The Fugitive Kind (Sidney Lumet, 1960)

I saw this eons ago and thought it lacked the fire of the more storied Tennessee Williams film adaptations. Seen recently, it gives off the sickeningly sweet stench of my favorite genre, the film maudit. Anna Magnani plays Lady Torrance, a role originated by Maureen Stapleton on Broadway under the title Orpheus Descending who, in a smaller role here, seems shipped in from a more even-keeled film. Magnani doesn't disguise her accent as the owner of a rundown shop in Mississippi so she comes across as much of an outsider as hunky, moody drifter Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier (Marlon Brando) who improbably falls for Lady. Not much happens. Lady Torrance's big goal is to open a "ladies confectionery" (aka ice cream shop) in the back of her store. And...that's kind of it. Any narrative beats are mere nodes around which the principals brood and seethe. And if you can figure out what on earth Joanne Woodward is doing in this thing, you're one up on me. As the "libertine" (or so Wiki says) Carol Cutrere, she sports Cleopatra eyeliner and a raincoat, playing someone who just might have returned from an afternoon sexploitation screening. She hangs with Uncle Pleasant, the Conjure Man (Emory Richardson), a black man with wild white hair whose gentle manner suggests he's figured out how to live with his outsider status. It all ends grandiloquently with Lady Torrance ecstatic underneath the flower orgy of her confectionery moments before her jealous, bed-ridden husband Jabe (Victor Jory) torches it to the ground. It's no surprise to learn that in 1994, the source material was turned into a two-act opera by Bruce Saylor and J.D. McClatchy. Bosley Crowther, of all people, nailed the film's agitated, scratchy vibe when he wrote that Lumet's "out-right audacity in pacing his film at a morbid tempo that lets time drag and passions slowly shape [is] responsible for much of the insistence and the mesmeric quality that emerge." The Fugitive Kind was so compelling this time around that I'm clearly overdue to rewatch another Lumet Williams adaptation that left me cold, Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (1970). How did these projects get greenlit?

Grade: A-minus