Joanne Woodward

  • The Fugitive Kind (1960)

    The Fugitive Kind (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) It’s not hard to see how The Fugitive Kind was an envelope-pushing film back in 1960 — Tennessee Williams writing, Sydney Lumet directing and Marlon Brando in the lead role, with a plot that has a drifter arousing passions in the small town where he stops for a while. (That plot summary also covers Picnic five years earlier, which was also considered edge-of-the-envelope.)  If you’re familiar with films of the time, it does remain a bit shocking to see Joanne Woodward make her entrance, dishevelled, unmannered and quite possibly inebriated: while unremarkable by today’s standards, female leads simply didn’t do that kind of thing back then. As the film advances, malevolent undercurrents suggest that it’s not going to end well… and it doesn’t. Still, what was effective sixty years ago is not always as fresh now, and it doesn’t take a long time for The Fugitive Kind to show its limits. Brando’s acting almost feels like a parody of itself, and Williams’s writing isn’t among his best. As with many films of its era, its desire to push the edge of permissible subject matters in an environment where the Hays Code was holding back honest drama lands it in a weird demimonde of unsatisfying compromises. It amounts to a film that’s certainly interesting as a representative of its era, but not completely satisfying as a viewing experience these days.

  • The Long, Hot Summer (1958)

    The Long, Hot Summer (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) Long before becoming a respected Hollywood icon and salad dressing tycoon, Paul Newman was the designated bad boy of the late-1950s-early-1960s and The Long, Hot Summer clearly takes advantage of that persona. A rural melodrama featuring a drifter (Newman), a rural patriarch (Orson Welles!) and his daughter (Joanne Woodward, soon-to-be Newman’s wife), it breaks no new grounds in narrative matters. We can guess how these things go, but the film’s biggest asset is its sense of rural atmosphere, and actors such as Welles and Newman playing off each other. There are links here with Tennessee Williams plays (especially if you follow Newman’s filmography at the time), with later films such as Hud and with a certain kind of rural southern-USA drama that would periodically pop up in Hollywood history later on. For twenty-first century viewers, Welles is a bit in a weird transitional persona here — overweight and no longer young but not yet bearded nor all that old. The melding of three Faulkner stories into one film actually works well into getting to a coherent whole with plenty of interesting side-details. While The Long, Hot Summer does not amount to an essential film (well, except for those Newman and Welles fans), you can see the way it worked back then, and an archetypical kind of southern rural drama.

  • Rachel, Rachel (1968)

    Rachel, Rachel (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) Oof: It’s not because films are nominated for an Academy Award that they’re worth a look. Case in point: The grating, annoying, irritating Rachel, Rachel—a story of a small-town mid-1930s spinster rediscovering herself that ends up being more boring than anything else. Sadly directed by Paul Newman, with his wife Joanne Woodward in the lead role and their daughter playing the heroine at a younger age. I’m not necessarily claiming nepotism here—Woodward was hailed for tackling a difficult role, won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award. But keep in mind that Rachel, Rachel is a product of the late 1960s, a time more concerned with gleefully pushing the limits left unguarded by the end of the Production Code and audiences thirsting for neorealism. While it worked at the time, it hasn’t necessarily aged well. It’s not a bad film, but it feels slow, long and dull. The herky-jerky flashbacks anticipate more modern non-chronological technique and grammar, but feel like unpleasant experiments to twenty-first century audiences—the added padding on a small story feels more grating than enlightening, with an inexplicable slowness to everything. But Rachel, Rachel remains in the pantheon of Academy Award-nominated movies, so there’s that.