Thursday, April 29, 2010

The Fugitive Kind


The Fugitive Kind is an antique masterpiece.

Adapted for the screen by Meade Roberts and Tennessee Williams from Williams' play, Orpheus Descending, it's an oldie from 1959.

Watching it on DVD has been a searing, consuming, unforgettable experience.  Parts were so affecting that I watched them again and again.  The brilliance of the performances can't be overstated.  Finally, I've seen Marlon Brando at the peak of his talent and can fully understand the acclaim he's accorded.  Anna Magnani was spellbinding, perfect for her difficult role.  She and Brando are this film.

A young Joanne Woodward has a showy, perhaps overplayed role of near madness, a Tennessee Williams staple.  Victor Jory is malevolently perfect, and Maureen Stapleton is memorable in her small role of then-atypical kindness and compassion.   

Anyone reading this will rightly conclude that I'm old (in body, not in mind, I hope), and I readily admit that this film probably won't interest you unless you're of a certain age, or are a film buff.  The time and morality that is its backdrop will be emotionally unknown to anyone young, but it is a perfectly crafted window into another time and societal place, one that was rigid, cruel and judgmental; one I grew up in.

The film begins with the arrival of Brando's quiet, guitar-carrying character in a small, insular town.  He finds employment, reluctantly forms or is drawn into relationships, and ultimately unleashes powerful, cataclysmic forces.

The stories - for really, there are several - evolve in undulating, entwined layers which are striking in their depiction of complex human emotion.  The abundance of interrelated themes, woven subtly into the narrative, move me still.  You see, the film depicts a time when females were "owned" - oh, not as overtly as in horrific slavery -but in effect, just the same - we were possessions.  It began for females with our parents; then, as we grew older, it became a collective communal thing until marriage when husbands took up the bonds.  Morality and social convention were absolute and vicious.  Women, blacks, natives, minorities, Jews, outsiders - we were all kept in our place and God help those who dared overstep.  Brutality, both emotional and physical, was entrenched, even celebrated.  Unimaginably cruel things were said and done then, even within families.

Tennessee Williams' brilliance has always been in his ability to see and reflect the suffocating confinement, delusion, hypocrisy and complexity of human personalities living within those times.  No one presents the myriad aspects of human emotion better or more courageously - even in their stark ugliness - than Tennessee Williams; and all were in play in this film.

The Brando we see here is a beautiful man blessed with sensual magnetism and charisma that defies description.  His character is quiet, yet commands the screen.  He is Williams' Orpheus.

The Illustrated Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology describes Orpheus as a musician of such power and sweetness that even the wild creatures would gather to listen to him. ... He is best known for his visit to Hades, when he tried to recover his dead wife [Eurydice] from the shades. ... His music, and his grief, so touched Persephone that she pleaded with her grim consort on his behalf, and Hades agreed to let Erydice return to earth.  But he made the condition that Orpheus must believe that Eurydice followed him - and not look back.  But in his agony of uncertainty that Eurydice really was following him Orpheus did look back, and saw her slip away from him forever.


The Fugitive Kind is powerful, quiet filmmaking from a more restrained era.
An early brief sequence, non-visual, exemplifies the now-abandoned cinematic art of evoking deep emotion without graphic depiction.  The mind alone can create a powerful image.

There is raw emotional truth here, in addition to a profoundly engaging and timeless story.  It dwells in my mind and memory as no other movie ever has.


Update - May 24, 2010

Although I viewed this film on a bare-bones DVD, Criterion restored and released it as a Special Edition, Double-DVD set this April, 2010. 
http://www.criterion.com/films/17998-the-fugitive-kind

and here's a must-read essay on it by David Thomson:
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1449-the-fugitive-kind-when-sidney-went-to-tennessee


ADDENDUM - September 23, 2011

Found a 1965 book titled Tennessee Williams and Friends, An Informal Biography, at a flea market.  It was written by Gilbert Maxwell, a writer-friend who says this, among other things, in his Foreword:

With Tennessee and me, however, time and talk were to form a relationship rooted in something far deeper than the circumstance of our having mutual old friends from down home--for we were to find there was an eerie likeness in our family backgrounds, as well as in certain events of our childhood.
From the dust jacket:

This book is unique:  a series of recollections -- immediate, palpable, human -- by a writer who has known Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Tennessee Williams since the very beginning of his career.  It is a fellow author's personal and highly sensitive portrait of the most successful and controversial playwright of our time.

Following is the second-last chapter of the book.  I reproduce it here for devotees of Williams' work, and to hopefully entice the unfamiliar into exploring it.
      
Now (as I have said before) though it has not been my intention to criticize or discuss the work of Tennessee Williams in these memoirs, I feel impelled to state his message as it has come across, personally, to me.

In his plays and stories he has repeatedly used as a theme the unjust cruelty of man toward his fellows because he has been haunted, first, by nightmarish fears that his sister may have been subjected to harsh and terrible treatment in sanitoriums, and secondly because, obsessed with a fearful revulsion at the thought of deliberate cruelty (Blanche du Bois speaks of it as "the one unforgivable thing"), he has been impelled to face it unflinching as he has grown older, and consequently to cry out in the loud voice of a possessed reformer against it. In portraying scenes of abominable, outrageous beastliness, he has been fighting fire with fire; and surely with such a motive, he has been justified in shocking the prudish, the hypocritical, the stubbornly blind or misunderstanding members of his audiences--at least for a space of three hours--out of their habitual apathy, their acceptance of intolerable things as they are in the world today.

It will probably be true, of course, that the majority to whom he cries out will be disturbed for no more than a matter of hours, but there is also, always, the hope that some few may have heard and heeded what he has had to say. He has tried to drive home his basic message, as in "Orpheus Descending", by such devices as posses of bigoted men mobbing an innocent victim with blowtorches and blood hounds, and with gossiping, ignorant women destroying a man or a woman's character; with a wretched neurotic (Blanche du Bois) paying all her life for having, with one awful accusation, driven her young husband to suicide; with the police in "Camino Real" attacking homosexuals and the street cleaners trundling them out in ash cans; with self-righteous, corrupt, powerful, small-town citizens castrating a simple, mixed-up boy in "Sweet Bird of Youth"; with the naked, starving children devouring the corrupt poet Sebastian in "Suddenly Last Summer".


He has done all this--and more--and he has never done it to be sensational, to shock the good citizen or, through flamboyance, to become notorious, famous, or rich. He has done it because he was impelled to shout (and let the damned chips fall where they may) to a selfish, self-centered, materialistic audience of millions everywhere, "This is your world, and here is what happens within it each hour that you live, going deaf, dumb, and blind about your personal affairs, self imprisoned in your own thick skins. This is your world, which you made, so now, if not for the sake of that kind, omniscient God you no longer believe in, at least for your own sake, try to do something about it.

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