The Fugitive Kind: When Sidney Went to Tennessee

The Fugitive Kind is not talked about too much today, but it was a big production for its time. To start with, Brando had won a contract of one million dollars to do the picture. Next, the teaming with Magnani was hailed as a bold chemical experiment—though the talk only made Magnani more nervous. As for Brando, his life was full of troubles: he had a bitter child custody suit pending with his wife, Anna Kashfi. As a further distraction, he had to fly back to Los Angeles from the East Coast on weekends to help with postproduction on what would prove to be his only directorial effort, One-Eyed Jacks.

It was not a happy shoot. At the first read-through, the lead actors lost all confidence and started whispering their bold lines so they couldn’t be heard. Rumors had it that Magnani (fifty-one at the time) assumed in advance that there would be a sexual encounter with Brando (thirty-six), and when that failed to materialize, she became aggressive and insecure; and that Brando believed she refrained from washing to goad him. Magnani felt that her costar was lovelier than she could ever be, it was said, so she resorted to wearing scarves on her head and begged Kaufman for a softer look—something he was opposed to in a doctrinaire way, for he was the brother of Soviet director Denis Kaufman (a.k.a. Dziga Vertov) and the trusted eye of Jean Vigo, the great French director (L’atalante).

The location was Milton, New York, up the Hudson near Poughkeepsie, but the small town was mobbed with kids, eager for a glimpse of Brando. He and Joanne Woodward did not get along, for reasons never made clear. And there was a further problem: Maureen Stapleton—the star of the stage production—had been offered the supporting role of Vee Talbot in the film, so Magnani had to work under the eye of the role’s expert. According to Brando biographer Peter Manso, Williams would ask Stapleton how they had done a thing onstage, and the good-natured actress would admit tactfully, “You know, I can’t remember, Ten.” On one occasion, in a scene with Brando, as he paused without quite cuing her, Stapleton said, “Marlon, you’re a genius, I’m not. While you’re waiting, I don’t know what to do.” Meanwhile, Lumet noted, Brando would test him early on by offering two takes of each scene—one okay, technically exact; one untidy but heartfelt, brilliant—and waiting to see which way the director would go.

In the end, Lumet (still a novice) won Brando’s trust. There was a challenging scene, Val’s bird monologue, that entailed unusual difficulties. In his book Making Movies, Lumet recounts the two and a half hours they spent on it, the repeated problem Brando had remembering his lines, and the technical obstacles. It was 5:30. They went into overtime. “We could break,” said Lumet, “and nail it tomorrow, but I feel you need to get it tonight.” Brando agreed. They worked on until, finally, the shot was delivered.

But movies are not just the sum of the stories that can be told about their shooting. The Fugitive Kind was unlike other films, and it was something Lumet had never tried before: a portrait of small-town meanness in which the outward action was to be fired by internal demons. In that sense, it was not too far from the wasteland of Psycho, which was filmed at the same time.

Is Psycho a crime story from local papers (like In Cold Blood) or is it a movie that stirs at dysfunction in America? In the same spirit, The Fugitive Kind is true to the stark paranoia in Williams, minus the lush color and starry glory that marked the films of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. Those hit movies look so much less now than Streetcar, Baby Doll, and The Fugitive Kind.

This is a mood picture, where, if you pay close attention, you can feel the lights come up and fade away to match the eloquence of the speeches. You can see the decor giving an emotional or spiritual force to the text. And you begin to hear Brando’s shy lyricism rising in the long speeches—this Orpheus in a snakeskin jacket sings. Woodward gives one of the least guarded performances of her odd career. And Magnani looks like a great sensualist terrified of getting her last chance. There’s no question that Magnani could do too much, but Lumet restrains her here and urges his cameraman to trust her tragic face and wounded voice. It was not often in this era that an actress shared the screen with Brando—so many were erased by his light. Lumet began by using markedly different lenses on the two leads, but as the film progressed, he let Magnani have more and more long-lens close-ups to match Brando’s. And so we feel their relationship growing in the most natural way.

No one went to see the movie in 1960. It got no nominations at Oscar time. It lost a fortune. But it may be one of the most intriguing Tennessee Williams pictures, in that we are asked to weigh and consider the faults of its provincial society. It is about time we yielded our trust in box office, the Academy, and journalistic critics as measures of quality. We have to see the pictures for ourselves. In which case, it’s natural enough to notice that The Fugitive Kind is only two films before Lumet’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, another study of the light fading in a small town.