RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM CINEMA RETRO'S ARCHIVES.
(The following piece was the first film review posted on Cinema Retro on February 25, 2007)
"Bus Riley" and William Inge: or When Playwrights Are
Wronged
By Joel Shatzky
Bus Riley's Back in Town is a
1965 Universal production that is vaguely based on a play written by William Inge (1913-1973) in the
early1950's bearing the same title. Because of the rewriting of the script and plot by the studio so
that the story could be more of a vehicle for Ann-Margaret, Inge removed his name from the credits and
not even the fact that the title was from an Inge play was mentioned. It is one of the few times, I
believe, that a prominent playwright
had his credits removed from a script that was based on his own
play. Even Tennessee Williams, who had every good reason to remove his name from the credits of A
Streetcar Named Desire due to the distorted ending, abstained from such a temptation.
Inge had no reason, from past experience, to feel that
he would have
trouble with a film treatment of one of his works. All four of his
major plays were
made into successful films: Come Back, Little
Sheba(1952), with Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster
garnered a best
actress Oscar for Booth; Picnic (1955) featured Kim Novak's screen
debut; Bus Stop
(1956) starred Marilyn Monroe and featured the film
debut of Don Murray; and Dark at the
Stop of the Stairs (1960)
with Dorothy McGuire and Robert Preston: all were produced apparently
in
accordance with Inge's wishes. His own screenplay for Splendor in
the Grass (1961), with Warren
Beatty and Natalie Wood, earned Inge an
Oscar, and the adoption of A Loss of Roses (1959) was
successfully made
into The Stripper (1963), with Joanne Woodward. Bus Riley,
unfortunately, proved
to be quite a different experience for Inge.
Having
read the original play script and then
seen the movie, I can say that I
can well understand why Inge would make such a decision to cut
any
connection with the film. Actor/playwright Robert Shaw did the same
when his stage play, The
Man in the Glass Booth, was turned into a film
produced by Eli Landau for the American Film Theatre
series in the
early 1970's, but it was indeed a rare occurrence for a playwright to
have his name
removed from a screen version of one of his works. Howard
Thomson's New York Times review, April 8,
1965 in fact, makes Inge's
decision seem all the more puzzling:
"Bus Riley's Back in
Town,
which opened yesterday at the Palace and other houses, already -
has
become a minor,
backstage cause celebre. The picture was penned as a
screen original by William Inge. The producers
are reported to have had
the completed Universal film rewritten and re-shot to
glorify
Ann-Margret, whereupon Mr. Inge had his name yanked from the credits.
Yesterday's credits
listed, instead, Walter Gage, who is supposed to be
non-existent."
Regardless of who did
or undid what, the
picture is a good one and that's all that matters. Indeed, this low
keyed
drama of a young Navy veteran's search for self-fulfillment is so
honest, sensitive and thoughtful
on several levels that not even
Ann-Margret's blatant, cooing portrait of a siren can ruin it.
Thomson
goes on to further praise the movie, comparing some of the scenes to
Picnic, but given its
original premises developed from a one-act play
that takes place in a barroom, I can see what upset
Inge. But first:
the casting. Ann-Margaret had been developing her career as a screen
siren in
Kitten with a Whip, and Viva Las Vegas, both released the
previous year. Universal saw the role of
the long-lost love of the
eponymous character as a vehicle to show off her most obvious
attributes
which did not include much emoting, but a lot of lustful
glances and strategic pouting, culminating
in the immortal words of
many a jilted lover: "I hate you! I hate you!" The cast included
several
veterans, among whom was Jocelyn Brando, Marlon's older sister,
and several new-comers: Kim Darby had
her first role as Bus's younger
sister and David Carradine has a few lines in a bar scene. Larry
Storch
is wasted in a brief stint as a bartender. The lead actor, Michael
Parks, who had a James
Dean 'look' although not quite the skills, was
given an opportunity to get a juicy role in only his
second film (He
would later have a distinguished career as a character actor in films
by Quentin
Tarentino). The problem was that the clear direction that is
pointed to by Inge in the original play
is almost completely ignored in
the rewrites.
Inge's play is a modest one-act affair about
the
reunion of two young lovers who have been apart for six years. It opens
with the young woman,
Jackie, trying to find out if Bus Riley is going
to make an appearance in the local bar of a small
Texas town that has
seen better days. The kernel of the plot involves several points that
were
undoubtedly important to Inge but are absent in the screenplay.
Bus Riley may have an Irish name, but
his mother is Mexican and he
lived on the wrong side of the tracks. In the play, Jackie has
not
married-
but in the film, she is married to a rich man who remains
faceless throughout the
movie-- and her father was a wealthy figure in
town who had Bus jailed after he impregnated Jackie,
who was forced to
have an abortion. Bus has tried to avoid her since he returned because
he
doesn't want any more trouble from her father. At the end of their
brief encounter, Bus decides that
he cannot remain any longer in town
but before he leaves, he persuades Jackie to go off with him to a
local
motel to have a last fling. Although by no means one of Inge's best
efforts, it has a
poignancy that is lacking in the film. More
significantly, the most controversial elements that Inge
most likely
would have wanted to preserve in the movie treatment- racial prejudice,
the privileges
of class, and abortion- are completely expunged. The
only element I can see that was most likely
added by the playwright
when he wrote the original draft of the screenplay is the
implicit
homosexuality of the mortician who is planning to hire Bus. The
scenario is introduced
early in the movie but is never subsequently
pursued. Inge's own homosexuality might have induced him
to introduce
this plot device in the screenplay.
Without access to his
original draft
of the script, it's difficult to judge whether the
homosexual angle was initially more prominent. .
There are some tender
scenes between Parks and Janet Margolin, who had recently enjoyed
prominence
with her stellar performance in David and Lisa (1962). There
are also certain sequences set around
the dinner table and between
mother and son that evoke elements of Inge's Picnic and The Dark at
the
Top of the Stairs but Howard Thomson's praise of the screenplay,
particularly the rather
pedestrian plot and dialogue, is completely
unmerited. What Hollywood had rendered to Inge's original
version of
the script can only be surmised. In a 1962 preface to his volume,
Eleven Short Plays,
he states briefly, "Bus Riley's Back in Town is a
play I happen to be working on now in expanded
form" but does not
elaborate on any changes to or expansion of the story. What appears to
me
obvious in comparing the original with the treatment is that any
controversial issues that could have
been developed by the dramatist
were expunged or neglected in the rewrites. Sadly, perhaps because
of
that experience, Inge wrote only one other play and after 1965, turned
to non-dramatic prose,
writing two novels and a memoir. Less than a
decade after Inge had removed his name from the credits
of Bus Riley,
he committed suicide at the age of sixty in his home in Hollywood.
The
plot of Bus Riley has an interesting resemblance to Tennessee Williams'
Sweet Bird of
Youth, which was undoubtedly written later. Williams and
Inge knew each other from the days when Inge
had been the theater
critic for the St. Louis Star-Times and saw Williams' early plays. It
is very
probable that he and Williams exchanged ideas about
playwriting, especially that it was at Williams'
urging that Inge wrote
his first play. Both Bus and Bird have the following plot
similarities:
they take place in a bar--although Bird moves elsewhere, they are both
about a past
relationship between two young lovers where the boy is
from the wrong side of the tracks and the girl
is the daughter of a
powerful figure in the town. In both cases the girl becomes pregnant
and has
an abortion, the boy is exiled by the powerful father--in the
case of Bus jailed for statutory
rape--and the play begins when the
young man, now somewhat shop-worn, comes back to town, though only
in
the Inge story do they meet for more than a brief moment before going
off together for one last
fling. An added resemblance, but this time to
The Rose Tattoo, is that the young man is a sailor.
Coincidence?
For
further details on this issue, see Ralph Voss' "Tennessee
Williams' 'Sweet Bird of Youth' and William Inge's 'Bus Riley's
Back
in Town':Coincidences of a Friendship"; American Drama,
Winter, 2006.
Joel Shatzky is a retired college professor
of dramatic literature from an upstate SUNY college
and an enthusiastic
movie viewer. He once did movie reviews for the local radio station but
the
management was too cheap to give him free tickets. He's written and edited a dozen books
including a two-volume reference work on Jewish-American literature. Shatzky is also a contributor to The Huffington Post.