The Fugitive Kind (1960)
Directed by Sidney Lumet

Film Review

Almost a decade after A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), the film that made him an overnight star, Marlon Brando was coaxed into starring in another film adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, Orpheus Descending.  Retitled The Fugitive Kind, Williams' play offers Brando another superb character role, in the form of the guitar-playing drifter Val Xavier, and the actor doesn't disappoint, turning in another of his hypnotic portrayals of a loner adrift in a world that rejects and disgusts him.  This time Brando is partnered with Anna Magnani, the famous diva of Italian neo-realism, who gives a performance of comparable power as the 'older woman' who is tainted by misfortune and who ends up looking like a refugee from a Greek tragedy.  It is an unlikely pairing but somehow Brando's brooding introspection makes an effective contrast with Magnani's penchant for histrionic self-immolation, and it is hard not to be completely mesmerised by the scenes in which these two legendary actors spark off one another with an intensity and ferocity that almost hurts.

In his direction of the film, Sidney Lumet shows perhaps a little too much reverence towards Williams' original play and, as a result, the film often appears airless and stagy, lacking the vitality and realism that Elia Kazan brought to his adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire.  Some of the performances (most notably Joanne Woodward's) are painfully theatrical and Williams' florid dialogue often cuts against the stark naturalism of Brando and Magnani's performances.   In spite of these obvious shortcomings, The Fugitive Kind is nothing less than riveting, from its lowkey opening courtroom scene (in which the camera is locked on Brando's face) to its utterly devastating conclusion.  With its allusions to racial hatred in the Deep South, the film was highly topical and appears to be chillingly prescient in its cataclysmic ending, which anticipates the eruption of race-related violence in 1960s America.

Whilst the film is somewhat better regarded today, it was ill-received by the critics on its first release and was not a great commercial success.  Brando was himself dismissive of the film, and said that in taking the one million dollar fee to appear in it he sold his soul so that he could pay his ex-wife's alimony.  At the time, he had become disillusioned over his failure to complete his magnum opus One-Eyed Jacks, his first and only attempt to direct a film, an adventure which ended in bitter frustration.  By taking the lead role in The Fugitive Kind, Brando was forced to hand over the editing of One-Eyed Jacks to Paramount, an experience that created an open wound which would poison his subsequent career and make him ever more antagonistic towards the industry that had brought him wealth and fame.

The role of Val Xavier is one of the last in which Brando appears to be comfortable and which leaves a lasting impression, a tortured, lonely character that resembles the actor in so many ways.  When Val eloquently describes who he is, a 'third kind' of person who neither buys nor is bought, someone akin to a bird that never sets foot on the Earth, you can't help feeling that Brando is painting the most blisteringly authentic portrait of himself.  There were still a few great roles to come - Don Corleone in Coppola's The Godfather (1972), Paul in Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972) - but Brando's career was pretty well over after this film.   The Fugitive Kind might as well have been his swansong.

Film Synopsis

Having run into trouble with the law in New Orleans, a 30-year-old drifter named Val Xavier leaves town determined to turn over a new leaf.  His only companion is his treasured guitar, which he takes wherever he goes.  Val finds work as a low-paid assistant in a small-town store run by an older woman, Lady Torrance, and her bedridden husband Jabe.  Val repulses the advances of sex-mad partygoer Carol Cutrere and instead begins an affair with Lady, perhaps because she shares his loneliness and disillusionment with the world.  Moved by Lady's tragic past, Val helps her to put up a confectionary extension to the store, unaware that Jabe has noticed his interest in his wife.  When he is threatened by the local sheriff, Val makes up his mind to leave town, but he then discovers that Lady is pregnant...