BY BRIAN GREENE
Tennesee Williams’s play Orpheus Descending stands out
among his works for being a flop at a time when the playwright could seem to do
no wrong. The seemingly unstoppable commercial and critical success Williams
had enjoyed for more than a decade came to a momentary halt when Orpheus
Descending tanked on Broadway in 1957. Despite the unexpected failure of the
stage production of the play, however, a few years later plans were made to
turn the story into a major motion picture, with up-and-coming director Sidney
Lumet behind the camera, and acting luminaries Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, and
Joanne Woodward playing key roles. Williams, who’d been working on various
versions of the play for close to 20 years, was so thrilled by this development
that he signed on to co-write the screenplay.
But Williams’s beloved tale just seemed to be doomed.
Despite his reputation as a writer, and despite the high quality of the
personnel involved in the creation of the movie, 1960’s The Fugitive Kind was a
box office disaster and a feature not generally loved by film critics of the
time. Why? With Criterion Collection issuing a new, deluxe version of the film,
it’s an opportune moment to explore whether Williams’s tale just wasn’t right
for the big screen, or if moviegoers and critical experts got things wrong in
assessing The Fugitive Kind’s merits.
Like Williams’s play, the movie is set in America’s deep
South, and largely in a dry goods store. Also like Orpheus Descending, The
Fugitive Kind revolves around three social outsiders and how they relate to the
rank and file locals, as well as to one another. Brando is Valentine “Valâ€
Xavier, a snakeskin jacket-wearing, guitar-slinging drifter who winds up in the
town by chance. Val has just turned 30 and he’s a good looking, sullen man who
is irresistible to women, oftentimes to his own dismay, and who just always
seems to find trouble for himself. Val has grown tired of the nightclubbing,
stud for hire lifestyle he’s been leading since he was a teenager and is
looking to settle down. Woodward portrays Carol Cutrere, born and bred in the
small town, and from an upper crust family, but at odds with the other
citizens, and her own kin, because of her hard-drinking, hard-living,
freewheeling and lawless lifestyle. Magnani plays Lady Torrance, whose husband
owns the dry goods and store and who is running the shop while her spouse is
laid up with a potentially fatal health problem. Lady is unhappy in her
marriage and has suicidal thoughts. Also, she’s a woman who’s deeply embittered
about the fact that the small-minded, bigoted locals burned down her late
father’s wine garden because he committed what they saw as an unforgivable sin:
he served black people at his establishment. Lady suspects certain townsfolk of
being responsible for the destruction of the wine garden and for the death of
her father, who died while fighting the fire; and her own estranged husband is among
those she believes were the culprits.
Lady hires Val to clerk at the mercantile store. She is
drawn to him emotionally and physically, and they become involved with each
other, despite the fact that Lady’s ailing, mean-spirited husband is generally
just one floor away from them, in his sick bed in the couple’s living quarters
above the shop. Carol wants Val, too, but he tells her she’s just the kind of
wild child he wants to avoid getting involved with from then on, plus she is
basically banned from showing her face in the town. All the locals keep a close
watch on Val and, not surprisingly, the men folk aren’t overly fond of the
homme fatale and the kinds of responses he tends to draw from women who
encounter him. As Val begins living at the store and spending more and more
time with Lady, as Lady makes plans to re-open a confectionery that she sees as
the rebirth of the spirit of her late father’s wine garden, as Carol continues
to show up and try to drag Val off to a life on the road with her, and as the
townsfolk watch all of this happening, a climax that we’ve seen coming and that
can’t be anything but destructive, is closing in all the time.
Many of the film’s key lines and speeches are straight
out of Williams’s play. One way The Fugitive Kind differs from Orpheus
Descending, though, is in the scenes that are set outside of the shop, as when
Carol takes Val to a roadhouse for some “juking,†and when Lady takes him to
the site of her departed dad’s old wine garden. In both versions, an important
side role is that of Vee Talbott, the sheriff’s wife and one of the few good-natured
townspeople, who also happens to be a visionary artist. Maureen Stapleton, who plays
that part in the film, acted as Lady Torrance in the failed stage version.
In his essay for the booklet in the Criterion edition of The
Fugitive Kind, film historian David Thomson champions the feature, going as far
as to say it’s “one of the best films made from Williams’s material.†Other
critics have showered (well, more like sprinkled, actually) praise on the film,
while not assigning it the kind of status that Thomson did. But other experts
haven’t liked it at all. In the Variety review that appeared at the time of the
movie’s release, it’s written that The Fugitive Kind “sputters more often than
it sizzles,†and the unnamed reviewer is critical of both Brando’s and
Woodward’s performances, while deigning to show a little faint praise for
Magnani’s acting in the picture. Other reviews one can dig up, both old and
new, are fairly evenly mixed.
There’s definitely a downbeat mood to the feature. It’s
been reported in various places that it was an unhappy shoot. Brando apparently
didn’t get along well with either of the two female leads, and meanwhile he was
engaged in a bitter child custody suit, also preoccupied with his debut
directorial effort, One-Eyed Jacks. Magnani, in her early 50s at the time, was
reportedly self-conscious about her fading looks and painfully aware of being
in Brando’s shadow when it came to being photogenic. Nobody can credibly aver
that Brando as Val Xavier has the kind of screen presence he did as Stanley
Kowalski in the film adaptation of Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951);
ditto Magnani when you compare her performance in this title versus that in the
movie version of Williams’s The Rose Tattoo (1955). But, in fairness to the
actors and to the film, their roles in The Fugitive Kind are meant to be more
subdued than their parts in those other titles. Remember that Val Xavier is a
guy who’s had enough excitement in his life for the time being and is looking
to lead a comparatively calm, stable existence now. And Lady Torrance is an
unhappily married woman still grieving over the bitter-making death of her
father. Anyway, any viewer who has an issue with the bleakness around their
characters can surely find some relief in the electricity surrounding Woodward
in how she played the live fast/die young hellcat Carol Cutrere.
My personal opinion is that I can’t agree with Thomson’s
high placement of The Fugitive Kind in comparison to the other film adaptations
of Tennessee Williams’s plays, yet I find plenty to appreciate in the title.
The characters just aren’t as memorable, the drama not as compelling, as in the
two features mentioned above, or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Night of the
Iguana (1961), or The Sweet Bird of Youth (1962). But the characters in The
Fugitive Kind are all believable, and their complexes get at some elemental,
difficult truths in human nature. Vintage Tennessee Williams conflicts, like
individuality versus conformity, affairs of the heart clashing with the drab
meanness of everyday living, and the corrosive nature of petty, herd mentality bigotry,
all play out in ways that stretch the brain and pull at the heart.
The transfer of this edition is of the same high quality
we can always expect from Criterion. In addition to Thomson’s booklet, the
bonus features include a highly illuminating interview Lumet did especially for
Criterion in 2010; he discusses why he loved working from Tennessee Williams’s
material, and how difficult (yet ultimately fulfilling) it was to shoot The
Fugitive Kind. There’s also a program in which the two authors of the book
Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America, discuss
Williams’s relationship with the movie industry, with some focus on The
Fugitive Kind. Finally, there’s a 1958 episode of the Kraft Theater Presents TV
show in which Lumet directed versions of a trio of William’s lesser-known
plays. The material is not among William’s finest work, yet it’s interesting to
see an earlier example of Lumet directing from Tennessee’s plays, and there are
strong acting performances from the likes of Ben Gazzara and Lee Grant.
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