This Property is Condemned: Tennessee Williams

If one writer may be said to be a barometer for the boundaries of presenting sex on the screen, it is one who rarely wrote directly for the medium, but whose plays — when adapted for the movies — were wildly successful, not least for their inflammatory depiction of sexual matters. However, most of these adaptations had to be softened and bowdlerised in order to be shown to cinema audiences, who were considered less sophisticated — and thus more open to moral corruption — than the more cultivated theatre audiences who first encountered Tennessee Williams’ work. After the success of his play The Glass Menagerie in 1944 (which was later filmed, but is not relevant to this study), virtually all Williams’ major plays enjoyed adaptations that were generally considered to maintain an extremely high standard, despite the strait-laced tinkerings to which they were subjected. Before the playwright’s cavalier attitude to drink and drugs began to sap his creative energy, he furnished some remarkable material for the cinema in which overcooked emotion and fevered sexuality were couched in the most poetic of terms, and shot through with a genuine and nuanced grasp of character, however extreme the situations in which he placed his protagonists.