Tennessee Williams’s short story was begun in 1942 and completed in 1945 but not published until 1948. Williams then turned the script into a screenplay. It was never filmed. Could it have worked as a film noir? Nineteen years later he revised it. Hollywood still wasn’t interested.
Moisés Kaufman, using both the short story and the screenplay in his adaptation, turns Williams’s dark poem, a paean to the solitary, the repressed and the misunderstood, into an interesting though not wholly successful memory play.
A broken Apollo (Tom Vary), a former boxer, a light heavyweight champion in the US navy, loses his arm in a car accident. Since nobody wants to employ a man with one arm, he opts to make his living as a hustler in New Orleans. “Nothing human disgusts me,” said Tennessee Williams, “unless it’s unkind.”