead character's name to a longer work that was initially called "Chart of Anatomy." By the time that play reached Broadway, it had been retitled as the more poetic and appealing Summer and Smoke. The play did not do well, however, and most critics (with the notable exception of Brook Atkinson of the New York Times) panned it. In development at roughly the same time as A Streetcar Named Desire, it suffered in comparison to that play, which had opened a year earlier and caused a sensation, thanks to its frank sexuality and dynamic leading man Marlon Brando.

Despite its initial failure, Summer and Smoke was revived a few years later to resounding success. The 1952 production by director Jose Quintero at New York's Circle in the Square Theater put Off-Broadway on the map and established the career of a relatively unknown young actress. For her portrayal of Alma, a repressed Southern spinster grasping at one chance for love with the wild, undisciplined young doctor she has known for years, Geraldine Page won the Drama Critics Award, the first given to a performer in a non-Broadway production. It also brought her to the attention of Hollywood, leading to an uncredited part in Taxi (1953) and a substantial role opposite John Wayne in Hondo (1953), for which she received a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination. Good movie roles were not forthcoming, however, and Page returned to the stage, building a sterling reputation both on Broadway and off, earning her first Tony Award nomination for another Williams play, Sweet Bird of Youth. Although she appeared occasionally on television, she did not return to film until Summer and Smoke, eight years after her feature debut.

Excerpt from TCM located HERE