Blame it on Tennessee Williams, but this is another intense Southern drama, involving sex, money, race and oddly enough, music the main difference here being that this is less a generational family drama than one focusing on the tangled love lives of a group of young people.
It starts with Robert Wagner and Natalie Woods as the poor star-crossed young lovers who live in a typical Southern town. Woods' Sara, who wants to be known by her invented, exotic alter-ego name of Salome, as you do, is already rebeling against the Draconian home-rule of her dad while Wagner's Chad is a talented trumpeter with an unaccountable dread of the dark. He wants to follow his dream in music but he's dead broke and when he gets her pregnant, they break up.
Sure enough he heads to New York where he hooks up with Pearl Bailey's black jazz singer Ruby who takes the fledgling talent under her wing where he quickly makes the big time. Only problem is that Bailey is slowly dying after presumably years of drink and drug abuse.
Meanwhile Woods also leaves home and on the train out meets up again with bored rich kid George Hamilton, who'd previously mistaken her for a prostitute in a downtown bar. This time, he offers her sympathy which she accepts and then love which she doesn't but for the sake of her unborn child, she agrees to marry him.
Hamilton meanwhile has a slightly strange (at least outside of films like this!) relationship with his jealous, conniving sister played by Susan Kohner. She comes to stay cuckoo -style with her sibling and his new bride and baby and turns the triangle into a quadrangle by hunting down Chad and throwing herself at him to the extent that they marry too.
This sets the scene for further high-powered emotional outpourings taking in a death, attempted suicide, family reconciliations and of course a final reckoning where all the emotional entanglements are more or less straightened out by the finish.
I have to admit I wasn't convinced by the convoluted plot or overwritten situations in which these characters are placed. I get that the movie is supposedly based on the life of real-life musician Chet (= Chad?) Baker but still found the juxtaposition with the musical world awkward and unconvincing. The movie doesn't ever show Wagner and Bailey as a couple (apparently in real life they had an affair during the shoot) and could have gone deeper and further into these various complicated scenarios to better effect.
Woods comes off well as the Southern belle forced to grow up quickly, Hamilton aquits himself passably as the smitten playboy, Susan Kohner acts her part with cattish relish but Wagner is all at sea as the tortured Chad. Forever running his hand through his hair, he constantly veers between under- and over-acting, never more so than with his musical instrument.
Michael Anderson's direction lacks dramatic focus and fails to draw in the viewer to engage with these unusual people. It almost feels as if he's simply been handed this assignment but in the end what emerges is a pale imitation if not an out and out pastiche of a would-be Williams or Inge-type drama.
It starts with Robert Wagner and Natalie Woods as the poor star-crossed young lovers who live in a typical Southern town. Woods' Sara, who wants to be known by her invented, exotic alter-ego name of Salome, as you do, is already rebeling against the Draconian home-rule of her dad while Wagner's Chad is a talented trumpeter with an unaccountable dread of the dark. He wants to follow his dream in music but he's dead broke and when he gets her pregnant, they break up.
Sure enough he heads to New York where he hooks up with Pearl Bailey's black jazz singer Ruby who takes the fledgling talent under her wing where he quickly makes the big time. Only problem is that Bailey is slowly dying after presumably years of drink and drug abuse.
Meanwhile Woods also leaves home and on the train out meets up again with bored rich kid George Hamilton, who'd previously mistaken her for a prostitute in a downtown bar. This time, he offers her sympathy which she accepts and then love which she doesn't but for the sake of her unborn child, she agrees to marry him.
Hamilton meanwhile has a slightly strange (at least outside of films like this!) relationship with his jealous, conniving sister played by Susan Kohner. She comes to stay cuckoo -style with her sibling and his new bride and baby and turns the triangle into a quadrangle by hunting down Chad and throwing herself at him to the extent that they marry too.
This sets the scene for further high-powered emotional outpourings taking in a death, attempted suicide, family reconciliations and of course a final reckoning where all the emotional entanglements are more or less straightened out by the finish.
I have to admit I wasn't convinced by the convoluted plot or overwritten situations in which these characters are placed. I get that the movie is supposedly based on the life of real-life musician Chet (= Chad?) Baker but still found the juxtaposition with the musical world awkward and unconvincing. The movie doesn't ever show Wagner and Bailey as a couple (apparently in real life they had an affair during the shoot) and could have gone deeper and further into these various complicated scenarios to better effect.
Woods comes off well as the Southern belle forced to grow up quickly, Hamilton aquits himself passably as the smitten playboy, Susan Kohner acts her part with cattish relish but Wagner is all at sea as the tortured Chad. Forever running his hand through his hair, he constantly veers between under- and over-acting, never more so than with his musical instrument.
Michael Anderson's direction lacks dramatic focus and fails to draw in the viewer to engage with these unusual people. It almost feels as if he's simply been handed this assignment but in the end what emerges is a pale imitation if not an out and out pastiche of a would-be Williams or Inge-type drama.