This Property Is Condemned
Directed by Sidney Pollock
Written by Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Coe, and Edith Summer suggested by a one-act play by Tennessee Williams
1966/USA
Paramount Pictures/Seven Arts Productions
First viewing/Amazon Instant
[box] Alva Starr: New Orleans is certainly not a place where a person needs to feel the pain of separation for long.[/box]
One of the last of the Tennessee-Williams Southern-fried psychodramas of this period. Williams disowned the film. Still watchable though.
The story is framed by a conversation between Willy Starr (Mary Badham) and a local boy about what happened to her sister Alva. Alva (Natalie Wood) is one of those dreamy poetic Tennessee Williams heroines in the tradition of Blanche DuBois. Her domineering mother (Kate Reid) sees her beauty as a meal ticket for the whole family and tries to pimp her out to a middle-aged train conductor with an invalid wife. Others interested in Alva Include Sidney (Robert Blake) and even mom’s boyfriend J.J. Nichols (Charles Bronson).
But Alva falls hard and fast for Owen Ligate (Robert Redford) who has arrived in town to close down the railroad station on which all depend. Owen eventually reciprocates. But mama has other ideas.
The acting in this is swell as is James Wong Howe’s cinematography. It just kind of feels like an erzatz version of what we have seen before several times.
