Main Cast: Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward, Maureen Stapleton, Victor Jory
Release Year: 1960
Country: US
Run Time: 122 minutes
Plot
Fugitive Kind began life as Battle of Angels, a never-produced 1939 play by a young Tennessee Williams. Nearly 20 years later, Williams refined this rough-hewn theatrical effort into Orpheus Descending, which enjoyed a respectable Broadway run. The renamed film version stars Marlon Brando as Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier, a trouble-prone drifter who wanders into a deliciously Williamsesque Mississippi town. Here he becomes involved in the problems of alcoholic Carole Cutrere (Joanne Woodward) and unhappily married Lady Torrence (Anna Magnani) and also runs afoul of Torrence's vicious husband (Victor Jory). Sexual symbolism abounds in this tempestuous drama, which offers Brando at his most inscrutable and Magnani at her earthiest. Maureen Stapleton, in real life one of Brando's best friends and severest critics, plays an avant-garde artist. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
The Fugitive Kind finds Marlon Brando at his slush-mouthed best, in a landscape that's pure Tennessee Williams -- appropriate, since the celebrated playwright wrote the screenplay. Three years after his breakthrough direction of Twelve Angry Men (1957), Sidney Lumet helms this involving tale of a reforming petty criminal (Brando) who quickly runs afoul of the local citizenry in rural Mississippi, in spite of his best efforts to abide by the law. In the course of spouting world-weary poetic blither, Brando's Xavier Valentine catches the attention of a crass wild child (Joanne Woodward) and a repressed convenience store owner (Anna Magnani). The Fugitive Kind confounds expectations by exploring a romantic relationship between Brando and the older Magnani, rather than the blonde, age-appropriate Woodward; though true to form for Brando characters, the relationship is all argument verging on fisticuffs. Magnani's performance is the soul of the picture, as her character's years of self-abnegating emotional baggage come to the fore with tortured immediacy. In relatively little screen time, Victory Jory plumbs the depths of jealousy and racism as Magnani's domineering husband, whose seething dictatorship over his dominion far outstretches the fragility of his bedridden body. The Fugitive Kind may be a lesser picture in the careers of those involved, but that's more an indication of the richness of those careers than a knock on this worthy morality play. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide
R.G. Armstrong - Sheriff Talbott; Emory Richardson - Uncle Pleasant; Sally Gracie - Dolly Hamma; Lucille Benson - Beulah Binnings; John Baragrey - David Cutrere; Ben Yaffee - Dog Hamma; Jeanne Barr; Frank Bergman - Gas Station Attendant; Mary Perry; Madame Spivy - Ruby Lightfoot; Joe Brown, Jr. - Pee Wee Binnings
Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier, a guitar-playing drifter, flees New Orleans in order to avoid arrest. He finds work in a small-town five-and-dime owned by an embittered older woman known as Lady Torrence, whose vicious husband Jabe lies on his deathbed in their apartment above the store. Both alcoholicnymphomaniac Carol Cutrere and simple housewife Vee Talbott set their sights on the newcomer, but Val succumbs to the charms of Lady, who plans to set him up with a refreshment bar. Sheriff Talbott, a friend of Jabe, threatens to kill Val if he remains in town, but he chooses to stay when he discovers Lady is pregnant. His decision sparks Jabe's jealousy and leads to tragic consequences.
In his review in the New York Times, Bosley Crowther described the film as a "piercing account of loneliness and disappointment in a crass and tyrannical world . . . [Sidney Lumet's] plainly perceptive understanding of the deep-running skills of the two stars, his daring with faces in close-up and his out-right audacity in pacing his film at a morbid tempo that lets time drag and passions slowly shape are responsible for much of the insistence and the mesmeric quality that emerge . . . Mr. Brando and Miss Magnani . . . being fine and intelligent performers . . . play upon deep emotional chords . . . Miss Woodward is perhaps a bit too florid for full credibility . . . But Miss Stapleton's housewife is touching and Victor Jory is simply superb as the inhuman, sadistic husband . . . An excellent musical score by Kenyon Hopkins, laced with crystalline sounds and guitar strains, enhances the mood of sadness in this sensitive film."[1]
In the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum observed, "Unfortunately, director Sidney Lumet, who's often out of his element when he leaves New York, seems positively baffled by the gothic south and doesn't know quite what to do with the overlay of Greek myth either."[2]
The Time Out London Film Guide feels that "despite its stellar credentials, just about everything is wrong with this adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play Orpheus Descending . . . Lumet's direction is either ponderous or pretentious, and he failed to crack the problem of the florid stage dialogue and a dangerously weak role for Brando,"[3] and Channel 4 describes it as "a less than satisfying experience . . . disappointing stuff."[4]
