The Fugitive Kind

Director: Sidney Lumet Sidney Lumet

Overview

Fugitive Kind began life as Battle of Angels, a never-produced 1939 play by a young Tennessee Williams. Nearly 20 years later, Williams refined this rough-hewn theatrical effort into Orpheus Descending, which enjoyed a respectable Broadway run. The renamed film version stars Marlon Brando as Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier, a trouble-prone drifter who wanders into a deliciously Williamsesque Mississippi town. Here he becomes involved in the problems of alcoholic Carole Cutrere (Joanne Woodward) and unhappily married Lady Torrence (Anna Magnani) and also runs afoul of Torrence's vicious husband (Victor Jory). Sexual symbolism abounds in this tempestuous drama, which offers Brando at his most inscrutable and Magnani at her earthiest. Maureen Stapleton, in real life one of Brando's best friends and severest critics, plays an avant-garde artist.

Product Details

Release Date:	01/14/2020
UPC:	0715515240017
Original Release:	1960
Source:	Criterion Collection
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[B&W, Wide Screen]
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Mono]
Time:	2:01:00
Sales rank:	11,929

Special Features

Interview from 2009 with Lumet; Three Plays, by Tennessee Williams, an hour-long 1958 television presentation of one-act plays, directed by Lumet and starring Ben Gazzara and Lee Grant, among others; Program from 2010 discussing William's work in Hollywood and The Fugitive Kind; SDH subtitles

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Marlon Brando	Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier
Anna Magnani	Lady Torrance
Joanne Woodward	Carole Cutrere
Maureen Stapleton	Vee Talbott
Victor Jory	Jabe Torrance
R.G. Armstrong	Sheriff Talbott
Emory Richardson	Uncle Pleasant
Sally Gracie	Dolly Hamma
Lucille Benson	Beulah Binnings
John Baragrey	David Cutrere
Ben Yaffee	Dog Hamma
Frank Bergman	Gas Station Attendant
Joe Brown	Pee Wee Binnings
Madame Spivy	Ruby Lightfoot
Mary Perry	Actor
Jeanne Barr	Actor

Technical Credits

Meade Roberts

Tennessee Williams

Sidney Lumet	Director
Kenyon Hopkins	Score Composer
Martin Jurow	Producer
George Justin	Associate Producer
Boris Kaufman	Cinematographer
Carl Lerner	Editor
Meade Roberts	Screenwriter
Richard Shepherd	Producer
Richard Sylbert	Art Director
Frank Thompson	Costumes/Costume Designer
Robert Whitehead	Producer
Tennessee Williams	Screenwriter

Editorial Reviews

The Fugitive Kind finds Marlon Brando at his slush-mouthed best, in a landscape that's pure Tennessee Williams -- appropriate, since the celebrated playwright wrote the screenplay. Three years after his breakthrough direction of Twelve Angry Men (1957), Sidney Lumet helms this involving tale of a reforming petty criminal (Brando) who quickly runs afoul of the local citizenry in rural Mississippi, in spite of his best efforts to abide by the law. In the course of spouting world-weary poetic blither, Brando's Xavier Valentine catches the attention of a crass wild child (Joanne Woodward) and a repressed convenience store owner (Anna Magnani). The Fugitive Kind confounds expectations by exploring a romantic relationship between Brando and the older Magnani, rather than the blonde, age-appropriate Woodward; though true to form for Brando characters, the relationship is all argument verging on fisticuffs. Magnani's performance is the soul of the picture, as her character's years of self-abnegating emotional baggage come to the fore with tortured immediacy. In relatively little screen time, Victory Jory plumbs the depths of jealousy and racism as Magnani's domineering husband, whose seething dictatorship over his dominion far outstretches the fragility of his bedridden body. The Fugitive Kind may be a lesser picture in the careers of those involved, but that's more an indication of the richness of those careers than a knock on this worthy morality play.

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