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| Fly away little bird, fly away or you’ll–get broke. |
The key to this film is not Brando, who is brilliant, not the tragic Italian classicism that Anna Magnani brings to all of her films, not even the language and poetry of Tennessee Williams, which is the exhalation of despair, but Joanne Woodward as Carol Cutrere. Invariably at the epicenter of a Williams piece is at least one beleaguered female; here we have two (three if we count Maureen Stapleton’s minor character). While the “Lady” exudes inner strength, or at least the will to struggle, Carol Cutrere is the vulnerable core around which the brutal forces of humanity swirl. She wants to hold something with the same tenderness that Val uses when he holds his guitar–she wants to hold him like that. She declares this with her nose spiritually and physically bloodied. Lumet’s eye roves over the darker nuances of human nature, with Williams whispering at his back. Good impulses are furtive, exceptional, as in the exception, such that any positive gesture strikes one as almost an act of aggression, it is so retrograde to the predominant spirit of the film.
Magnani/Torrance utters, “I’m full of hate.” Her father, a vintner, was punished for selling his wine to “Negroes”, in other words for daring to include the African American in the perfectly normal world of buying and selling, and by that act humanizing them, an act intolerable to the traditionalists of the town. These vigilantes burned the grapes down, killing the dreamer immigrant. And so Williams’ America stumbles forward, falls, and slides back two steps. This film is about picking oneself up and thinking about trying again, or hoping that our actions do not yield the exact same results. It’s quickly apparent that the key to breaking this cycle is human contact, a theme or motif embraced in basically every Williams piece. It’s important to note that in Williams’ works, this cycle persists; the burning never stops.
Criterion Critical Mass 