Period Of Adjustment – Tennessee Williams, 1960 ★½

Manly Men and Women Stuck with Them

Two youngish couples struggling to find Christmas Eve contentment in Eisenhower-era suburbia may not seem like fertile ground for an outsider’s artist like Tennessee Williams. And it isn’t.

Written both as a send-up and a genuine appreciation for the American middle class, Period Of Adjustment is billed as “a serious comedy,” when it is really neither. Williams has a sense of sarcasm about his characters, but his need to convey their basic goodness dampens any edges he might have had. Maybe on stage the right actors could inject a spark of life, but on the page it makes for a stiff, mawkish read.

Before The Fall – William Safire, 1975 ★★★★

Run of the Milhous

From 1966 to 1973, William Safire was one of Richard Nixon’s top speechwriters. In Before The Fall, Safire makes use of his vantage point as crafter of the Nixon message to relate everything he saw, and much of what he didn’t, of Nixon’s triumphant, calamitous presidency.

Among the things he missed was the Watergate break-in which forced Nixon’s resignation. As that was dark ops and Safire was in the business of public relations, his orbit lay well outside the infamous Plumbers breaking into Democratic headquarters.

Yet this didn’t protect Safire from being bugged when Attorney General John Mitchell pegged him as a potential security leak.