Marlon Brando’s breakout decade in Hollywood was bookended by Tennessee Williams adaptations: 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire and 1960’s The Fugitive Kind, drawn from Williams’ Orpheus Descending. (This time, Sidney Lumet directs rather than Elia Kazan.) Brando feels a bit less dangerous here, but not by much. When his drifter guitar player Valentine “Snakeskin” Xavier is brought before a judge for disorderly conduct and asked if he’s drunk, he replies not with a threat, but with a sigh: “No . . . I’m tired.” An existential exhaustion hangs around Val, one that’s briefly lightened when he lands in a small Mississippi town and takes on a legit job at a mercantile store run by Anna Magnani’s Lady. Yet considering Val’s past, Lady’s ailing, vindictive husband, and the seething, racist rage that has overtaken the Deep South, this reprieve is doomed to be short-lived. Even though it’s populated almost entirely by white characters, The Fugitive Kind doesn’t shy away from the realities of its Jim Crow setting, even referencing lynching and pausing for two characters to acknowledge the awful things they’ve seen, but aren’t supposed to talk about. This beaten-down demeanor is built into Brando’s performance. As Val, it seems like he’s hardly doing anything at all, yet there’s an inner turmoil that keeps everything within the frame on edge—the men who instantly hate him, the women instinctively drawn to him, and those caught somewhere in between. Some of this gets lost in a bombastic ending that piles on the tragedies in quick succession, as Williams is wont to do. What lingers is Brando’s surprising softness as a wild one who gets punished, even after he’s allowed himself to be tamed.
(7/31/2024)