Ending ruined a good romantic movie

Alva is not in the play. It is a one-act "memory play" with only two characters, Willie and Tom. Alva is only mentioned (as in the opening scene of the movie) in Willie's monologues. FYI, Williams hated the film adaptation.

This movie was tacked together from beginning to end. First off, they had no script, or hardly any script. The movie bears little to no resemblence to Tennessee's one-act play, and the people of the small town they shot the picture in were horrified that Hollywood was in their streets shooting a amoral Tennessee Williams play. They went as far as to clean up the streets at night when the crew wasn't there so that the crew had to correct the situation the next morning before shooting. The restaurants of the town went asfar as to refuse to feed the crew. That's how nasty things got. This film was put together by what is known as a "film-writing committee", that simply means that everyone from the grips to the actors had a hand in coming up with a hopefully workable script. Not very promising.

I loved the picture, In fact, it's one of my very favorite pictures. It has a nuaunce to it... Kate Reid is wonderful. Robert Blake is fabulous, Charles Bronson is scary/sleazy at it's best and of course it has Mary Badham as the supporting female. She is most widely known as "Scout" from "To Kill a Mockingbird". She left films... but anyone who's interested in seeing her again can, There's a little-known new film called "On Our Own" that's been playing on and off on the movie stations where she has a cameo as woman who has left her children and disappeared into the mountains only to be found at the very ending of this film by an alcoholic Keith Carradine. She has about eight seconds on the film but it was marvelous seeing her.