Sidney Lumet (1960)
It seems to be a mark of how high Tennessee Williams’s stock was in Hollywood at the time that this became a film at all. The play on which it’s based hadn’t been successful on stage, in either in its original form (Battle of Angels (1940)) or its more recent incarnation (Orpheus Descending (1957)). But the Williams adaptation industry was at its peak at the turn of the decade from the 50s to the 60s. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) was followed by Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). In the year after The Fugitive Kind was released came Summer and Smoke and The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (based on a novella rather than a play), with Sweet Bird of Youth only a few months later. The Fugitive Kind, in spite of the source’s track record, attracted Brando, two actresses who, like him, had won an Oscar within the previous five years, and Sidney Lumet, coming off a critical success with 12 Angry Men. The material didn’t, however, change its spots for the screen and the picture was a flop at the box office and with critics.
The Fugitive Kind is an unhappy marriage of Greek myth and Southern Gothic. The way in which Williams (who co-wrote the screenplay with Meade Roberts) hitches the familiar vicious aspects of Southern macho mentality onto a mythic framework is less lively here than in the schematically similar, no less unconvincing but more exuberantly florid Sweet Bird of Youth. As in that play, Williams’s work in creating characters seems to be largely concentrated on the middle-aged woman attracted to a younger man. Also as in Sweet Bird, local men who are both physically and spiritually ugly threaten and try to destroy a male protagonist who is not only conspicuously handsome but, in spite of character flaws, morally superior to his enemies too. (In both pieces, this hero never comes to life convincingly.) Given the cast he was working with, Lumet’s mistake in thinking the actors would find depth and truth in their characters was forgivable. It’s a bad mistake, even so. Apart from Brando’s opening (pre-titles) monologue and his first scene, when he arrives in the small Southern town to which he’s travelled, the picture – in spite of the melodramatic situations and the over-coloured dialogue – mostly moves at a snail’s pace: Lumet seems to think that if he keeps the camera on the leads they’re bound to strike gold sooner or later. At this distance in time, you’re naturally grateful that the film provides a record of performances by major actors, but that’s because of who they were rather than what they do here.
Brando’s dissatisfaction with, even contempt for, his art (or screen acting anyway) has often been quoted and this looks like an expression of it. His Valentine ‘Snakeskin’ Xavier is one of his least interesting performances – less interesting to me than what he does with roles in material (like Sayonara) that has much less artistic ambition than this. The disappointment certainly isn’t predictable from the start. In a court appearance, Xavier answers the questions of a judge (whom we never see) and says that he’ll be leaving New Orleans, never to return. Brando, with his unique blend of reality and mystery, draws you in. You immediately want more of the character but you never get it. There’s no connection between the man Brando suggests in this first scene and later in the story, in which the actor seems to be gradually losing interest. By the end of the film, its opening sequence is even more striking – but only because it seems clear this was the one part of the material that truly engaged Brando. The character of Xavier is very weakly developed: he has a guitar for Orpheus’s lyre but to very little effect – except when Brando briefly, pleasingly sings a few lines as he plays the instrument in the back of a car. It’s hard, therefore, to say that Brando wasn’t the best man for the role: he was probably the only actor around who might convincingly have animated a piece of symbolism at the same time as he created a human being. But it seems he doesn’t want to know.
As ‘Lady’ Torrance, the older woman, Anna Magnani is prepared to give herself more fully to her role than Brando. Magnani’s performance is sometimes compelling and often enjoyable, although the emotional intensity she brings to bear is often too much and occasionally ridiculous. Her accent gives the Southern locutions an unusual spin (although she’s required to say ‘the gala opening of the confectionery’ several times too often). Most of the action takes place in and around the Torrances’ general store – which, even in the anonymous little town where the story is set, seems to attract remarkably little custom. Lady has a presumably symbolic dream of branching out to open a confectionery (sweet things) among the piles of unbeautiful goods that surround her; and the story leads up to the store’s conflagration – brought about by Lady’s husband (an invalid but a robustly evil one, played by Victor Jory with too much nasty relish) – just as its opening is about to get under way. (It turns out the husband and his cronies, years before, burned down Lady’s father’s wine store/garden because he was serving ‘liquor to niggers’.) The ludicrously exaggerated elaborateness and prettiness of the confectionery’s design left me wondering whether a confectionery means something much more exotic than a sweet shop in the American South.
Joanne Woodward, having recently won the Academy Award for playing a woman with a multiple personality disorder (The Three Faces of Eve), may have seemed a natural for the garishly eccentric Carol Cutrere. Actually, Woodward is so naturally sane that she seems miscast when the craziness of the character is as shallow as it is here and she has to strain for it. (She’s also very weirdly dressed and ends up looking like a neurasthenic Valkyrie.) Maureen Stapleton had played the part of Lady Torrance in the original stage production of Orpheus Descending; since she’d also lost the lead to Magnani in the stage-to-screen adaptation of The Rose Tattoo, Stapleton showed considerable professional generosity in signing up here for the part of the sheriff’s wife, Vee Talbot. It was worth it for her opening scene with Brando, in which Stapleton shows a fine and eccentric mixture of nosey eagerness and apprehension, but, to add injury to insult, Vee’s time on screen is crudely reduced to even less than the part was to start with. She goes suddenly and unaccountably blind and is in the street shouting, ‘I can’t see, I can’t see’. And that’s the last we see (or hear) of her.
25 November 2008
