Alternative Film Guide

Via Susan King’s article "He wrote movies, and he loved movies" in the Los Angeles Times: Author-screenwriter Gavin Lambert, who died last July at age 80, is being honored by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with the series "A Tribute to Gavin Lambert," which kicks off on Friday at the Leo S. Bing Theater. The first two films of the series are The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, both of which Lambert co-adapted from novels.

Based on Tennessee Williams’s novel and directed by Jose Quintero, the 1961 melodrama The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone follows an aging actress, delicately played by Vivien Leigh, as she looks for love and her lost youth in the streets of Rome. She finds both - sort of - in the body of a self-centered Italian gigolo (an atrociously miscast Warren Beatty). Not a great movie by any means, but Leigh’s performance alone is enough for me to recommend it. According to the IMDb, Jan Read did "additional writing.")

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, a 1977 drama directed by Anthony Page and adapted from Joanne Greenberg’s novel, revolves around the problems of a young woman suffering from schizophrenia. Kathleen Quinlan and one of Ingmar Bergman’s frequent collaborators, Bibi Andersson, star. Also in the cast are veterans Sylvia Sidney (City Streets) and Signe Hasso (A Double Life). Lambert and Lewis John Carlino received an Oscar nomination for their screenplay.

I had the pleasure of meeting Gavin Lambert while doing research for my book on actor Ramon Novarro. Besides being quite helpful, Lambert was an inspiration. His Norma Shearer biography remains the best of all show business bios I’ve ever read. (Patricia Neal’s As I Am: An Autobiography — actually penned by Richard DeNeut — is my favorite "auto" biography. Disclaimer: Yes, I red-facedly admit that Dick DeNeut is a friend but his — and Neal’s — book is still awesome.)

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