Film

The Fugitive Kind

Wednesday, June 1
7:30 PM

The next film in the Tennessee Williams Film Festival, The Fugitive Kind is a 1960 film starring Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward, and Maureen Stapleton. It was directed by Sidney Lumet. The screenplay by Meade Roberts and Tennessee Williams was based on the latter’s 1957 play Orpheus Descending, itself a revision of his unproduced 1940 work Battle of Angels.
   Valentine “Snakeskin” Xavier, a guitar-playing drifter, played by Brando, flees New Orleans in order to avoid arrest. He finds work in a small-town five-and-dime owned by an embittered older woman known as Lady Torrance, played by Magnani, whose vicious husband lies on his deathbed in their apartment above the store. Both alcoholic nymphomaniac Carol Cutrere, played by Woodward, and simple housewife Vee Talbott, played by Stapleton, set their sights on the newcomer, but Val succumbs to the charms of Lady Torrance.
    The New York Times described the film as a “piercing account of loneliness and disappointment in a crass and tyrannical world.”

Prior to the screening, join us for a prix-fixe  dinner at 6:00 PM at the “Film Table.”  Be sure to reserve with the dining room at (212) 477-2389 or [email protected]