Tennessee on DVD
The Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots (Warner Bros. Classics)
Both directed by Sidney Lumet
Comedian Paul Mooney recently cast aspersions on Tennessee Williams,
America’s most film-adapted playwright: “Tennessee Williams knew about
the South, but he would clean it up and lie about it. He knew the women,
he knew the racial thing, he knew everything.
He knew the incest, the child abuse, all that shit. He had to hide it
because those white folks would get angry.
A Streetcar Named Desire, trust me when I tell you that Marlon
Brando’s character was a Creole, he was a black man…you’ll see it in
between the lines.”
Two new Williams DVDs go between the lines. The 1959 The Fugitive
Kind (Criterion) and
Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots (Warner Bro. Classics) actually
complicate Mooney’ fascinating claim. These films (based respectively on
the stage plays
Orpheus Descending and The Seven Descendants of Myrtle)
both show Williams’ response to the mid-20th century Civil Rights
advancement and display his attentiveness to the turmoil of his society
and times. Todd Haynes didn’t know about these
when he cooked up the specious Far From Heaven.
Each tale of misfits and their thwarted dreams confronts the repressed
racial anxiety that was central to American psychology and sociology.
The Fugitive Kind is best, using Brando’s sexual mystique to
portray an outsider’s fascination and doom. As Valentine Xavier (Love
Saviour), Brando is the sacrificial Christ figure amidst desperate
disciples Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward and Maureen
Stapleton, poetic victims of the South’s racist and sexist chauvinism.
In Hot-Shots,
Lynn Redgrave marries a dying aristocrat (James Coburn) hoping to
inherit his dilapidated plantation before the levee breaks. This more
politically explicit play emphasizes Robert Hooks’ crotch-bulge (as the
literal black sheep of Coburn’s heritage) turning
Fugitive’s fatal sexual temptation into fitful farce.
Williams was experimenting with what he called “slapstick tragedy” but
director Sidney Lumet doesn’t get the humor–perhaps because
Hot-Shots was made immediately after his eulogy-documentary King:
A Filmed Record From Montgomery to Memphis.
What remains (Hot-Shots was one of the first X-rated studio
releases) is testament to Williams’ racial daring. Too bad Mooney wasn’t
around to punch-up Gore Vidal’s adaptation and pinlight Redgrave’s
brave attempt at a comic/tragic-heroine: Her performance
of a minstrel song (“Plant a watermelon on my grave/And let the juice
drip down”) won’t be forgotten by anyone who hears it.
The Fugitive Kind overtly exposed the South’s lynching culture—a
risk that surely appealed to the radicalism Brando braved in 1957’s
anti-racist
Sayonara. Brando’s magnetic personal poetry burns away any
didacticism, making his snakeskin jacket-wearing Xavier one of the most
mystifying portraits of moral sensitivity in movie history. As
photographed in lustrous b&w by Boris Kaufman, Brando is
beautiful verging on divine. (A bonus disc of Lumet’s 1960 TV program
of three Williams one-act plays gives evidence of Brando’s immediate
impact on post-WWII acting style.) Brando’s martyr-figure emanates
Beat-era dissent and eroticism—forget
The Wild One. He plays what Patti Smith would label a
“rock-n-roll nigger”—and Paul Mooney would probably agree.
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Carrie Pena