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.

Great 70's Dads: Will Varner (Orson Welles) in THE LONG HOT SUMMER

"I love life, Minnie."

He may be made-up to resemble some expressionist Apache War Chief, but Orson Welles is in fine sparkly, robust form as Will Varner in 1961's THE LONG, HOT SUMMER (1961) and in fact I love this character even more than his Hank Quinlan. And when one considers with Welles all the great films Welles could have done and didn't due to his heroically self-indulgent arrogance, such as deciding to play the dopey romantic lead instead of the slimy self-loathing lawyer he'd likely written for himself in LADY FROM SHANGHAI, ore realizes great roles like this should be cherished. Director Martin Ritt keeps Orson on a short leash, for his own protection, but he's still allowed to bark.

So often Welles became his own worst enemy; no one wanted to work with him because he couldn't stop suggesting things, and then eventually suggesting so many things he tried to take over the picture. He did best when a good director and rest of cast was able to at least hold their own and not let his portly ego capsize the vessel. This might be the reason John Huston didn't cast him as Ahab in MOBY DICK, for example, but gave him one long sermon to cut loose in (as the preacher) then left him on the dock.

But we were talking about Will Varner. He's acidemic in the way no other Welles character is, aside from himself in F FOR FAKE, naturally. Good-natured if bossy, robust and over-the-top, witty but devious; fearless but frail (the movie starts as he comes home from the hospital, high on HOT TIN roofies). A drinker unafraid of trashing his aging constitution, Will Varner is a living force to be reckoned with -- until he dies, that is, which he may do soon. The closest thing the film has to a 'villain,' it's more like he's a father who teaches by bullying and bellowing; he's a Great Santini without the military drive. He forces his weak-willed son Jody (Anthony Fanciosa) to desperate measures for letting himself get outfoxed by old Ben Quick (Paul Newman) while all but chaining Quick to his dow-ta's baid.

Best of all is the way he calls out the coded momma's boy (TV's Oscar Madison) for wasting the fertile years of said brainy, ill-banged (in both senses) daughter, played by Joanne Woodward. The DVD extras tell that Newman and Woodward were hot, crazy lovers at the time and spent their weekends driving off to luxury hotels to shack up for marathon lovemaking sessions, which probably explains why Woodward's character comes off as the most comfortable-in-her-own-skin 21-year old virgin in cinema. We also learn from the extras that Welles re-wrote his scenes and no one could understand a word he said.

Why is he a great 1970's dad for all that? You can't understand most of what 1970's dads say either. Another reason is encoded in how Woodward's belle triumphs over the manipulations of father and suitor through perseverance and wiles. She doesn't do what her dad wants, or let the handsome stranger seduce her though her whole body, mind, and soul clearly responds to him. That's the sign of a loving patriarch who--for all his assertive grandson-craving bellowing and turf-stomping--clearly hasn't cowed his kids. There's no indication of physical abuse in their faces, no ominous chords in the score indicating he might slap someone at any moment. His tantrums and demonstrations of force preclude all resorts to mundane physical or mental abuse to get his way (unless you count hollerin' - but since Woodward's not at all cowed by it, you shouldn't). I'm sure some students of feminism and the male gaze would object to Will Varner's sheer ungainly macho manner, and maybe they're the reasons so many movie, TV, commercial fathers all talk in these high, wimpy little voices. Varner's proof that it's far better to have a strong dad to rebel against rather than a 'friend' who tries to appease your every need, his whole sense of self hinging on your happiness and regard for his parenting.

Also true to great 1970s dad form, Varner's comfortable in his sense of sexual mastery, making only the feint-inest attempt at discretion when driving over to his mistress's. Larger than life, committed to his see-gars, Varner demonstrates his excellent child-rearing not in his outrageous procreative demands but in the way he indirectly rewards his children for rebelling against him, which mirrors in turn the way he rebels against society at large, even if he is, in effect, society itself (at least in that town). He'd rather have his kids fight him every step of the way than have them be type of children who cling to their cribs too long, the way Oscar Madison does.  He even recognizes progress in his spoiled simpleton son Jody, not because Jody tried to burn him to death but because he changed his mind, and rushed to rescue him at the last minute. That he could have this profound realization of forgiveness makes him a top flight 1970's dad!! And through it all, Welle's Will stays true to his oversize, deep-bellowing way of life and outrageous expressionistic Apache make-up. Will Varner loves life, Minnie, and I love Will Varner!

The Coolest of Couples #1: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

"Joanne is one of the last of the great broads." 

- Paul Newman 

               

The weirdness aspect here isn't age, but that Paul Newman is actually hotter than his own wife, and yet they were together and happy from the 1950s right through to Newman's recent sad passing. The actual physical beauty of Woodward is not insubstantial, but as Newman is still probably the closest thing cinema has had to a living Greco-Roman god one would think he'd need someone like Rita Hayworth or 1967-era Raquel Welch to be evenly matched. And yet! Newman seemed to have an altruistic gift--perhaps an old soul too cool to be shallow--in realizing excessive beauty can be a curse after few months into a sexual relationship, as anyone who's dated a painfully hot girl can tell you. A woman who is too beautiful becomes like a dagger, stabbing you in the heart with recrimination because no matter what you do, somehow, you can't live up to her, the ideal, the pedestal, which advertising and the media has helped raise to ludicrous heights in this country... so you end up fighting against becoming an insecure drunken wreck over all the skeevy attention she gets and she instinctively recoils and acts out against your spinelessness by playing it all up, like Marlene Dietrich in DEVIL IS A WOMAN. Conversely however, Newman is almost too hot to cheat, it's just too easy. Men cheat because they need validation; a guy as hot as Newman never needs validation. Also, if you're a girl with a guy like Newman in your hands, you know better than to bother getting jealous.

Woodward's suspected uninhibited sexuality, then, is a blessing that comes with the phenomenon known as "ugly-sexy," i.e. someone is enough themselves that even their conventionally unattractive features become incredibly sexy (perhaps defined ultimately by Serge and daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg). Woodward's healthy lust is something Newman was always quick--even wolfishly proud--to confirm in the press. He praised her as one of those rare and all-but forgotten creatures of the 1960s and 1970s, the broad. Women extroverted to the extent that their sacral chakras hum like spinning tops, theirs is actually the highest level of sensuality short of the tantra. It's a casual, open-hearted lust that prettier women sometimes never develop thanks to an excess of skeevy male attention at too early an age. Instead of learning to go after the boys they like, to parlay out into the field to claim a particular prey, the too-pretty women cultivate a defense against "men" as a whole, a facade of shallow bitchiness that repels close contact but rewards long-distance worship. While gorgeous women become obsessed with making themselves prettier, no matter how pretty they may be, the clock ticks and they recoil from each new wrinkle like Baby Jane in the mirror. The ugly-sexy girls don't worry so much and so wiggle free from narcissism's trap, staying eager for the flesh of their opposite rather than their own ego ideal. As a result, ugly-sexy women often get the hottest guys, while the hot girls wind up with rich short dudes, looking around their expensive lofts and wondering if their girlfriends' are bigger.

As for Newman, as goddesses would throw themselves off horses just to touch his garment, carousing around on a midnight creep carries no 'thrill of the chase,' so marrying Woodward and being faithful to her becomes a key to spiritual enlightenment, as Shakespeare intended, like Siddhartha chucking his kingdom for a spot on the river. If Newman spent most of his career free from the shallow insecure vanity that leads men astray, the cause lies perhaps in this sacrifice.

Newman and Woodward's relationship is built, in Newman's words, on "equal parts lust and respect." The "broad" comment atop may be lost on today's generation outside of MAD MEN fans, but I still remember flirting with drunken secretaries at my dad's bridge games as a swingin' eight-year-old in the 1970s. I value and remember those "broads," and if the juggernaut of feminism has them steamrolled, I hope they don't look back on their swinger days with any remorse. They shouldn't. Sex needn't always be a weapon or means to an end. If you give it a little effort you can wiggle free from guilt, shame and repression and just have a good time. It's clear Newman and Woodward did, and they probably helped usher in 1970s permissiveness as a result. Acidemic salutes them and all broads. Ladies, please come back.

But blue eyes and Greek god sculpted features, sex and slinkiness, aren't the true measure of Newman as a man, it's his unshowy altruism and wry, self-effacing humor. He's a veritable Otto Kruger from MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, as is evidenced in the couple's preference for rural Connecticut over Hollywood, and in the many amazing food products-- popcorn, salsa, cookies, tomato sauce, you name it--all delicious, well-made, affordable--the profits from which go to charity. Yeah, man, not just "a portion" of the profits but all. ALL PROFITS!  And the company's been a huge success without having to hoist any TV commercials on the public, nothing with Newman in overalls, intoning gravely about the importance of natural ingredients. Just sunny pictures of Newman and sometimes Woodward clad as farmers on the labels.

Just look at those still-hot sweet elderly beaming faces! So much wisdom. They're in the documentary on LONG HOT SUMMER, looking great and radiating enough matrimonial calm assertiveness to fuel twenty Thin Man movies.

Now, to confess, LONG HOT SUMMER is the only movie of theirs I see over and over. PARIS BLUES (1961) and A NEW KIND OF LOVE (1963) were okay but dated in their winky attitude towards sex. I'd love to see FROM THE TERRACE (1960) but RALLY ROUND THE FLAG BOYS (1958) pissed me off no end, as I couldn't stand seeing Newman's character being cock-blocked at every step by bratty children and Woodward's community activism; I cried seeing him struggle to get a much-needed after-work drink: he can't even fit into the crowded bar car on the commuter train home from the city, and at home there's barely enough gin in the liquor cabinet to make even one gin and tonic, and--right as the lip of the glass is reaching his lips--one of his bratty boys knocks it out of his hand with a pillow thrown from across the room. And the kid is not punished! Rather the dad is supposed to be very tolerant that neither his sexual or alcoholic needs are  being met.

And then when Joan Collins--the only other awake, sexually frustrated human being in this gossipy white collar settlement--tries to get him into bed (all the way safely over in Paris, mind you), who should show up but the wife for a surprise visit. Woodward is great, of course, but what's the point of watching a match not burn?


I did stick around for Collins' Pocahontas dance at the Thanksgiving-cum-fertility festival. Whoop! Whoop! And since I'd read Robin Wood's essential but slightly bitter Sexual Politics in Narrative Film, I knew to see it as the "repressed erotic (barred from the home) returning in the exotic" (p. 170) Whoop! Whoop!

Ah, but THE LONG HOT SUMMER (1958), that never fails me. Their first co-starring vehicle, it does what so many films, including CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, can only try and do and don't often get right: that whole American Gothic style whoop-whoop that was so hot in the television-competitive Cinemascope-crazy late 1950s. Colliding a couple of Faulkner stories and contrasting acting styles. Unlike some of their other vehicles, here the passion between Newman and Woodward is allowed to be super hot in its non-hotness, as Newman's hustle only strengthens her spinsterish desire.

Woodward is deliberately school-marmish here the way a modern hipster chick might be today, all she lacks is granny glasses--promoting an implied gender neutral celibacy via unsexy clothing and carting around devoted and coded momma's boy, Oscar Madison from SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN. Gender, man, it's a weird thing when a girl tries to not be sexy. I don't know how to handle it! Neither does Newman. He can't steamroll over it, so he surrenders into a calm, submissive state for the first time in a tender final monologue.

 Masters of staying humble and in character, there's no more spark or heat than needed between these two, yet they still sizzle. Their bond has developed naturally through antagonism and begrudging respect-- though offscreen they were--according to the DVD extras---racing down to Florida to ball all night during their days off. Man, I know what it's like to be in love, don't you? If not, just learn from the masters: Newman and Woodward were a solid front, completely devoted, and it helped no doubt that they were in acting class together and probably got all inside each others' heads through hours of improv and exercise. So often stars dictates to what extent the supporting characters around them are allowed to flesh out and develop in any particular movie (they don't want anyone stealing their show). But no one in the family dynamic here feels the need to spell out their connections to one another in any showy or expository manner. It's all direct non/interaction, immediate, forceful! It cuts through the artifices of poetry and grabs right at the bull's balls, without seeming to grab a damn thing. Son, that's mythic!

Orson alone seems oblivious to such dynamics, and is thus superb. We see the way living with such a boisterous, animal breeding tyrant--no matter how benevolent and witty he may be--takes its toll on his children and shows in Fanciosa's and Woodwards' sense memory resignation. Welles' complete obliviousness to all but his own charm links him to Kane and Quinlan, and matches a current of self-loathing running below Newman's self-satisfied drifter--a mutual respect forms between them, one not sullied by confusing issues of trust.

But it's humility and vulnerability that win out. As they said in later years, their relationship was built on affection and tolerance, an understanding they didn't need to meddle in every aspect of each other's life. Noted Newman: "You can’t spend a lifetime breathing down each others' necks ... We are very, very different people and yet somehow we fed off those varied differences and instead of separating us, it has made the whole bond a lot stronger.”