5/5 Exceptional performance by Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani
  by Ioana
An impressive, deeply emotional performance by Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani. A very sorrowful story too. The main evil character is one of the most inhuman one can imagine.


"Several years before One Eyed Jacks, Tennessee Williams had told me he had written a new play, Orpheus Descending, with me in mind to play opposite Anna Magnani. I told him I didn't have any interest in returning to the stage, and Cliff Robertson and Maureen Stapleton played the parts. But when Tennessee Williams and Sidney Lumet invited me to be in the movie The Fugitive Kind, which was based on the play, I was divorcing my first wife and I needed money.(...) I've always thought of Tennessee as one of the greatest american writers, but I didn't think much of this play or the movie."
(MARLON BRANDO, "Songs my mother taught me")

5/5 Otherworldly
  by Epic Rock Lover (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
The Fugitive Kind is one of my favorite films of all time, in large part because the experience of watching it (so long as you do not resist its dramatically-saturated style) is like being transported into a strange, though strangely familiar, world of shifting light and dark, where the angry sweat of a kicked-once-too-often South can be felt and tasted, and the possibility of love becomes a dream of the doomed. This is more poetry and dance than film, more drug than food; it makes the viewer an ethereal shadow witnessing by sensation the tragic unraveling of these characters' dreams. There are few films that can do what this does - marry brilliant writing (Tenessee Williams), breathtaking and claustrophobic cinematography, daring direction (Sydney Lumet), and haunting acting performances (especially by Brando and Magnani). Altogether a tour-de-force and an absolute delight!

4/5 A Lynch favorite?
  by Christopher B. Murray (Portland, OR)
Much could be said about the merits of Williams' script, Brando's acting, Magnani's acting, and Lumet's direction, but I'll leave that to other reviewers. One thing that struck me about this film is that it must be one of the films that made an indelible impression on David Lynch. The snakeskin jacket worn by Brando appears in Wild at Heart (it's worn by Nicolas Cage). Magnani's character in The Fugitive Kind, called "Lady", is very similar to Isabella Rossalini's character in Blue Velvet, "The Blue Lady". Both characters are middle aged Italian women who were once beautiful but are now broken (though still mysterious and alluring). Both enter into extra-marital affairs with younger men that are highly charged but doomed from the start. And both of these affairs must be kept secret to avoid the wrath of a dangerous man. There may be other similarities, but that's what first struck me. Maybe you have to be a Lynch nut like me to care, but there are more than a few of us out there. That said, this film is worth watching for reasons other than the Lynch connection. It's not quite as great a film as "Streetcar", but it's still an excellent film. For another film that seems to have informed Lynch's style, see Ingmar Bergman's great horror film "Hour of the Wolf": you will see where some of the ideas for Twin Peaks originated.

5/5 If there was a moral to this story...
  by Zachary Cabon (High Point, NC USA)
In The Fugitive Kind, Tennessee Williams gave us a conflict between fugitives from morality and bigots. For whom would you pull?

Williams mishandled Anna Magnani. I would have given a different explanation - or no explanation at all - for the presence of "Lady Torrance" in Two River County, Louisiana. "Daughter of an Italian wine maker" explained Magnani's accent, but Two River County seemed more suited for whisky distilleries than for "Italian wine gardens."

Did the original story, with Maureen Stapleton as Lady Torrance, include an Italian wine garden?

If the bigots of Two River County hated a "dego" (slur against Italians used by Williams), then why did they wait until he sold "Italian wine" to [black people] before they attacked?

I might believe the writer if he used whisky, or maybe even French wine, there in Louisiana; and no character, especially one played by Anna Magnani, would spend the day working after learning a crucial secret about that attack.

Williams had struggles other than writing-in Magnani, i.e., his illogical formula.

The first time I saw The Fugitive Kind I had no empathy for Jabe Torrance. The writer distracted me by using Jabe's bigotry.

The writer initially convinced me bigotry prevailed, but Valentine Xavier and Lady Torrance would have pushed any reasonable person to his limits. If there was a moral to this story, then it was, "Do not antagonize proven homicidal psychopaths with sexual misconduct."

Could better men than bigots not defeat depravity (Val in his way, Lady in hers)?

Reading about Williams having Elvis in mind to play Val (instead of Brando) makes me rethink his ambitions. In "King Creole," Elvis took on juvenile delinquents and their mob boss in Louisiana - released July 2, 1958. Did Williams originally hope Elvis would be a fugitive from morality in Louisiana in The Fugitive Kind, released December 1, 1959?

The original ambition might explain why Brando carried a guitar everywhere without playing the thing: frustrating. On the other hand, Elvis might have sung too many songs. (Imagine Elvis in his final scene singing, "I'm just a hunk, a hunk of burning love.")

No Elvis. More Magnani. Better.

Tennessee William's ability to write monologue for female characters was impressive. Nothing made The Fugitive Kind more touching than the short-lived passions of Lady Torrance.

Five stars: Brando and Magnani could make any writing a work of art. The entire cast was superb. Three stars: Tennessee Williams was in over his head with Magnani. Using bigots as protagonists and moral-fugitives as antagonists was a no-win situation from the start - okay for stories of poetic justice but a failed formula for tragedies.

5/5 Extraordinary
  by Eugenia Maldonado (Mexico City, Mexico D. F. Mexico)
This film is absolutely impecable. Throughout the film, Brando and Anna Magnani are superb actors. It a duel. what I find really wonderful is that all the conversations between the two of them, that are intimate, their voices are kept in a mezzo tono.It gives really the atmosphere of complicity and sensuality that is required by the author of the play. The climate of intolerance in a small town in the USA is perfectly depicted, and the counterpoint, Joanne Woodward is remarkable. I recommend this picture as one of the most beautiful, poetic and realistic of the XX Cy. cinema. It just leaves me astonished and very satisfied of having admired a masterpiece.No flaws, no doubts, nothing that should be said is said or whispered.
Eugenia.