The Fugitive Kind

Valentine Xavier is a drifter carrying a guitar and a snakeskin jacket. He gets into trouble in New Orleans and leaves town. He arrives at a small place in Mississippi and finds work in a store there. The owner is dying and his wife Lady runs it alone. Lady's account with her husband is not closed; this town is behind what happened to her family years ago. Valentine stays. The town watches him. There is also the sheriff's wife and a young woman; neither wants him to go. Sidney Lumet directs. Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward are in the cast. The source is Tennessee Williams's play Orpheus Descending. Brando was paid a million dollars for the film; it was cited as the highest fee paid to an actor for a single picture to that date. Relations on set were tense; Brando's and Magnani's ways of working did not match, a detail that recurs in accounts of the period. The film did not succeed commercially on release and its standing rose later. The matter it treats is how a closed community marks the person who comes from outside. Boris Kaufman's black and white photography is its strongest side. Its limit is register; the levels of performance differ and the stage text does not fully settle into cinema. Who it is for: viewers who like Tennessee Williams adaptations and Brando. Who it is not for: it is heavy, loaded with talk, and the ending hard.