Tennessee Williams at the Mill of Rubes: THE FUGITIVE KIND

If a bunch of method-trained NYC actors crashed their bus in the middle of nowhere Louisiana and tried to pass as locals so as to not get lynched, the result might look a lot like The Fugitive Kind (1959). Marlon Brando--radiant, and way too good for it all--plays a Christlike (coded queer) guitar-slinging drifter who winds up in a romance with older Italian shop owner Anna Magnani. Together they face a hardened mob of drunken good-old-boy characters whose raging fires are fueled by Anna's bitter, sweaty invalid husband (Victor Jory, practically stealing the movie) spewing vitriol from his upper berth. It's the kind of vehicle the gay drunk genius Tennessee Williams cranked out by the dozen for his muse/avatar, Anna Magnani, plopping her down in the midst of his usual rentboy deep south fantasias, there to emote and assume postures and be as out of place as a weeping marble Madonna statue in the middle of a rowdy redneck saloon.

Running a general store in this Nowheresville town, scarred by memories of racist mob violence against her late father (for daring serve drinks to colored people at his wine bar), Magnani stays married to racist invalid Jory, who's all dying and sweaty, and strung out on morphine upstairs, for vague reasons (some long term plan of Elektra-style vengeance gone dormant?). Into all this strained soap and free-floating malice walks wandering troubadour Brando, his snakeskin jacket a symbol of his individuality and his handling of his mama guitar as awkward as a lavender honeymoon. He could have hot mess Joanne Woodward (top), who's never seemed sexier, or more alive, or wilder, more intoxicating, rampaging around town in a cute raincoat with wild platinum blonde hair (we're so used to seeing it pulled back with unflattering bangs, that her sudden sex appeal makes her seem like some whole other being), but Brando prefers glum middle-aged Magnani, thus hinting that his character is not entirely straight. He wants a mother, not a lover. And while he claims to be free, he's so closeted/closed-off that his snakeskin may as well be a straight-jacket. Get it?

It's that kind of poetic/layered stiltedness that keeps Kind from being an A-shelf Williams, something perhaps partially explained by its having spent two decades buried deep in his desk drawer (where it was called Battle of Angels), before he finally exhumed and reconfigured it into something called Orpheus Descending. What a title! What else is Orpheus gonna do? Now, Orpheus Just Standing There - that's more like it. The Fugitive Kind isn't much better, but at least there's a poetic semi-poetic second way to read it. And audiences were looking for second ways to read things back in the late-50s.

It's easy to forget, now it's all fallen into disreputability with many snotty academic circles, but Kind's era saw a kind of post-war suburban renaissance: White middle class America was almost legit intellectual while still being sexual, thanks to Freud and the Kinsey Report. The success of Williams' plays, his bridge game buzzword popularity, was bound up in that 'knowingness', the secret insider cool that came from that. A whole generation, home from the war, had picked up all sorts of European liberalism (that 'continental mind') leaving their parents' small town moral hypocrisy, moving wholesale into the post-war 'suburban dream of martini lunches and modernist art wherein there was just enough dirty business to make deciphering all the psychological underpinnings worth the effort.  Years of sanitized white Christian picket fence heteronormative blandness had made even a veiled mention of homosexuality, rape, or abortion in some otherwise pedestrian romance would send the cocktail class flocking, darling, if for no other reason than being able to say they saw it at the next Jaycees bridge game. Condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency was like a Pulitzer stamp. 

That said, Willians clearly run out of things to say by the time he dug his old Battle of Angels-cum-Orpheus out of that desk drawer. Man, I know the feeling. Who among us hasn't gone thumbing through old work for inspiration when we've fallen into weary writer's blockage? Still, he should have left the Battle be. He'd already cherrypicked the best ideas out of it for other plays, anyway.

Furthermore, director Sydney Lumet's shadowy noir style seems way too sober and judgmental for the Dirty South. Lumet could be great with small casts where--no matter how messed-up the characters were (as with his masterful Long Day's Journey into Night, Klute, or Dog Day Afternoon)-judgement didn't enter into it. But it's too easy to cast stones in the backwards county where Fugitive unfolds, to make characters grotesque without any real cause other than to  Brando's Christ-y glow even more godlike by contrast. Elia Kazan had a rootsy respect for the uneducated thug but Lumet's lynch mob is just raw undiluted evil, set up for us to throw rocks at, with no awareness of the vicious self-perpetuating irony such throwing engenders.

Most glaring of all the problems though, to my mind, is Brando. He's the prettiest, but he's also the most uncomfortable-looking miscast drifter/troubadour since Sterling Hayden in Johnny Guitar (1954), with which Fugitive would make an apt, if excruciating, lavender double bill. Both concern guitar slinging trouble magnets who shack up with middle-aged super-butch saloon/store owners and wind up in the crosshairs of  rabble-roused townsfolk who burn said saloon/store to the ground. Oh my god, it's the same damned movie!

Both films prove that stock outlaw guitar heroes need to be played by less awesome actors than Brando or Hayden to not seem forced. That's what Elvis was for. Real musicians are always a little spacey because they're so attuned to the melodic spectrum; their personalities are incomplete without their instruments. For big A-list personas, a guitar is just ab awkward accessory, hanging limply on them like a rotting albatross two sizes too small.

But Hayden knows one thing Brando doesn't: if you can't hide your complexity, just try to fade into the landscape as much as possible and let the women do all the raving. Try to not try to act at all. An even "bigger" actor than Hayden, Brando makes a bad casting choice worse by trying too hard to seem easygoing and Christlike. Each monologue is practically hung on the wall of the Whitney like an American folk masterwork and I don't mean that as a compliment.

The dialogue wouldn't be bad for a normal writer, but we've already seen this collection of archetypes and deep south incidents before, in better Williams adaptations and better Williams dialogue: Woodward's bleached nymph straining at her shackles was already brilliantly essayed by Carroll Baker in Kazan's Baby Doll and Sue Lyon in Night of Iguana; Anna Magnani had already done the depressed middle-aged Italian widow in The Rose Tattoo; Ava Gardner stole (and likely improved on) the role written for her in Iguana; the dying redneck patriarch shivering in the junky morphine prescription heat was done to a turn with breadth and sympathy by Burl Ives in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Jory and Woodward add their own spin, making them the reasons to watch this, but they still have to contend with Williams' muddled motivations. Jory and his cronies have suspicions about our guitar-wearing Brando's orientation but if they think he's gay, then their jealousy makes no sense. The idea of the virile straight male outsider downstairs at the general store, while the impotent fumer is straight-up Malden in Baby Doll or Anthony Franciosa in The Long Hot Summer (by Faulkner but similar) but the homophobic persecution angle is straight up Suddenly's Sebastian, Cat's Skipper, and Blanche's Streetcar husband prior to their suicides and/or devouring. But you can't have it both ways, unless you're just ticking off the checklist of Tennessee tropes. Even in the dirty south they probably knew enough to realize a gay bestie was a great way to keep the flies off, so to speak.

Another main problem in Fugitive, aside from its similarity to these Williams' classics, is that we can't quite believe an Adonis like Brando would be bothering to hang around these stifling swampy Louisiana backwaters in the first place. The beginning indicates he was busted hustling and is trying to go 'straight,' in some other podunk town, but an actor of Brando's caliber has no business being a mere hustler. His teeth are too perfect, his demeanor too polished. He's out of jail, why not split for NYC or SF and hustle there? New York City is the place where / they say hey babe! Yes sir, a gorgeous boy like him could make a fortune or at least find a nice sugar daddy with a comfy duplex, rather than putting up with a vicious mob just so he can get with this frumpy broad Magnani when he could be sailing the drunken Main with vivacious Woodward. 

Either way, the gay subtext is the only way any of it makes sense. The vicious hatred the town rubes have for anyone wild or serpentinely jacketed seems a beard for homophobia. Brando's 'crimes' here aren't otherwise great enough to stir the wrath of the town in quite such a vicious, heated way. Meanwhile, a handful of saints are strewn about for contrast, like Maureen Stapleton as a local painter, who Brando monologues in hushed cobra monotones until she sways before him like a hypnotized chicken. Surely such a talker could hypnotize hateful rubes into liking him if he wanted to. It's clear Brando's outlaw prefers a firehose crucifixion to any kind of real warts-and-all acceptance. Hell, all he had to do was buy them a round at the bar and the rednecks would likely accept him. Jesus would have, if he had the bread. 

What Brando's 'fugitive kind' doesn't grasp is that the beautiful people only trudge through the Dirty South for a reason. Otherwise they move, like Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy, from small town to big city - that's their natural drift, that's where all roads lead. Paul Newman understood that in Sweet Bird of Youth --his cocky rentboy is shanghaiing a drunken Hollywood patroness and her Cadillac to the outer bayou rings so he can rescue his hometown sweetheart from her cliche'd Kingfish-y mayor father --and it works because-- though Newman is in some ways even prettier than Brando--Newman the actor knows the way to seem a realistic local boy is to taint his beauty with cocky, needy cluelessness. When an already-perfect demigod puffs out his chest and struts to impress, he suddenly seems faintly ridiculous, and that's why Newman's performance works where Brando's fails. In refusing to betray the insecure little boy behind his character's bravado, Marlon never quite 'gives' us anything. He's so wise to his own bullshit he barely says an untrue word, which means he barely says anything, just orates a series of trite poetic monologues of the sort Williams realized early on were best kept in a file drawer.  
  
Streetcar, for another example, Brando's big Tennessee victory, was subtler by actually being more histrionic --that's the paradox Fugitive director Sydney Lumet doesn't seem to understand, and maybe wouldn't until Klute eight years later: No one should ever be all the way 'beautiful' and making a Williams play hum involves letting an actor become so much themselves that the seams of their persona break and the hideous lonely hunger of their hidden core comes busting out like taxidermy sawdust. 

Another master of getting sawdust out of his actor's taxidermy persona masks? John Huston, as in his Williams adaptation, Night of the Iguana. 

A director able to understand the Williams sawdust mill principle but not how to successfully harness it? Joseph Loesy in Boom! (1968, left). Here Taylor and Burton merely dump sawdust tonnage upon the stage as if it's a suitable shortcut to brilliance. But of course that doesn't work either. The pain has to be real, the sawdust awkward, faux-accidental, the stitches in the mask newly ripped, to grab us. We can sense the difference between drunkenly inspired and just sloppy. But the drunk cannot. That is the tragedy of humankind. 

And while sometimes his plays need a villain-- ala Karl Malden in Baby Doll, who, like the racists of Fugitive, digs on torching Italian-owned business; or Jack Carson's shrill grating harpy wife in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; or seething Ms. Fellowes in Iguana--when Williams is at his best there's no one-note villains or hicks or closets at all. In Streetcar everyone is sympathetic, even the brute Stanley. A pagan god crossed with "a ape", its he who is the put-upon party after all. He pays the bills and we can understand how he'd be sick to death of Blanche and her joneser high-hattin' and liquor-mooching after a few hours, let almone several months. I'd be fed up after a week. That he puts up with it when he's clearly no milquetoast is to his credit; not that it excuses any rapey climax, but on some level it at least rationalizes it.

When Williams is done right, his monologues are ranted or recited the way we natter on to people we subconsciously know aren't really listening to us. When Williams is done wrong, as he is in Fugitive Kind, monologues go on and on, slow and measured, while the onscreen listener stands at rapt (i.e. vaguely bored but respectful) attention, like at a poetry reading when they're trying to impress the bourgeois date. 

All that said, it's still fascinating as a film, just for its T-Williams laundry list affect. Brando is gorgeous and at least when he does sing and play it's actually his voice and guitar doing it (hearing Brando cautiously sticking to a few lightly brushed chords and singing in a half-whispered croon works only because you wonder if he really doesn't know how to play and it's just no one's told him because he's so gorgeous). And Woodward lights up the screen as the wild drunk nymphomaniac... when she's around, but for whole stretches of the film she's MIA and we're left with this half-baked, zombie-like mama-fixation romance between Magnani and Brando.  

Oh well, even if the tepid chemistry-free 'torridity' is just not convincing and whole stretches are formulaic, if you're a Williams, Brando, or Lumet fan (and you should be all three), you need to see this movie, even if for no other reason than to unlock the joys and motivations of Williams' other, better adaptations. Somehow seeing a genius faltering backwards into amateurish pretension makes his great work all the more noble. There's a great fountain of truth and enthusiastic idealism one can drink from when indulging amateurishness: the amateur's inability to dilute his poetry's potency in the minutiae of realism is like watching a clumsy magician give his tricks away, i.e. fun on a whole other level than intended.  The poetry is still fresh and raw, so you can feel the rush the author felt while writing it, his swooning in drunken euphoria over a late night typewriter. Such a euphoria can help us all find the courage to become alcoholic titans, to write into existence the scalpels that will tear open future actor's masks so they might sprinkle the sawdust of the soul upon silver screens yet to be... even if for no good reason.