Pre-Code Parade:THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE (1933)

Paramount Pictures's adaptation of William Faulkner's controversial best-seller Sanctuary is an instructive example of the limits of "pre-code" cinema. Modern-day movie buffs tend to romanticize the period between the coming of sound and the institution of stricter Production Code enforcement in 1934 as a short-lived period of maturity and frankness, though not explicitness, that was neutered by religious fanatics, condemning Hollywood couples to separate beds for the next thirty years or so. It's an objective fact that "pre-code" cinema is more lurid and somewhat more ribald than product from the period of Code Enforcement, but there were still limits, and The Story of Temple Drake, which was broadcast on Sept. 14 on TCM to the joy of more than one blogger, illustrates those limits.

Faulkner's novel, allegedly written as hackwork for a quick buck in between more ambitious books, tells the story of Temple Drake, an 18 year old college girl who endures a night and day from hell after she rides along with a casual boyfriend to pick up booze from a backwoods bootlegger. They're stuck in Lee Goodwin's country house of horrors after a car wreck, and Temple, a judge's daughter, feels menaced by all the men there, but especially the sociopathic gangster Popeye. Laugh all you like, but Popeye kills a "feeb" who'd tried to protect Temple and rapes the girl, in the book's most infamous scene, with a corncob. Popeye blows the scene, allowing Goodwin to be arrested for the feeb's death and taking Temple with him to a whorehouse. Goodwin's lawyer, Horace Benbow, tracks Temple to the whorehouse and urges her to testify at Goodwin's trial to save his life. Though she admits the truth to the lawyer at the brothel, Temple refuses to take the stand -- only to appear as a prosecution witness and perjure herself by identifying Goodwin as the murderer and her attacker. Goodwin is convicted, but the local mob can't wait for the execution and lynches him. Temple's father takes her into Parisian exile. Popeye gets arrested, convicted, and killed for an unrelated offense.

Screenwriters Oliver H.P. Garnett and Maurine Dallas Watkins make some of the usual pointless cosmetic changes. Judge Drake becomes Temple's grandfather rather than her father, Horace becomes Steven Benbow (William Gargan) and, perhaps most importantly for the studio that released Max Fleischer's cartoons, Popeye becomes "Trigger" (Jack LaRue). The most obvious cosmetic change is the title, which was going to be -- as the poster above shows -- The Shame of Temple Drake. Why not call it Sanctuary? To fool people who wouldn't let a Sanctuary movie into town? There's probably an answer to that question, but I don't know it. Some story changes are more drastic. The story follows Faulkner pretty closely until the rape -- though no corncob is ever shown. Later, director Stephen Roberts stages a melodramatic confrontation for Benbow, Temple and Trigger. The lawyer threatens to beat up the gangster but Temple, fearing that her old friend will be killed, makes like she loves Trigger and enjoys her new life until she drives Benbow away. Then she prepares to leave, proving to Trigger that she'd just faked her affection to save Benbow's life. He tries to stop her from leaving, but she shoots him to death. She reaches the county seat where Goodwin's (Irving Pichel) trial is held, but is reluctant to testify because of the shame it'll bring on her (she's been a subject of gossip the whole picture) and her family. Benbow calls her to the stand, but can't bring himself to ask the necessary questions of her. As Judge Drake reprimands Benbow for frivolous lawyering, Temple stands up and volunteers the truth, saving Goodwin, before she faints. Benbow carries her out of the courtroom, telling the judge, "Be proud of her. I am."

Rarely seen outside of film festivals in modern times, Temple Drake has a huge reputation among pre-code connoisseurs that is partly justified on its own terms. After an opening that stresses Temple's centrality to town gossip, the film really gets going once she and her escort get stuck in the woods. Their approach to and arrival at the Goodwin place, guided by the drawling. gibbering feeb, is something out of a horror film, and it could be argued that the motley, menacing Goodwin household is a precursor of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and other rural terrors. Karl Struss's cinematography is proto-noirish at times, often transforming Trigger into a pure silhouette of malice. At age thirty, Miriam Hopkins is too old to play Temple but gets the spoiled, scared essence of the character right, and she looks fine in the pre-code actress uniform: lingerie. Her ordeal is one with which anyone of either sex who ends up stuck with dubious strangers on a vanished friend's initiative can empathize. Jack LaRue plays Trigger like someone's prophetic fever dream of Humphrey Bogart -- maybe Bogart's own -- but he doesn't live up to my reader's recollection of Faulkner's Popeye. On the page, he reminded me of Anton Chigurh. Popeye dominates the novel, starring in the opening and closing chapters, in a way he can't in the movie, which is Temple-centric. From his early menacing encounter with Benbow to his ironically passive submission to death, he flows through the novel like a current of evil, but is just too easily dispatched in the movie, just as evil is too easily dispelled.

But while pre-code cinema is no match for mainline Southern gothic, it has to be admitted that Hollywood would not be able to touch this material for decades afterward. I don't believe there was another Faulkner adaptation until 1949's Intruder in the Dust, and Sanctuary would finally be filmed under its own name in 1960, -- my copy of the novel is a movie tie-in -- with Popeye further transmogrified into Yves Montand (!) and again renamed, presumably out of deference to Roy Rogers's horse, as Candy. And even a bowdlerized, happy-ended version of Sanctuary was way too strong for the Legion of Decency types who already had enough clout to demand cuts to Temple Drake. The fact that a major Hollywood studio would even think of taking on Sanctuary, when it certainly wouldn't just two years later, is what we love about the pre-code era, even when we admit its limitations. Better a truncated Sanctuary in 1933 than none at all, which is what we would have gotten in 1935. There's a poignance to the incompleteness of pre-code cinema, whether on the individual level of variously compromised films or the overall sense of the period as a dead end or a path but partially taken before the road was blocked. Had The Story of Temple Drake appeared last year, it would have been condemned as a travesty on the level of the Demi Moore version of The Scarlet Letter. As a product of 1933, it deserves a lot of the credit it gets from posterity.

THE FUGITIVE KIND (1960)

This particular review is in the way of a request. Sidney Lumet's film of Tennessee Williams's play Orpheus Descending was recommended to me by Crhymethinc, one of my oldest friends and a fellow movie fan whose opinions have appeared sporadically here and more often on The Think 3 Institute, my political blog. I hope he'll add his thoughts to our discussion of this film. Starting from a shared interest with me in cult cinema (he saw Goodbye Uncle Tom the same time I did for the first time, for instance), Crhymethinc has been moving toward a greater appreciation of Classic Hollywood. He enjoys outrageousness nearly as much as I do, and sometimes more so, but he ultimately holds movies to a literary standard: story counts the most. His blooming interest in Williams may be a way of having it both ways, combining strong literary credentials with often outrageous subject matter. He comes to this particular film, however, because of an additional interest in the career of Marlon Brando. Brando and Williams are a combination that happened only once before, and that was A Streetcar Named Desire, which should need no introduction here. But Fugitive Kind is not as well remembered, and was an unexpected flop with reviewers and public alike when it appeared. So what's the difference?

The first thing that struck me about this movie is that it's the last appearance of the archetypal young Brando: the sullen stud from Streetcar, The Wild One and (perhaps less sullenly) On the Waterfront. His pre-credits entrance into a police court to explain his arrest for disorderly conduct and plead for a chance to start fresh elsewhere promises a return to primal Brando after the accented extravagances of Teahouse of the August Moon, Sayonara and The Young Lions. It's a riveting scene in the reticent classical style, as it makes clear without stating explicitly that this would-be guitar hero has ended up playing a male prostitute in New Orleans, providing "entertainment" that doesn't require his musical instrument. Genuine shame combines with the usual instinct to sweet-talk the judge, and it works for the actor and the character, Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier, who's allowed to leave the mean old city and try his luck elsewhere. Brando works as well to leave you a little doubtful of Xavier's sincerity.

But Xavier is one of the "fugitive kind," a term only heard at the end of the film as a synonym for what the man himself describes as a sort of footless bird who floats through life and touches earth only to die. The emphasis on the fugitive-kind concept is a change from the classical symbolism that comes with the play's original title, and the movie title strikes me as being more appropriate to the story. "Orpheus Descending" implies that Xavier's arrival in a small Mississippi town is going to be like the mythological bard's trip to the netherworld, but the parallel is complicated by the availability of a number of Eurydices for our hero to choose from. There's Maureen Stapleton as the sheriff's wife, a would-be visionary painter. There's Joanne Woodward in crazy mode as the community's "lewd vagrant" who happens to know more about Xavier than he wanted. Most importantly, there's Anna Magnani as Lady Torrance, ambitious and frustrated wife of general store owner Jabe Torrance (Victory Jory), a mean old cancerous cripple who shares a guilty past with the sheriff. The men don't like the competition when the young stud blows in and almost unconsciously draws the women like a magnet.

Joanne Woodward is the nearest thing to comedy relief in The Fugitive Kind, whether she meant to be or not.

Something doesn't quite work here. Brando is still young and handsome enough to be plausible in this role, but his is a passive performance, and his talk about birds has primed us to think of Xavier as a transient who's ready to quit town at any moment. The actor labors under a huge handicap, as what we presume must be a big part of Xavier's appeal is unavailable to Brando: his music. The labors of Samuel Goldwyn and Joseph L. Mankiewicz in Guys & Dolls only barely concealed the brute fact that Brando had not a musical bone in his body, and in Fugitive Kind his character's one attempt at singing is dubbed by another actor. The cumulative effect is to confirm what the riff-raff of New Orleans believed; that Xavier's natural talent is purely physical and sensual, not artistic. I understand that the character gets to sing more in the play, as is only right with Orpheus in the title, and something is probably missing in the film when he doesn't, despite Williams's efforts as co-adaptor to make up the difference. The movie leaves you with the impression that Xavier's musical pretensions (his guitar autographed by blues legends is his most prized possession) are little more than a pose, and he can't help coming off as a bit of a loser as a result. There's nothing wrong with a loser as a protagonist, but it throws his appeal to the ladies into question. Crhymethinc, I think, was on the mark when he suggested that a darker Elvis Presley might have been ideal for this story.

But the story isn't about the power of music. More likely, it's about the impossibility of escape into any sort of rural idyll. If Xavier sees himself fleeing from the corruption of the big city, he finds at least as much corruption where he lands. The town is a depraved, racist patriarchy, where Lady's father was lynched because he dared sell alcohol to black people. She may have her problems with her husband, but at least he wasn't involved in that atrocity -- or was he? In any event, her revenge on the community is to build and run her own "confectionery" next door to her husband's shop. That project coincides with her simmering romance with Xavier, who initially goes to work as a shop clerk but becomes, resentfully, Lady's kept man. He's heading toward leaving when important revelations, including the full lit-up promise of the confectionery, convince him to commit himself to Lady. He touches earth -- mistake! But maybe he's only disproving the whole fugitive kind/footless bird concept and is acknowledging that he's just a man. The only one still talking about the fugitive kind at the end, after all, is a madwoman.

To state the obvious, Tennessee Williams is a theatrical writer. He is not a social realist. His characters are theatrical in all senses of the word; they self-dramatize and they speechify. This makes him a tough sell to some viewers, but used as I am to unconventional acting styles, the only jarring aspect of it all in The Fugitive Kind is the presence of unorthodox thespianism in what is clearly an A picture. The mighty Brando is mostly upstaged by the more flamboyant female characters: Stapleton's neurotic painter; Woodward's nutjob; and the patently tempestuous Magnani. She's a Williams veteran, having won an Oscar for The Rose Tattoo, but apart from one reference to her as a "dago" you're left wondering whether Lady is supposed to be Italian or if this is some gigantic piece of miscasting. But I suppose she's not inappropriate for a character who has a sort of non-violent vendetta against the town fathers, and she has an impressive range of emotion from steely entrepreneurship to weepy despair under assault from an embittered Xavier. By comparison, Woodward, who won her Oscar playing schizo in The Three Faces of Eve, is a sort of specialty mad act, a pseudo-Eurydice who ends up more like the chorus of the tragedy.

It's up to Sidney Lumet to hold it all together. The man has a 50 year track record of quality from Twelve Angry Men to Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, and here he does a great job establishing the grungy setting of the town. This is a dirty film in the sense that it looks like everything needs a good sweeping and dusting. This is necessary to set up the contrast when Lady turns on the lights at the confectionery for the first time, turning it into a kind of fairy palace that finally bewitches Xavier. That in turn sets up the illusion-smashing brutality of the climax. Throughout the show, Boris Kaufman's cinematography is atmospheric and beautiful when it needs to be without being self-consciously arty, which would be wrong for the subject matter.

Lumet makes an arguably prophetic use of fire hoses as tools of oppression as Brando is victimized by villains who are firemen in something like the Fahrenheit 451 sense of the term.

Overall, the story seems compromised by Brando's limitations, but it's also sometimes enlivened by his strengths. His particular presence may throw the narrative out of balance, but The Fugitive Kind remains an intriguing balancing act as an attempt by Hollywood to come to grips with the scandal of the South. Landing somewhere between classic cinema and white-trash exploitation, it has ample material of interest to both camps.