What makes it different from others?

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

When an actor like Geraldine Page or even an old timer like Una Merkel gets to sink their teeth into those inimitable, poetic, deliriously 'over the top' Tennessee Williams lines of dialogue one cannot help but share in their thrill. Gerry Page never 'moons' over her Buchanan boy - that is why she is so powerful here where so many other revivals of the play have failed. Rather than having Alma acting like a 'love-struck teenager', Page plays Alma as fiercely engagé with Buchanan in an adult and complex way. Few people mention the cruelly ironic aspect of the ending in that the now 'respectable' bourgeois Dr. Buchanan is Alma's 'drug dealer'. "You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful these pills are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!"

Hardly the best of Tennessee Williams and this film version does nothing to improve on it. The director was Peter Glenville who may have been highly proficient on stage but who had no real idea of what made good cinema and this is turgid at best. Geraldine Page may have been ideally suited to the role of the repressed spinster Alma but her tremulous, hesitant and, of course, highly mannered performance is just annoying and you know something is askew when the usually wooden Laurence Harvey more than manages to hold his own against her. He's the good-for-nothing young doctor who seduces her and whose body just drives her wild with desire as a certain Miss Bowles might say. As the local tramp Rita Moreno barely gets a look in though Una Merkel makes a brave stab at playing Page's dotty mother, (she and Page were both Oscar-nominated). Williams later revised the piece under the title "Eccentricities of a Nightingale" which was filmed for television with Blythe Danner and Frank Langella.

"Summer and Smoke" is another Tennessee Williams southern drama that, after debuting as a play, was made into a film and later an opera. Set earlier in the 20th Century, it's the story of repressed passion, unrequited love and desperation. Geraldine Page stars as Alma Winemiller, the uptight daughter of a minister. She teaches voice, sings a little, and lives with her father and an insane mother (Una Merkel). Alma, since childhood, has been in love with the young doctor next door, John Buchanan (Laurence Harvey), the son of a doctor and a playboy. Buchanan has recently returned to town and is still a reckless playboy. Now he's involved with Rosa Zacharias (Rita Moreno), a girl from the wrong class and the wrong side of town. On the evening that something could have happened between Alma and John, she runs from him. One night, while a wild party is going on at the Buchanan house, Alma goes next door and learns that Rosa and John are going to be married. Upset, she calls John's father (John MacIntyre) at the hospital and urges him to return home. The result is tragedy.This is a very powerful and poignant story of two people, one interested in earthly pleasures and one focused on the soul and spirit. Neither one is entirely right or wrong, but it creates a chasm between them. When each realizes what the other has been saying, it's too late for them.Geraldine Page, who played this role to great acclaim on stage, brings her magnificent portrayal to the screen. The role was based on Williams' sister, who eventually went insane. If physically Page is a little less delicate looking than one imagines Tennessee Williams' female characters, her portrayal contains all of the fragility of the role. The final scene between Alma and a salesman, played by Earl Holliman shows the shocking contrast between Alma in the beginning and at the end of the film. Geraldine Page gave us all too few gems on films, as she concentrated on the stage. We have to savor what we have.Laurence Harvey is very handsome and desirable, but probably a little too refined for the role of John. The role needs someone whose sexuality is less ethereal and more earthbound. Una Merkel is excellent as Alma's mother, a truly disturbed and frightening woman.Very good film based on a Williams play, worth seeing for the wonderful Geraldine Page and its thought-provoking story.

Geraldine Page received an Oscar nomination for her sterling portrayal of a small town spinster hoping to kindle a spark with the ne'er-do-well doctor's son who has lived next door since they were kids. Adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play (in which Page scored a personal success off-Broadway some nine years before the film) is brightly-painted and full of nervous, fluttery life (it's like a neurotic Disney movie--Pollyanna herself might just live down the street). It never takes off into its own emotional sphere however, mainly because the melodrama inherent in the story is so wan (it isn't encumbered by character neuroses, like many of Williams' other works--this one could actually use more). Laurence Harvey is somewhat mild-mannered as Page's leading man (one can't imagine this guy getting too wild), and the supporting players are a variable lot, ranging from Una Merkel's dotty mother to Rita Moreno's strutting flooze. Page is the one to watch; with the tiniest sparkle of dementia in her alert eyes, and the quiver of her uncertain mouth, she nearly transforms this material, an amalgamation of Tennessee Williams and Hollywood in 1961. ** from ****