Sweet Bird of Youth is a tamer and tidied but arresting version of Tennessee Williams' Broadway play. It's a glossy, engrossing hunk of motion picture entertainment, slickly produced by Berman.
60
Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
Just like the play, the first half is a delicious, hotel-room-set duel of desperate characters, while the second half goes awry. [01 Dec 1989, p.F18]
50
The New YorkerPauline Kael
The New YorkerPauline Kael
Hysterical twaddle.
50
Time Out
Time Out
Brooks' direction seems a little too stolid for all the sleazy, flaming passions.
[Brooks's] second Williams adaptation (1962) is literally a form of emasculation that offers little indication of what made the original play interesting (especially in Elia Kazan’s stage production), despite the fact that Paul Newman and Geraldine Page are called on to reprise their original roles—as a hustler returning to his southern hometown and a Hollywood has-been—and do a fair job with Brooks’s hopeless script.
Sweet Bird of Youth, for all its graphics and the vigorous performance of its top roles, has the taint of an engineered soap opera, wherein the soap is simply made of lye, that's all.