Quite why anyone would want to make one film of this Tennessee Williams play, let alone two, isn't easy to fathom. It had been left well alone since the 1950 original and, in this version directed by Paul Newman, it isn't difficult to see why. Despite nice performances by Karen Allen, John Malkovich and James Naughton, it is, for most of its lengthy running time, pretty boring stuff. Newman encourages his own wife, Joanne Woodward, to go quite a bit over the top as the smothering matriarch who's partly responsible for the repression of her disabled daughter. If she is meant to be irritating rather than endearing, this adaptation certainly does the trick, marking the film as of interest to addicts of the play only.


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