The Fugitive Kind: When Sidney Went to Tennessee
In the late 1940s, driven by the opening-night ovations for A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams embarked on more than a decade of immense success. During this period, he wrote at a furious pace: Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Night of the Iguana—a list that carries us from 1948 to 1961, with motion pictures made of everything except Camino Real, and one screen original, Baby Doll. Yet despite his triumphs, nothing could shake his inner certainty—call it dread—that he deserved disaster and ignominy. (Those things would come, if he was patient.)
Over and above the reviews and praise, this was also the era in which Williams became a rich man, a household name, and the apparent owner of a gothic, nightmarish South (which coincided, oddly, with the dawning of the civil rights movement). He was attended to, he was given prizes, he was esteemed, no matter that onstage he had a brave instinct for depicting fineness and creative passion as fugitive urges hounded and destroyed by an unkind world. And so the more Blanche DuBois was led away, the more securely “Tennessee” existed. But in that halcyon period, Orpheus Descending was the one portent of fall and dismay to which Williams clung. So it is the distress signal that may still alert us to one of the best films made from Williams’s material—The Fugitive Kind.
It was in 1940, in New York, that Williams, not quite thirty, had written a play called Battle of Angels, the outline of which is very close to that of Orpheus Descending and The Fugitive Kind: a small Mississippi town; a storekeeper dying of cancer; his frustrated wife, Myra; a roaming visitor to the town, Val Xavier; a love affair between Val and Myra; and a mob that murders Val for the threat of life he brings. The Theatre Guild elected to produce the play, with movie actress Miriam Hopkins as Myra. Williams was not happy with his own text; he was not happy with anything. The play went to Boston first, where, despite some good reviews, it closed because of local fears of indecency and the guild’s belief that it was not working. The production never reached New York.
Over the next seventeen years, during the riot of his success, Williams returned to the play time and again, and eventually renamed it Orpheus Descending; he now employed the Orpheus myth to stand for the angelic Val’s fall to earth in a shabby town. It was Williams’s hope that Anna Magnani would play the wife. He had met her in Italy in the early fifties and been swept away by her impulsiveness. In his Memoirs, he would write, “I often wonder how Anna Magnani managed to live within society and yet to remain so free of its conventions.”
The Fugitive Kind is not
talked about too much today, but it was a big production for its time.
To start with, Brando had won a contract of one million dollars to do
the picture. Next, the teaming with Magnani was hailed as a bold
chemical experiment—though the talk only made Magnani more nervous. As
for Brando, his life was full of troubles: he had a bitter child
custody suit pending with his wife, Anna Kashfi. As a further
distraction, he had to fly back to Los Angeles from the East Coast on
weekends to help with postproduction on what would prove to be his only
directorial effort, One-Eyed Jacks.
It was not a happy
shoot. At the first read-through, the lead actors lost all confidence
and started whispering their bold lines so they couldn’t be heard.
Rumors had it that Magnani (fifty-one at the time) assumed in advance
that there would be a sexual encounter with Brando (thirty-six), and
when that failed to materialize, she became aggressive and insecure;
and that Brando believed she refrained from washing to goad him.
Magnani felt that her costar was lovelier than she could ever be, it
was said, so she resorted to wearing scarves on her head and begged
Kaufman for a softer look—something he was opposed to in a doctrinaire
way, for he was the brother of Soviet director Denis Kaufman (a.k.a.
Dziga Vertov) and the trusted eye of Jean Vigo, the great French
director (L’atalante).
The location was Milton, New York,
up the Hudson near Poughkeepsie, but the small town was mobbed with
kids, eager for a glimpse of Brando. He and Joanne Woodward did not get
along, for reasons never made clear. And there was a further problem:
Maureen Stapleton—the star of the stage production—had been offered the
supporting role of Vee Talbot in the film, so Magnani had to work
under the eye of the role’s expert. According to Brando biographer
Peter Manso, Williams would ask Stapleton how they had done a thing
onstage, and the good-natured actress would admit tactfully, “You know,
I can’t remember, Ten.” On one occasion, in a scene with Brando, as he
paused without quite cuing her, Stapleton said, “Marlon, you’re a
genius, I’m not. While you’re waiting, I don’t know what to do.”
Meanwhile, Lumet noted, Brando would test him early on by offering two
takes of each scene—one okay, technically exact; one untidy but
heartfelt, brilliant—and waiting to see which way the director would
go.
In the end, Lumet (still a novice) won Brando’s trust. There
was a challenging scene, Val’s bird monologue, that entailed unusual
difficulties. In his book Making Movies, Lumet recounts the two
and a half hours they spent on it, the repeated problem Brando had
remembering his lines, and the technical obstacles. It was 5:30. They
went into overtime. “We could break,” said Lumet, “and nail it tomorrow,
but I feel you need to get it tonight.” Brando agreed. They worked on
until, finally, the shot was delivered.
But movies are not just the
sum of the stories that can be told about their shooting. The Fugitive
Kind
was unlike other films, and it was something Lumet had never tried
before: a portrait of small-town meanness in which the outward action
was to be fired by internal demons. In that sense, it was not too far
from the wasteland of Psycho, which was filmed at the same time.
Is
Psycho a crime story from local papers (like In Cold Blood) or is it a
movie that stirs at dysfunction in America? In the same spirit, The
Fugitive Kind is true to the stark paranoia in Williams, minus the lush
color and starry glory that marked the films of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and Sweet Bird of Youth. Those hit movies look so much less now than
Streetcar, Baby Doll, and The Fugitive Kind.
This is a mood picture, where, if you pay close attention, you can feel
the lights come up and fade away to match the eloquence of the
speeches. You can see the decor giving an emotional or spiritual force
to the text. And you begin to hear Brando’s shy lyricism rising in the
long speeches—this Orpheus in a snakeskin jacket sings. Woodward gives
one of the least guarded performances of her odd career. And Magnani
looks like a great sensualist terrified of getting her last chance.
There’s no question that Magnani could do too much, but Lumet restrains
her here and urges his cameraman to trust her tragic face and wounded
voice. It was not often in this era that an actress shared the screen
with Brando—so many were erased by his light. Lumet began by using
markedly different lenses on the two leads, but as the film progressed,
he let Magnani have more and more long-lens close-ups to match
Brando’s. And so we feel their relationship growing in the most natural
way.
No one went to see the movie in 1960. It got no
nominations at Oscar time. It lost a fortune. But it may be one of the
most intriguing Tennessee Williams pictures, in that we are asked to
weigh and consider the faults of its provincial society. It is about
time we yielded our trust in box office, the Academy, and journalistic
critics as measures of quality. We have to see the pictures for
ourselves. In which case, it’s natural enough to notice that
The Fugitive Kind is only two films before Lumet’s Long Day’s Journey
into Night, another study of the light fading in a small town.
This piece was originally written for the Criterion Collection in 2010.
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