THE FUGITIVE KIND (1960)

This film opens with a long single take of Valentine Xavier (Marlon Brando) in a courtroom explaining himself to a judge as he is about to be kicked out of New Orleans for some kind of unsavory behavior, perhaps in a whorehouse, though he claims he's just a relatively innocent guitar player. He does admit that turning thirty might be a good time to change his life, and he leaves the city, winding up on a stormy night in a small Mississippi town. Vee Talbot (Maureen Stapleton), the sheriff's wife, a woman with an artistic bent who seems a bit smothered by her husband, takes pity on him and lets him sleep in a jail cell. Next day, he's given a job at the general store, owned by the sickly Jabe Torrance (Victory Jory) and run by his younger wife, an Italian immigrant known as Lady (Anna Magnani). Jabe, returning home after a hospital stay to face a slow invalid decline covered in "death sweat," is still a mighty mean bastard, and Lady takes a liking to sexy Val. So does blond floozy Carol (Joanne Woodward), who thinks she remembers Val from New Orleans. And Vee still has a soft spot for him. But the town's menfolk aren't as happy to have him around, seeing him as a disruptive force. Eventually, Val and Lady have an affair and we discover that Lady's father, who owned a wine garden, died in a fire set by townspeople because he was selling wine to Black customers. Lady's dream is to open her own little sweet shop, and Val helps her put it together behind the general store. But things come to a head when 1) Lady winds up pregnant from Val, and 2) a jealous Jabe lets slip that he was an active participant in the fire that killed Lady's father. No happy endings are in store here.

We're in Tennessee Williams' Southern gothic territory here (based on his play Orpheus Descending), but overall this is not as engrossing as Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The biggest problem is the character of Valentine Xavier. He is supposed to be a wild partier, a member of the "fugitive kind," as the title would have it, but Brando underplays the part so much, he comes off as a rather tender, passive guy who reacts and observes more than takes direct action. I actually like his performance here (though it's a bit weird how much he sounds like Vito Corleone, especially in the opening scene) but the situations that swirl around him aren't terribly compelling. Magnani, with her heightened and artificial performance, acts like she's in a different movie, and for me, she and Brando have little chemistry. (Supposedly while making the movie, she had the hots for Brando but he didn't reciprocate.) Woodward, normally a spot-on actress, also overdoes the sleaziness of her character, and Stapleton, after giving a strong performance in the first 20 minutes, mostly vanishes from the story except for a strange moment near the end where she apparently suffers from hysterical blindness—it's an incident that seems to be present only to give the sheriff a reason to try and toss Val out of town. Jory is great as an intensely unlikable character. This odd movie is both overheated and underdone. Good line: when Val tells the sheriff that he is not a wanted man, the sheriff (R.G. Armstrong) replies, "Good lookin' boy like you is always wanted." Pictured are Brando and Magnani. [DVD]