The Fugitive Kind

Despite its stellar credentials, just about everything is wrong with this adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play Orpheus Descending. Brando plays a mysterious drifter who ignores a local tramp (Woodward doing her well-practised degenerate shtick) in favour of a lady of maturer years with a cancer-ridden husband. Magnani, with her unintelligible English, is not much worse than Brando, who undergoes the ultimate indignity of having to sing through another man's voice (for this role he became the first actor to be offered a million dollars, which he needed badly to cover his debts on One-Eyed Jacks). Lumet's direction is either ponderous or pretentious, and he failed to crack the problem of the florid stage dialogue and a dangerously weak role for Brando.