Fernando Di Leo's MANHUNT (La Mala Ordina, 1972)

Playing an exuberant thug who ends up the last man standing, Mario Adorf nearly stole Milano Calibro 9 from the incredible Gastone Moschin and earned himself the starring role in Fernando Di Leo's follow-up film, the second of what is called the "Milieu" or "Italian Mob" trilogy of films set in Milan. The effect, and you'll excuse a Classic Hollywood analogy, is as if, on the strength of The Glass Key, someone cast William Bendix in a starring role in a film noir, only it's the 1970s and you can have lots more violence, and hippies, too. Adorf might be more accurately described as half Bendix, half Al Lettieri. He has Lettieri's disheveled brutishness, but some of Bendix's sympathetic luggishness as well. Both qualities serve him well in this film.

Adorf plays Luca Canali, who gets some buildup in a pre-credits sequence before we actually meet the man. A New York mafia don is sending two Italian-speaking hitmen, army veterans both, to Milan to kill Canali, a local pimp suspected of stealing a major heroin shipment. The hitmen are Henry Silva as Dave and an alarmingly hirsute Woody Strode as Frank. They're instructed to make Canali's death as publicly gruesome as possible, and to behave like "the Italian idea of Americans" in the meantime, i.e. like asinine boors. This comes naturally to Dave, but Frank's a little too straightedge to follow these instructions exactly. He appears to require his maximum concentration just to spit out his lines. Strode and Silva both did their own dubbing, as far as I could tell, but this didn't come naturally to Strode, and his is an awkward performance, as if he were understandably self-conscious about that stuff on top of his head that usually isn't there.

Frank: "I don't want to interfere with your sex life, but if the women come after you, keep your hands in your pockets!"

We're then introduced to the infamous Luca Canali strolling through a Milan park with one of his whores. He gets into a scrap with some punks and bitch-slaps a few of them before the police show up. He gets in a few extra love taps on his last victim and tells the cop that he was trying to revive a poor man who had fainted. There's a slapstick quality to the first half of the film as long as we're encouraged to think of Canali as little more than a clown. At the same time, his portrait gets rounded a bit as we encounter his estranged wife and their sickly daughter. Di Leo is also patient enough to indulge in some character time for Dave and Frank, the former trying to score with hippie/disco chicks with little success, except when he throws money around. He finds out some info about Canali, but one of the hippie chicks, Trini, takes a moment to call Canali, who's been trying to recruit her (though not very forcefully), and tip him off that he's a wanted man. But she prefers her free-love existence in some sort of commie commune where every night seems to be an orgy combined with political indoctrination. Luca doesn't understand her life choices, but he's more affectionate toward her than he is to his current, cynical squeeze. She says Trini's a whore already, but Luca defends her honor. These are details that date the film but add to my enjoyment of it as a historic document of bad fashions and bad Euro-pop music.

The local Don (Adolfo Celi) doesn't like Dave and Frank running loose on his turf, so he sends his own men in search of Luca, ordering them to take him alive for delivery to the Americans. This leads to a Three Stooges-style battle in a lumber yard in which two goons slap our hero around, pull his nose, yank his tie, and force him to smell a rose until he can't stands no more.

"Stop and smell the roses, you son of a bitch!" Not actual dialogue from Manhunt.

This approach gets nobody nowhere. It humiliates the Don before the Americans, who kneecap the goons who let Luca get away. To show that he's even more hardcore, the Don then kills the goons. The stakes grow more severe as Luca's friends and loved ones are endangered in the effort to bring him to ground and he grows steadily more confused by the intensity of the manhunt. While Milano Calibro 9 worked on our uncertainty over whether the hero had or hadn't committed a big robbery, we become convinced fairly early in La Mala Ordina that Luca is innocent. He honestly hasn't got a clue why so many people are after such a small-timer as he. No one has ever taken him seriously before, most of Milan taking him for a softy and a weakling. But he's discovered resilience and resourcefulness in keeping ahead of his pursuers, and after the Don's men go after his family, he discovers the motivating power of rage. The movie climaxes in a furious car and foot chase through the city as Canali picks up the trail of vengeance.

Unfortunately, Di Leo can't top the chase scene in the half-hour he has left to tell his story. He takes the film in potentially interesting directions but doesn't develop them as fully as he could have. Luca hides out overnight at the hippie orgy house, for instance, but we never see what could have been his interesting reaction to the sexy radicalism surrounding him. We do get a too-protracted showdown between Luca and the Don, in which the old man at first talks Luca out of shooting him and then back into shooting him, that nearly stops the film dead. By the time we return to Dave and Frank, it's like an afterthought, and while Di Leo comes up with some violent business during the final battle in an auto graveyard, it still seems anticlimactic compared to the big chase.

La Mala Ordina (called Manhunt on VideoAsia's Thug City Chronicles set, but also known as Manhunt in Milan, The Italian Connection, Black Kingpin (!), etc) isn't as good as Milano Calibro 9, but it still has a lot going for it. While the previous film was based on a novel, this film still has a novelistic quality, at least through the first half, in its eye for social detail (not to mention the abstract sculptures Di Leo's art directors are fond of) and its willingness to let the actors do stuff beside advancing the plot. The music by Armando Trovaioli is funkier and brassier than the score for the previous film, and works best during the big action scenes. Among the actors, Silva really seems to be enjoying himself, and Adorf justifies Di Leo's confidence in him by giving a great performance that keeps you rooting for Luca Canali from the beginning to the literally gripping conclusion.

While these films along with Il Boss form a trilogy of Milanese crime films, there's no continuity to them except the reappearance of Adorf in La Mala Ordina and the return of Silva in a different role in Il Boss. I'll be watching the third film later this week, with a review to follow, but it seems likely already that Di Leo's Milan films are the nearest thing Italy produced to the crime sagas that Francis Ford Coppola produced in the U.S. and Kinji Fukasaku produced in Japan in the 1970s. I don't think I'll regret saying now that the trilogy should be required viewing for any fan of international crime cinema.

Here's an English language trailer (for "Manhunt"), uploaded to YouTube by JohnnyRedEyes.

MILANO CALIBRO 9 (1972)

Here's the first of a trilogy of crime films by Fernando Di Leo, an Italian director who's a new quantity to me. All three films are included in VideoAsia's Thug City Chronicles collection in letterboxed editions that probably make the entire collection well worth the price you might pay at your local Best Buy. This particular film has a classic crime plot, charismatic characters and direction that's dynamic without being flashy -- except when it has some female flash and flesh to flaunt.

Our protagonist is Ugo Piazza (Gastone Moschin), just out of prison but wanted by one Milan gang for another offense: the theft of $300,000 in American currency. He denies the theft but the underlings of "the Mikado" (Lionel Stander) don't believe him. They rough him up a bit and keep their eyes on him, but he makes no move to confirm their suspicions. The police are just as suspicious, but they want to use Ugo as bait to hook the Mikado.

Ugo has little to say to either group. He's a silent and strong type, powerfully built but no powerful mind by his own admission. He still has a few friends. One is Kino, the last retainer of a once powerful crime lord who's initially reluctant to defy the Mikado but ready to help a friend with money, shelter, and eventually more. Another is Nelly (Barbara Bouchet), an exotic dancer who was his girl before jail and hooks up with him again even though he didn't expect her to be faithful and she wasn't. A wild card is a mysterious figure in a red jacket and white scarf who stalks Ugo and later intervenes to set up a small-scale gang war between Kino and the Mikado, with Ugo in the middle.

Any more description would give away some important twists in the plot, and viewers deserve to experience this story fresh. It's a very conventional story that thrives in this telling. Di Leo establishes the menace in a pre-credits sequence that shows the Mikado's men dealing brutally with three people who apparently bungled a money-smuggling operation. The main man of this group is Rocco (Mario Adorf) who has an almost love-hate relationship with Ugo. He enjoys toying with the man but has a respect for him that later blossoms quite surprisingly into something like hero worship. Adorf gives a flamboyant performance that's actually helped nicely by his American dubber, who synchronizes his scenery-chewing quite nicely with the original actor and gets to spew out malapropisms like "the damages is astrological!" for comedy relief.

Mario Adorf in aggressive and more pensive modes.

Rocco needs to be done big to contrast with the laconic Ugo, who's ideally incarnated by Moschin, who I was surprised to learn later played the very different Don Fanucci in The Godfather Part II. Those are two very different characters. Ugo is really nothing but a thug, but his simplicity makes him sympathetic. You get the sense that he's the sort of guy who really has no other option than crime in his life. He's the rank-and-file soldier who gets manipulated by the schemers on top, and you find yourself rooting for him to be vindicated, either to be proven innocent as he claims or to get the upper hand on his tormentors along with the money. His minimal dialogue betrays a constant physical intensity, even in stillness, that explodes in moments of hands-on violence. He looks like the type that can kill with one blow, as he does at one climactic point in the film. And as with Adorf, Moschin's counterpart in the dubbing studio does a good job translating the character's blunt personality.

Milano Calibro 9 is one of those Italian crime films that wears its socio-political context on its sleeve. A lot of them are very conscientious about their settings, including city names in their titles, and geography matters to the larger story Di Leo hints at here. Ugo has to deal with two police officials, one a hardcase right-winger of the sort that would probably be the hero were this a poliziotteschi film, the other a more liberal cop who's interested in the root causes of crime. The Mikado (so called in the dubbing but actually "the Americano" in the Italian credits!) runs a sort of tax-shelter racket, smuggling wealthy folks's money out of the country to be deposited in Swiss banks. The liberal cop's more interested in using the Mikado to bring down the rich malefactors who are hurting the Italian economy, while the right-wing cop just wants to take down the Mikado with minimal collateral damage to the upper class. He mockingly red-baits his liberal colleague, who also argues that crime is surging in Milan because of an influx of low-wage workers from southern Italy who are exploited by their new employers and denied other opportunities for advancement. As far as I could tell, Di Leo doesn't really come down on either side, but reports the disagreement objectively to reflect the divisions in Italian society at the time.

So now that I've made the film sound more pretentious than it really is, let me stress that Milano Calibro 9 has plenty of kick-ass action, genuinely decent English dialogue (though one cop's admonition to Ugo to "get out of here and go play with her dangling dingleberries!" is just a bit awkward) and ample eye-candy mostly provided by the gorgeous Barbara Bouchet. It also boasts a terrific main theme and score by Luis Enriquez Bacalov with that characteristic Italian combination of romantic classicism and electric edginess. The Italian film composers just have a knack for expressing idealism and harsh realism at practically the same time; apparently it's a national trait.

Only the wide screen can hold the rampant sensuality of Barbara Bouchet in Milano Calibro 9.

Bouchet in her apartment, a small wonder of set design, and in matching clothes.

Milano Calibro 9 is a promising introduction to Fernando Di Leo in general and his crime trilogy in particular. Unless something jumps up suddenly to claim my attention, I expect to go through the remaining films in the coming week. From the peeks I took when I first picked up Thug City Chronicles, the next films look even more brutal than this one, but if the other story elements keep up with the escalating violence, this will be an extraordinary set of movies.

Since I've shown the trailer before, this time I'll show you Ms. Bouchet's complete dance number, as uploaded to YouTube by the appropriately named poliziottesco70. I think you'll enjoy it as much as Ugo does.

STRAIGHT TIME (1978)

If the title of Ulu Grosbard's film refers to the amount of time Max Dembo spends on the straight-and-narrow following his release from parole at the start of the picture, it doesn't really describe most of the story accurately. Adapted by ex-con Edward Bunker from his own novel No Beast So Fierce, in collaboration with future Spider-Man scribe Alvin Sargent, Straight Time portrays a man who can't stay straight. Society may be to blame a little, but a lot of the responsibility sits on the man's own shoulders.

Max chafes against the rules almost immediately by refusing to check into a halfway house. This earns him some hassling from his parole officer (M. Emmet Walsh), who decides to trust Max to find his own apartment and get a job. These things he does, and he even strikes up a relationship with Jenny, the nice lady at the employment agency (Theresa Russell) who helped set him up with the job. The trouble begins when he begins looking up his old friends. One is Willy Darin (Gary Busey), an ex-con himself whose wife (a young Kathy Bates) would rather not have Max around. But Willy craves Max's company, too, especially if he can use Max's pad to shoot up without the missus knowing. Max isn't really keen on the idea, since it could earn him three more years in prison, but what are friends for?

Contradictory influences: the potential love of a good woman versus the friendship of, ... well, it's Gary Busey, for goodness' sake.

Well, they're for getting you in trouble if they're friends like Max's. The parole officer makes a routine random visit to the apartment and finds a match. He handcuffs Max to a chair while he searches for drug paraphernalia, then takes him to jail. A long sequence realistically details Max's humiliation as he has to undergo the stripping down, the showering in front of guards, and the sharing of a cell with five other cons as if it was his first time. It turns out that the parole officer was just yanking his chain, or at most trying to get him to rat out whomever he still suspects of using drugs in the apartment. After several days, he drives Max back home, but Max snaps, commandeers the car, cuffs the schmuck to a fence on the highway, pulls his pants down then leaves.

Max's exposure to humiliation is avenged upon his parole-office
tormentor

Now he's a fugitive and has to go back to stealing to live. But Jenny sticks by him while admitting her growing anxiety. Her attitude is one of the intriguing aspects of the story. She's troubled by his reversion to crime, but doesn't seem morally troubled by it, only worried about his safety and the possible risk to herself, in that order. She seems to have been impressed by his remarks on prison life on a dinner date, when he explained that only in prison, as he saw it, were men valued for what they really are. She seems determined to treat him that way, with almost guileless honesty, and short of incriminating himself too specifically, he repays her in kind. Their relationship is reminiscent of film noir romances, or the sort of relationship you might see in a Jean-Pierre Melville movie, but stripped of archetypal pretension or the distancing veneer of foreign chic. Grosbard is a naturalistic director who doesn't impose a personal style on the action, and Theresa Russell gives a character who might seem too good to be true an unaffected sincerity and an unsentimental manner that keep Jenny interesting and unpredictable.

Highlights and lowlights of Max Dembo's latter-day criminal career.

Max doesn't want to live off Jenny, but wants to stay with her. His hope is to make a big score so they can both leave town. He hooks up with some other cronies (including Edward Bunker in a cameo appearance). His main accomplice is Jerry (Harry Dean Stanton), another allegedly domesticated ex-con who takes Max's reappearance as a cue to return to the criminal life. Their efforts are complicated by unreliable assistants and Max's own tendency to ignore the rigid timetables Jerry sets for their robberies. Max emerges as one of those criminals who asserts a strong sense of right and wrong that usually breaks down to a petulant rage at not getting his own way. He's quite the judgmental person, eager to tell people that they're in the wrong when he's about to beat them up or shoot them. But the film shows us that his own greed, his obsession with finding a particular piece of jewelry for Jenny, and his not knowing when to quit, are just as much to blame for a debacle that ends badly for Jerry as Willy Darin, whom Max chooses to blame for everything.

I was reminded a little of High Sierra by the ending, which has Max driving off toward the mountains after leaving Jenny behind at a diner with the loot from the jewelry heist. Again, as in comparison with noir, Straight Time deromanticizes the archetypal criminal while still trying to keep Max Dembo a sympathetic character. This takes the form of a kind of special pleading at the very end when we see a montage of Max's mug shots dating back to his teens, as if the film was saying, "What else could he do?" Maybe that's a stab at tragedy, but Bunker's own attitude as an author seemed to be to show things just as they were, nonjudgmentally. Those mug shots don't really give us the why of Max Dembo, but they arguably serve to state once and for all, as far as Bunker, Grosbard, et al are concerned, that he could be nothing else.

The DVD of Straight Time actually complicates things a little further, if I heard and saw it right. Outside the diner, loyal Jenny once more asks to stay with Max. I'm certain that I heard Max say, "You'd only get caught." Turn on the subtitles, however (as I did when it got a little loud outside) and you can read Max saying, "I want to get caught." That makes quite a difference, and it had me wondering whether I heard Max right. I might have to go to the audio commentary to get that cleared up.

I see that I've gone this far without mentioning Dustin Hoffman. Let me make up for that by saying that this is an awesome performance, one more Oscar-worthy, in my estimate, than the one he won for a year later. By this point in his career I think Straw Dogs and Marathon Man had done away with any stereotype of Hoffman as a sort of nebbish but if doubts remained Straight Time would have destroyed them. This is still the intense Hoffman of the Method, who hung out with career criminals to get the attitude and mannerisms right. I can't vouch for his authenticity, of course, but once he turned criminal again he seemed completely convincing to me. He has a cool chemistry and a mutual wary intimacy with Russell that helped me suspend disbelief in their romance. I hold Hoffman in pretty low regard these days because I feel he sold out some time ago, but watching this film reminded me of how good he really was.

The Warner DVD is a nice little package. The only extra apart from the trailer and a Grosbard-Hoffman commentary track is a TV documentary about the film, which is fascinating to look at because videotape always has a "live" look to me. It goes the extra mile by not only interviewing Edward Bunker, but also interviewing Joseph Wambaugh, who offers a sharp critique from a cop's perspective of Bunker's notion of criminal morality. It's an ideal supplement to one of the superior U.S. crime movies of the 1970s.

The Straight Time trailer was uploaded to YouTube by WorleyClarence. They sure don't promote stars now like they did back then.

IPHIGENIA (1977)

Americans, how would you feel if the lion's share of westerns were spaghetti westerns, if your national mythology had been appropriated by another country's movie industry? I imagine the people of Greece must feel that way when they see their ancient mythology presented to the world in the form of Italian muscleman films? The overwhelming majority of films based on Greek mythology are not Greek, but Michael Cacoyannis's stark epic comes straight from the source. It's adapted from the play Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides, one of the great ancient tragedians, but it also had to have struck a contemporary chord for modern Greek audiences.

Kostas Kazakos as Agamemnon

Mythology tells us that King Agamemnon, commander-in-chief of the Greek expeditionary force to rescue his sister-in-law Helen from Troy, was ordered by an oracle to sacrifice his eldest daughter to the goddess Artemis, who would then allow the winds to blow the Greek fleet from its base at Aulis to the enemy coast. This is just another feather in the cap of the House of Atreus, and Agamemnon will get his when he returns from the war (contra Troy, and fie on that awful film while I'm on the subject) and his grudge-holding wife Clytemnestra kills him, only to be whacked in turn by her son Orestes at the instigation of his sister Elektra, in whom Freud took an interest millennia later. Elaborations of the basic myth explain that Agamemnon lured his daughter to Aulis with a promise of marriage to Achilles, then thought better of the whole deal and sent a messenger to tell his wife to turn back for home, only to have that message intercepted by minions of his brother Menelaus, Helen's husband, who wants nothing getting in the way of his revenge mission. None the wiser, Clytemnestra's party ends up in Achilles's camp, only to be baffled by the hero's bafflement at all talk of marriage. When the truth comes out Clytemnestra is furious and Achilles is characteristically more so at being made a dupe. He's now willing to fight against all odds to save Iphigenia from the sacrifice, but seeing that the odds are pretty hopeless, the girl decides to go to her fate rather than let people waste their lives for her sake.

Panos Mihalopoulos as Achilles and Irene Papas as Clytemnestra

That's the story Cacoyannis tells, but he gives it a strongly political emphasis. The film represented the director's return to Greece after years of self-imposed exile during the reign of a military junta, and a deep suspicion of militarism pervades his interpretation of the myth. In his Iphigenia the super-army created by Agamemnon has become a thing unto itself, defiant toward leaders who in the absence of combat look more like politicians than warriors or heroes. They are manipulated by Odysseus, the nearest thing to an outright villain in the picture, who is portrayed as a self-interested demagogue possibly out to usurp Agamemnon's elected position as commander-in-chief. He goads the rank-and-file into demanding the sacrifice originally ordained by the oracle by telling them it's only fair when so many mother's sons are going to lose their lives in the war that the first casualty be one of the commander's children. Agamemnon himself craves his position of command, and his second thoughts about sacrificing his daughter are tempered by the idea that saving her might break up the army or endanger his position on top. He takes out his guilt feelings on his brother Menelaus, blaming him and his "whore" Helen for having to kill his own daughter. But Menelaus reminds him that he, Agamemnon, was the one who wanted control of the army, an end towards which Menelaus made himself subservient, even though it was his honor at stake in the matter of Helen. Initially repelled by the thought of sacrifice himself, Menelaus ends up adding to the pressure on his brother. Even Achilles, the loyalty of whose Myrmidons was legendary, finds himself unable to win his own men over to the defense of Iphigenia. "We came for a war, not a wedding feast," they tell him before driving the invincible warrior out of camp with a hail of rocks. With the gods significantly if not necessarily implicitly absent from the story, it ends up being the army, above all, that demands the death of an innocent who is imperiled only by her proximity to power. The heroic generals of myth, who might well serve as symbols for the junta themselves, end up being sacrifices of a kind to a machine of their creation.

The irony amid the proofs of the powerlessness of heroes in the face of the war machine is Iphigenia's own determination to make a genuine, honest sacrifice, not for the sake of the war but for the sake of her "new friend" Achilles and the others who were willing to protect her from the military mob. Resolved that no one should die for her sake, her only choice left is to die, but to make it clear that she dies by her own choice and on her own terms. But before her courage creates the illusion of a happy ending, we have a cruel finale in which the long-desired winds finally rise before Iphigenia is killed, as Odysseus seemed worriedly to realize they would, inspiring Agamemnon to make one final lunge to save his daughter -- in vain. Now that's tragedy.

Tatiana Papamoschou as Iphigenia

What Cacoyannis lacked in the way of vast Hollywood-style sets he makes up for in manpower and a vast landscape to deploy his actors on. Whatever the Greek film cost, it achieved an epic look without looking overproduced. The stark production design, including the masks the generals wear on public occasions, gives Ancient Greece a more alien quality than Hollywood or Italy ever conveyed, compelling us to look at the old story with fresh eyes.

Landscapes and costume design more than make up for the lack of
conventionally classical sets in Cacoyannis's Iphigenia.

The cast probably won't be familiar to most viewers, except for Irene Papas, but they form a strong ensemble, including an uncanny Tatiana Papamoschou in the title role. Whatever damage generations of sword-and-sandal films may have done to the credibility of Greek mythology, Cacoyannis's Iphigenia is an honorable continuation of the ancient tradition.

THE FUGITIVE KIND (1960)

This particular review is in the way of a request. Sidney Lumet's film of Tennessee Williams's play Orpheus Descending was recommended to me by Crhymethinc, one of my oldest friends and a fellow movie fan whose opinions have appeared sporadically here and more often on The Think 3 Institute, my political blog. I hope he'll add his thoughts to our discussion of this film. Starting from a shared interest with me in cult cinema (he saw Goodbye Uncle Tom the same time I did for the first time, for instance), Crhymethinc has been moving toward a greater appreciation of Classic Hollywood. He enjoys outrageousness nearly as much as I do, and sometimes more so, but he ultimately holds movies to a literary standard: story counts the most. His blooming interest in Williams may be a way of having it both ways, combining strong literary credentials with often outrageous subject matter. He comes to this particular film, however, because of an additional interest in the career of Marlon Brando. Brando and Williams are a combination that happened only once before, and that was A Streetcar Named Desire, which should need no introduction here. But Fugitive Kind is not as well remembered, and was an unexpected flop with reviewers and public alike when it appeared. So what's the difference?

The first thing that struck me about this movie is that it's the last appearance of the archetypal young Brando: the sullen stud from Streetcar, The Wild One and (perhaps less sullenly) On the Waterfront. His pre-credits entrance into a police court to explain his arrest for disorderly conduct and plead for a chance to start fresh elsewhere promises a return to primal Brando after the accented extravagances of Teahouse of the August Moon, Sayonara and The Young Lions. It's a riveting scene in the reticent classical style, as it makes clear without stating explicitly that this would-be guitar hero has ended up playing a male prostitute in New Orleans, providing "entertainment" that doesn't require his musical instrument. Genuine shame combines with the usual instinct to sweet-talk the judge, and it works for the actor and the character, Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier, who's allowed to leave the mean old city and try his luck elsewhere. Brando works as well to leave you a little doubtful of Xavier's sincerity.

But Xavier is one of the "fugitive kind," a term only heard at the end of the film as a synonym for what the man himself describes as a sort of footless bird who floats through life and touches earth only to die. The emphasis on the fugitive-kind concept is a change from the classical symbolism that comes with the play's original title, and the movie title strikes me as being more appropriate to the story. "Orpheus Descending" implies that Xavier's arrival in a small Mississippi town is going to be like the mythological bard's trip to the netherworld, but the parallel is complicated by the availability of a number of Eurydices for our hero to choose from. There's Maureen Stapleton as the sheriff's wife, a would-be visionary painter. There's Joanne Woodward in crazy mode as the community's "lewd vagrant" who happens to know more about Xavier than he wanted. Most importantly, there's Anna Magnani as Lady Torrance, ambitious and frustrated wife of general store owner Jabe Torrance (Victory Jory), a mean old cancerous cripple who shares a guilty past with the sheriff. The men don't like the competition when the young stud blows in and almost unconsciously draws the women like a magnet.

Joanne Woodward is the nearest thing to comedy relief in The Fugitive Kind, whether she meant to be or not.

Something doesn't quite work here. Brando is still young and handsome enough to be plausible in this role, but his is a passive performance, and his talk about birds has primed us to think of Xavier as a transient who's ready to quit town at any moment. The actor labors under a huge handicap, as what we presume must be a big part of Xavier's appeal is unavailable to Brando: his music. The labors of Samuel Goldwyn and Joseph L. Mankiewicz in Guys & Dolls only barely concealed the brute fact that Brando had not a musical bone in his body, and in Fugitive Kind his character's one attempt at singing is dubbed by another actor. The cumulative effect is to confirm what the riff-raff of New Orleans believed; that Xavier's natural talent is purely physical and sensual, not artistic. I understand that the character gets to sing more in the play, as is only right with Orpheus in the title, and something is probably missing in the film when he doesn't, despite Williams's efforts as co-adaptor to make up the difference. The movie leaves you with the impression that Xavier's musical pretensions (his guitar autographed by blues legends is his most prized possession) are little more than a pose, and he can't help coming off as a bit of a loser as a result. There's nothing wrong with a loser as a protagonist, but it throws his appeal to the ladies into question. Crhymethinc, I think, was on the mark when he suggested that a darker Elvis Presley might have been ideal for this story.

But the story isn't about the power of music. More likely, it's about the impossibility of escape into any sort of rural idyll. If Xavier sees himself fleeing from the corruption of the big city, he finds at least as much corruption where he lands. The town is a depraved, racist patriarchy, where Lady's father was lynched because he dared sell alcohol to black people. She may have her problems with her husband, but at least he wasn't involved in that atrocity -- or was he? In any event, her revenge on the community is to build and run her own "confectionery" next door to her husband's shop. That project coincides with her simmering romance with Xavier, who initially goes to work as a shop clerk but becomes, resentfully, Lady's kept man. He's heading toward leaving when important revelations, including the full lit-up promise of the confectionery, convince him to commit himself to Lady. He touches earth -- mistake! But maybe he's only disproving the whole fugitive kind/footless bird concept and is acknowledging that he's just a man. The only one still talking about the fugitive kind at the end, after all, is a madwoman.

To state the obvious, Tennessee Williams is a theatrical writer. He is not a social realist. His characters are theatrical in all senses of the word; they self-dramatize and they speechify. This makes him a tough sell to some viewers, but used as I am to unconventional acting styles, the only jarring aspect of it all in The Fugitive Kind is the presence of unorthodox thespianism in what is clearly an A picture. The mighty Brando is mostly upstaged by the more flamboyant female characters: Stapleton's neurotic painter; Woodward's nutjob; and the patently tempestuous Magnani. She's a Williams veteran, having won an Oscar for The Rose Tattoo, but apart from one reference to her as a "dago" you're left wondering whether Lady is supposed to be Italian or if this is some gigantic piece of miscasting. But I suppose she's not inappropriate for a character who has a sort of non-violent vendetta against the town fathers, and she has an impressive range of emotion from steely entrepreneurship to weepy despair under assault from an embittered Xavier. By comparison, Woodward, who won her Oscar playing schizo in The Three Faces of Eve, is a sort of specialty mad act, a pseudo-Eurydice who ends up more like the chorus of the tragedy.

It's up to Sidney Lumet to hold it all together. The man has a 50 year track record of quality from Twelve Angry Men to Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, and here he does a great job establishing the grungy setting of the town. This is a dirty film in the sense that it looks like everything needs a good sweeping and dusting. This is necessary to set up the contrast when Lady turns on the lights at the confectionery for the first time, turning it into a kind of fairy palace that finally bewitches Xavier. That in turn sets up the illusion-smashing brutality of the climax. Throughout the show, Boris Kaufman's cinematography is atmospheric and beautiful when it needs to be without being self-consciously arty, which would be wrong for the subject matter.

Lumet makes an arguably prophetic use of fire hoses as tools of oppression as Brando is victimized by villains who are firemen in something like the Fahrenheit 451 sense of the term.

Overall, the story seems compromised by Brando's limitations, but it's also sometimes enlivened by his strengths. His particular presence may throw the narrative out of balance, but The Fugitive Kind remains an intriguing balancing act as an attempt by Hollywood to come to grips with the scandal of the South. Landing somewhere between classic cinema and white-trash exploitation, it has ample material of interest to both camps.

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961)

Don't expect me to solve Alain Resnais' famous time-and-memory puzzle; I'm not sure if it has an actual solution. The truth of whether Delphine Seyrig's character actually met Giorgio Albertazzi's protagonist at the resort hotel the year before is less important to Resnais or writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, I suspect, than the process by which the man attempts to force his memory upon the woman, or the fact of the man's confusion. You might even ask whether the "this year" of the narrative is taking place at the real Marienbad or in a memory palace in the man's mind. We know he is a creature of repetitive routine. He hits all the resorts every year. He is as much a spectator as an active personality. Given all that, it's just as possible that the man has lost himself in the collective consciousness that converges annually at Marienbad and other places.

We know he's lost something. He is, in fact, a chronic loser, always being beaten in the peculiar game he plays repeatedly with Sacha Pitoeff's character. That guy's invincibility tempts me to view him symbolically, but I catch myself when I start wondering whether he's Death or not, because then I know that I'm confusing L'Annee derniere a Marienbad with its nearly-coincidental counterpart, Herk Harvey's indie one-off wonder of 1962, Carnival of Souls. I'm not the first person to see and hear similarities (architecture, organ music, dancing), and I agree with those who doubt whether Harvey had a chance to see the Resnais before starting his own film.

Four faces of future Daughter of Darkness Delphine Seyrig in Last Year at Marienbad.

Instead, the two films seem to stem from a common zeitgeist stirring in western civ which seems to equate a compulsive sociability with at least a kind of death which the occasional alienated consciousness struggles to comprehend. Also, I'm tempted to think of death because of the double meaning of the English word "Last" as "final" as well as "previous." I don't know if "derniere" has the same ambiguity, but if so perhaps Marienbad might be seen as some kind of actual limbo instead of a figurative one.

Marienbad: the architecture of Hell? It looks like a helluva place to visit.

I think that's enough to suggest that Marienbad will give food for thought to any viewer who can stand being disappointed by a lack of straight answers. The producers promoted it as a puzzle film in which each viewer would collaborate in constructing the "real" narrative, so it really is up to each of us to figure the thing out for ourselves. All I can say definitively is that Marienbad is one of the ultimate expressions of black-and-white cinema, a spectacle of art direction that demands attention and rewards it even if you can't quite determine what's going on. If that's the same way I feel after watching some Italian gialli, that's probably no accident, since I can see Marienbad's influence on that genre (as well as on Kubrick's The Shining, I might add). Resnais's film is a textbook example of one in which style is substance, and anyone who honors cinema as a visual art owes it a look someday.

The original French trailer, with English subtitles, was uploaded to YouTube by shihlunTW