Tennessee on DVD

[The Fugitive Kind (Criterion)]

[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.