Period of Adjustment (1962) ***

You want angst, frustration, tragedy, Tennessee Williams is your man. Comedy? Not so much. He had pretty much supplied Hollywood with an unending stream of hits. From The Glass Menagerie (1950), quadruple Oscar-winner A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), triple Oscar-winner The Rose Tattoo (1955) and four-time Oscar nominee Baby Doll (1956) to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) with six nominations, Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) three nominations, The Fugitive Kind (1960), Summer and Smoke (1961) four nominations, and Oscar-winner Sweet Bird of Youth (1962) his movies attracted the cream of Hollywood.  The likes of Marlon Brando (twice), Elizabeth Taylor (twice), Montgomery Clift, Vivien Leigh, Paul Newman (twice) and Katharine Hepburn stood in line for the honor of participating.

Tennessee Williams was, unusually for a writer, a marquee name. He promised sensation, sex, scintillation. Audiences in need of a few laffs didn’t look towards his work.

So what to make of his first comedy? He was the biggest name by far involved. And the marketeers made sure audiences were aware this was a comedy and not a searing drama. But absence of the kind of big-name star generally associated with the playwright’s adaptations might have made them leery. Director George Roy Hill making his debut. Anthony Franciosa in his first top-billed role, fourth movie for Jane Fonda, Jim Hutton downgraded to second male lead from being star of his previous picture, Lois Nettleton in her debut. But who knows? It might make stars of them all.

The story itself is slight. A couple with different expectations of each other coming to terms with marriage. There’s a racy element, too. New husband George (Jim Hutton) is suffering from stage fright, can’t deliver in the bedroom department on their honeymoon. Wife Isabel (Jane Fonda) is a bit too ditzy, far removed from the efficient nurse he fell, too fast, in love with. He’s got some odd ideas of his own, a hearse his notion of acceptable transportation.

Anyway, they end up in the home of his Korean War buddy Ralph (Anthony Franciosa) whose marriage to Dorothea (Lois Nettleton) is in tatters. It’s a soft soap version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as the newly-weds get a glimpse of what can happen way down the line when marriage is out of control.

Luckily, it’s built as a comedy not as drama, so nothing gets that much out of control and if anything it’s heading in the direction of warm-hearted as the newly-weds find ways to patch up their differences while the warring couple discover exactly what’s gone wrong with their relationship, primarily that good old Ralph married his wife for her money.

But, mostly, instead of trying to fix their own marriages, the couples are more intent on offering advice to the other. The pal’s in-laws take the brunt of the blame. Dysfunctional family and potentially dysfunctioning family have to suck it up and change.

There’s some obvious comedy thrown in to lighten the load, this taking place at Christmas, a bunch of choristers, going door to door, get drunker with every stop-off. But the movie doesn’t quite go in the direction you expect. There’s no easy fix, though there is a fix, but each character goes through a definite change rather than just flipping a switch.

Though Jane Fonda (Barbarella, 1968) is the one who became a star, it took her quite a few acting iterations to achieve it, and this sees her going down the Marilyn Monroe route of  blatant sexiness so in a sense hers is the least interesting character because she’s so shallow to begin with. Anthony Franciosa (Fathom, 1967) is the pick, in part because he’s playing a more genuine character rather than the schemer or matinee idol that he essayed in so many later movies. Jim Hutton (The Hellfighters, 1968) is still in lightweight mode.

George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969) is occasionally stagey in his direction but manages to pull out the performances required to make this work. Isobel Lennart (Funny Girl, 1968) does the adaptation.

Not just for Tennessee Williams or Jane Fonda completists.