This Property Is Condemned
Sydney Pollack (1966)
Only the prologue and the epilogue derive from the Tennessee Williams one-act play of the same name. What comes in between is credited to three writers, including Francis (pre-Ford) Coppola. (The others are Fred Coe and Edith Sommer.) Alva Starr is the flirty elder daughter of the hard-as-nails, rancorous landlady of a boarding house in a small Mississippi town in the Depression years. The film is about Alva’s love affair with a new arrival in the town, Owen Legate, a railway ‘efficiency expert’ whose job is to tell railroad workers they’re losing their jobs. The plot is framed by sequences set a few years in the future: Alva’s sister Willie is telling a younger boy the story of what happened. It’s not clear how Willie now spends her days other than in the way we see her at the start: walking along the local railroad track (which looks out over the Starr boarding house – now boarded up, with the condemned property sign on it) and singing a wan little song (written for the film by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, which we hear a bit too often). It’s not clear either how the Willie of the main action – an unruly, tomboyish teenager with a strong streak of resilience – has been reduced to this feyly demented creature, who trips around wearing clothes and jewellery inherited from her elder sister. The older Willie, because she seems a Tennessee Williams archetype, appears to be used in these sequences for purposes of orientation – to signal to the audience that we’re in Williams country. It’s a mark of the success of Coppola and his co-writers in scripting material with a life of its own that the start and end of the picture seem unconvincingly tacked on.
It’s obvious from the above that there are other Williams landmarks – a bitter, dominating mother (Mr Starr went AWOL some years ago), the handsome stranger in town/gentleman caller; although Alva herself seems to be conceived as something earthier than Blanche Dubois, she belongs to the same I-don’t-want-realism-I-want-magic school of thought. The screenplay is skilful – Williams-lite rather than mere pastiche – but the film inevitably depends strongly on the actress in the leading role and watching Natalie Wood as Alva is a lowering experience. This is partly because she’s bad and partly because I felt guilty finding her not just bad but embarrassing. Why guilty? One reason is simply that it seems unkind to think unkindly about someone who was dead at the age of forty-three. (Wood’s early death also gives an unhappy edge to the heavy hints dropped throughout the film that Alva isn’t long for this world.) Another is that Wood isn’t a technically incompetent actress and she’s conscientious in the role – but every gesture and inflection seems so preconceived that the effect is mechanical and shallow.
Although Wood has a lovely face and figure, her moments of nakedness have something of the see-I’m-game-for-anything effect of Julie Andrews baring her breasts in 10 – with the difference that, whereas Andrews had made her name in roles where she really did seem unassailably virginal (not to say asexual), Natalie Wood’s ingénue quality on screen seems another element of her falseness as an actress. She does have a sexual presence. She seems to be not so much unconscious of this (which might be appealing) as simply unable to draw on it in a way that would make her more convincing in a role like this one. Alva is clearly supposed to be hot-blooded, impetuous, a romantic and romancing free spirit. Natalie Wood’s neat, practised acting suggests none of these qualities. They seem to belong much more to Mary Badham, who has a likeable, quirky warmth as the younger sister.
Wood was twenty-eight when she did this film. Robert Redford, in the role of Owen, was two years older but the effect of his presence and acting style, compared with hers, is to make you think Owen is having an affair with an older woman. Redford has always shown an intuitive understanding of how little he needs to project on screen, the confidence to underplay and the ability to suggest a brain behind the face – the tension between his glamour and his miniaturist approach to expressing emotion is an important part of his star quality. His performance here is refreshingly relaxed, compared not only with Wood’s box of tricks but with much of the supporting acting going on around him. Yet you can also see in this role early signs of what has stopped Redford from becoming a major screen actor: it’s a quality of looking after himself, of never giving too much of himself away – as an actor. This quality has served him well when it fuses with the character he’s playing and the central relationship that the film describes, making him all the more magnetically unreachable in two later, bigger Sydney Pollack films – to Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were and to Meryl Streep in Out of Africa. But Redford’s effectiveness on screen has got to rely so much on the emotional temperature and tension of elements in the film other than himself that he has come to seem not so much mysteriously aloof as parasitic.
Three particular moments in Property seem to anticipate his future in front of the camera. First, when Owen arrives asking for a room at the boarding house, Alva’s mother (well played by Kate Reid) asks him, ‘You’re not a vagrant, are you?’ I’m sure this question would have sounded ludicrous even if the well-groomed Redford had never made another picture – but it’s a good deal more ludicrous now: one can rarely remember seeing a hair out of place in the forty years since Property was made. Second, when the entire population of the boarding house – both sexes, all ages – suddenly decide to go skinny-dipping, Alva, who’s already annoyed with Owen, chides him: ‘I suppose you’re not coming – too scared to take your clothes off?’ He replies, ‘No, I’m not coming’ (and Redford delivers the line perfectly – his tone is quietly self-possessed while his face blushes very slightly). Alva’s right to the extent that Robert Redford always does keep his clothes on emotionally. Third, after Alva has followed Owen to New Orleans, she seeks him out then keeps eluding him. We understand why Alva is doing this: she knows her hopes of happiness with Owen are doomed when he finds out what happened the night he left Mississippi. (Alma got drunk, got married to a man her mother thought was her beau but who’s lusting after Alva, and walked out on him and the town the next morning.) But the moment of their reunion is delayed because Owen, having seen her in the street, takes his time. He doesn’t rush to embrace Alva but follows her at a discreet distance, through the streets and into a park. Eventually, we see their reflections on either side of a pond and hear them speak to each other. I couldn’t make sense of Owen’s tentativeness in this scene in the context of the film; yet it seems right, given Redford’s innately watchful, detached temperament as a performer.
This is a long-winded way of saying there’s no chemistry between Natalie Wood and Robert Redford but the fact that they don’t connect – and that, although near contemporaries, they seem a generation apart as screen stars – is actually what fascinated me about the film. It’s well written, competently directed, and an entertaining story but it’s the limitations and ambiguities of the two leads that really engages your attention at this distance in time. This Property Is Condemned features an interesting mixture of big names of the era (and of an earlier era) and of the future – not just Coppola and Redford. This was Sydney Pollack’s second feature as a director; the producer was John Houseman; the cinematographer was James Wong Howe. Charles Bronson plays the one-night-stand husband: it’s plain to see he’s not much of an actor but interesting to find his strong presence in a film of this kind rather than an action picture.
28 November 2008