Posthumous presentation of a hitherto unknown or lost work is nearly always a disservice to its creator. Better left to the academics’ scrutiny, “rediscovered gems” were likely not so much misplaced as shelved just short of burning by the artists who deemed them inferior or incomplete. Such seems true with The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, alone among Tennessee Williams’ sixteen other filmed works in that it was a film script from its composition in 1957 rather than an adapted stage play.

Stagey nevertheless, it is an awful movie, partly because of being ill conceived by fellow Southerner, actress Jodie Markell in her feature directorial début. The performances ring false, too, though, to be fair, America’s most cinematographically successful dramatist put the cast behind the eight ball every inch of the way. The 1920s crinoline debutantes and cavalier drunks still live out Gone with the Wind, but not one elicits empathy. Even Ellen Burstyn cannot overcome tin-ear dialogue as Miss Addie, the aunt seeing and dispensing truth though deprived of the opium that got her through in Hong Kong and begging for release from “this chamber of horrors” life.

Inhabited by catty young women and dry-as-dust older ones in pastels, this world is not congenial to vamp-lipsticked, dark- or bright-dressed Fisher Willow (Bryce Dallas Howard), needing the man who can appreciate and tame her.

Humorless even in a Tweedledum and Tweedledee pair, the syrupy snoots are odious, but, brassy and spoiled, the heroine has a short fuse and rubs others’ faces in her “heiress to two fortunes.” Acquired unpopularity has grown since daddy (Marco St. John) -- a non-presence apart from a glowing cigar and full-length Southern planter portrait -- had a bothersome levee blown up, resulting in the drowning of two white men.

To upset hypocritical Aunt Cornelia (Ann-Margaret), Fisher asks, or commandeers, father’s drunken commissary overseer’s (Will Patton, as James Dobyne) son to squire her to two or three weekly “agonizing parties.” Poor now but grandson of a governor and once headed for Ole Miss, Jimmy Dobyne V (Chris Evans) is all steely-eyed, morally upright, conscious of being bought and paid for, and worried about his catatonic institutionalized mother (Barbara Garrick). Squeaky clean in work duds and spotless white undershirt, he balks at undressing in front of his paying date but has no such delicacy regarding black maid Susie (Carol Sutton).

SPOILER ALERT

In her yellow roadster parked overlooking an impossible romantic Mississippi, Fisher falls for Jimmy. However, her behavior, ego, tantrums, and tales of noble Italian aspirants are hard to swallow.

Wearing $10,000 in the title earrings wheedled out of surprisingly compliant Cornelia, Fisher loses one at a Halloween gala thrown by her one college friend, Julie (Mamie Gummer). Though the young party-goers have trouble spiking the punch under the watchful eyes of the hostess’ mother, there are hip flasks to go around but not enough worthy men.

Even if a lowly Kresge clerk, Julie’s cousin Lavinia “Vinnie” McCorkle (Jessica Collins) has attracted the attentions of bankers. But she responds only to Jimmy, who is already angered by a misunderstanding about the missing jewelry. In a bizarre collage of a bonfire and gypsy dancer (Natalia Payne), holiday masks, the old kissing game of Post Office, rear-seat groping, and a tearful Fisher crescendoing Liszt on a candle-topped piano, Vinnie coaxes Jimmy into her favors and secret discovery.

As writer and as man, Williams could be as whining and hysterical as he was moving and fragile. At his best as well as the not-so-good, his Southern Gothics are lonely frightened outsiders, vulnerable like their creator. Those of LTD are simply lifeless and obvious. Far from advertised “lush, poetic language,” the film’s dialogue is pancake flat, including verbal sparring. At one time, the script was intended for Elia Kazan; the who, how and why of that failure of realization are lost, but perhaps, with madness in his family and himself entering psychoanalysis, Williams still had the clarity of wisdom to “lose” the work. As historian Samuel Eliot Morison remarked in another context, “when discovered it was not wanted.” 

(Released by Paladin and Constellation Entertainment; rated “PG-13” for some sexuality and drug content.)