Renegades

 From the archives ...

THE FUGITIVE KIND (1960) (B+) - Marlon Brando ends his first decade as a movie star by mixing "A Streetcar Named Desire" with "The Wild One" to flex his chops as a lone-wolf drifter named Valentine Xavier trying to stay out of trouble with the women of the Deep South and their feral male protectors. 

Tennessee Williams, adapting some of his earlier work, lays the groundwork for the beautiful Brando to smolder his way through this dark story of longing and regret. Anna Magnani plays Lady Torrance, the wife of a miserable cur (Victor Jory) who lies in bed dying in a room above the mercantile store she runs and where Brando's Valentine comes to work after giving up his life as a guitar player. Joanne Woodward is on hand as Carol Cutrere, the town floozy who is frustrated that her come-ons to Valentine don't work. He is drawn more to the older woman. 

Sidney Lumet, behind the camera, doesn't seem to connect much with the southern culture (he's prone to depicting the men as parts of snarling racist mobs), but, like Williams, he seems to have a natural connection to Brando, who carries the story along in the trail of his animal musk. Valentine and Lady Torrance form a genuine bond, and when it all comes to a head, there's real heartbreak and tragedy involved. This feels like adult storytelling despite the period melodrama.

WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964) (B) - This philosophical psychological horror film from Japan has style to burn, not to mention grains of sand in every crack and crevice you can imagine. A Tokyo teacher indulging his love of entomology while on vacation near a small sea village is tricked into staying overnight with a woman who lives in a sand it accessible only by a rope ladder. He soon finds that he can't escape and is trapped in this sandy purgatory, perhaps indefinitely.

The dread and drudgery of shoveling sand for the villagers above is sharply rendered -- though the depiction of mind-numbing servitude might weigh on viewers over the course of two and a half hours. (We admit to some strategic fast-forwarding in a few spots, but not enough to qualify this for Fast Forward Theater.) The man (Eiji Okada from "Hiroshima Mon Amour") eventually falls into the arms of the coquettish but practical woman (Kyoko Kishida).

Director Hiroshi Teshigahara develops a captivating visual palette, offsetting the suffocating amounts of sand with geometric patterns and extreme close-ups, including of the couple's bodies. At times the artistic flourishes are mesmerizing. The story itself soon devolves into a slow-burn tale of survival, one of Sisyphean proportions, suggesting that the repetitive days in a sand pit are a metaphor for the daily rat race in the big city. Your mileage may vary.