Classic Corner: The Fugitive Kind

“It’s Xavier,” he mumbles.

“With an X or an S?” comes the reply, and an early hint at the kind of pointed metaphors The Fugitive Kind will traffic in. No, his name is not “Savior”; it’s “Xavier,” though most of those who know him before that moment call him “Snakeskin” (after the jacket that gives serves as his Wild at Heart-style symbol of individuality), and most of those after, or at least the one who matters, call him “Val.” You get a sense that he can shed those nicknames, and their connected identities, as easily as the snakes sheds its skin, that nothing much bothers this man who’s apparently spent his life cruising by on his charisma. But over the course of the picture’s two hours, he will find himself very invested indeed in the happiness of another person.

The Fugitive Kind is a strange case of a movie I hadn’t seen, but I had; I acted in a college production of Orpheus Descending, the play from which Tennessee Williams and co-scripter Meade Roberts drew their screenplay. Orpheus was itself an adaptation of Battle of Angels, which Williams had written 17 years earlier—his first produced play, and by his own admission, a spectacular failure. Despite the considerably larger cachet of Williams’ credit, Orpheus also failed, running less than 70 performances on Broadway, and then The Fugitive Kind failed at the box office, in spite of the considerable interest in Williams’s words again coming from the mouth of Streetcar Named Desire sensation Marlon Brando. People just resisted this story.

And honestly, it’s not hard to see why—even within the usual Williams playbook of broken dreams and lifelong compromises, it’s pretty grim stuff. Our introduction to those themes first comes in the form of Vee Talbot, the sheriff’s wife, played by an especially soft-hearted Maureen Stapleton. She first comes on as a bit of a pushover, but watch the way Lumet holds on her face after her husband first humiliates her, capturing vividly the humanity of what could be a caricature.

In these early passages, we’re struck by how deftly Williams’s writing and Lumet’s staging set up a sense of community; the sets and costumes and most of all the relationships allow us to believe people live here, and that they’ve lived alongside each other for years. This is particularly present in how everyone regards Carol Cutrere (Joanne Woodward), especially the old biddies who hang around in the dry goods story; Carol is a firecracker, and she absolutely inflames them. She’s a “church-bitten reformer,” a “benign exhibitionist”—truly one of his most fascinating characters—and the way she explains “goin’ jukin,’” she makes it an awfully hard offer to resist.

Lumet indulges in a narrative focal shift that’s not far removed from that year’s Psycho; from the first act of the picture, you might think it’s going to be about Val and Carol, with Anna Magnani’s Lady just another of the colorful local characters. But she’s not, and the picture is ultimately dependent on the heat she and Val (and Magnani and Brando) generate, on their hunger and desperation, and by the end, it’s there, and it’s real. She breaks your heart, even when the theatricality of the piece is laid bare (“I have something to tell you that I never told you before” is how a piece that’s destined for actor’s monologue books begins). Brando matches her, summoning up all of his quiet emotional intensity as he talks about the guitar and the signatures on it—and aside from all of that, he’s just beautiful in this movie, whether doing the rough-edged “Snakeskin” thing early on, or when she cleans him up (nicely) to work in the store.

As with any good Williams work, The Fugitive Kind is rife with symbolism, and it’s most potently present in the form of the “ladies’ confectionary” that Lady and Val build together in back of the dry goods store, an oasis of beauty and calm in the midst of all this ugliness. Yet it never feels like a symbol, or at least, never merely like one; I suspect this is where the Lumet touch comes in handy. It was shot, as many of Lumet’s early films were (including 12 Angry Men, Long Day’s Journey, and The Pawnbroker) by the great Boris Kaufman, who also lensed such quintessential ‘50s and ‘60s New York movies as On the Waterfront, Patterns, and The World of Henry Orient. It was Lumet’s fourth film, and while he and Williams might seem like an odd match, clashing Northern urban and Southern Gothic, he also keeps the film grounded in a kind of reality. His staging, and Brando’s reading, can make purple prose like “Fly away, little bird, before you get broke” seem like something somewhat might actually say. Well, someone like Valentin Xavier, at least.

“The Fugitive Kind” is streaming on Tubi and PlutoTV.

Jason Bailey is a film critic and historian, and the author of five books. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Playlist, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Rolling Stone, Slate, and more. He is the co-host of the podcast "A Very Good Year."

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