Sometimes you have to hunt out great performances in films that are not too often seen. Here’s a clip i found of Anna Magnani and Marlon Brando in The Fugitive Kind 1960
The performances are fantastic and I loved the Directing / Cinematography (Sidney Lumet / Boris Kaufman) with extended close ups, interesting angles, an upside down shot and expressionistic lighting.
In fact i like it so much, i’ll show a set of stills below, partly in response to the wikipedia quotation of a “observations” by Jonathan Rosenbaum,In the Chicago Reader.
Unfortunately, director Sidney Lumet, who’s often out of his element when he leaves New York, seems positively baffled by the gothic south and doesn’t know quite what to do with the overlay of Greek myth either.
This sequence looks gothic to my eye and the Marlon Brando as Val (Orpheus Descending) looks like a greek figure in the shot where he’s trapped between the blasts of water and the flames.
