The Fugitive Kind (1960) (2025)

Popular reviews

• Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★½ 5

  Action! - Lumet/Pollack: The Fight of the Century

  Wait a second, I thought only Elia Kazan had the rights to do Williams adaptations starring Marlon Brando?!

  But truly, after a few mediocre melodramas, Lumet finally found a terrific story to work with. To be honest, the director follows much of Kazan's blueprint in both directing and acting, and the actors themselves behave in what seems to be a formula that everyone working on a Williams play should follow. Indeed, I got a strong sense of déjà vu on many occasions. Not that the premise or the picture is much more than a solid drama with good performances, with Brando playing a fugitive who attempts to settle in a town where…

• Review by 📀 Cammmalot 📀 ★★★ 5

  I tried to pour oblivion out of a bottle,
  but it wouldn’t come out.

  This slow burn film made me feel bad, because the entire time Brando and Magnani are acting their asses off all I could think was, show us more Woodward!

  She steals this movie like it’s a Rolex watch.

  I’m not a reformer anymore.
  I’m just a lewd vagrant.

  
  Cinematic Time Capsule - 1960 Ranked

• Review by 𝙿𝚊𝚘𝚕𝚘 𝙼𝚊𝚌𝙶𝚞𝚏𝚏𝚒𝚗 | 🇮🇹 ★★★★

  After starring in A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando tries his hand again in a film written by Tennessee Williams and based on one of his plays. The work is a modern reinterpretation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and tells the story of Val Xavier, a drifter who arrives in a Louisiana village with his guitar and a snakeskin jacket on (a garment full of symbolic meanings that will be taken up and honored by David Lynch in Wild at Heart). Here he attracts the interest of two women, the unhappy wife of an elderly man, sick and evil, and a misfit, vulnerable and lonely girl.

  The Fugitive Kind offers Brando the opportunity to depict another of his…

• Review by russman ★★★★ 2

  I never realized how badly my wardrobe lacked a snakeskin jacket until now

• Review by Zoë 🐛 ★★★★★ 1

  Absolutely genius retelling of Orpheus. Subtle while still being easy to detect as the film comes to its shocking conclusion. Classic Tennessee, the unrestrained drama of an ending brings an incredibly acted film together.

  I noticed that Brando as Snakeskin was lit, especially in the beginning, very much like how women are usually lit on screen, especially a woman shown as a figure of desire. Obviously he doesn't get the Vaseline close up treatment, but in an early conversation with Lady (Anna Magnani), he's lit up like an angel, and she's in the darkness, baggy circles under her eyes. The film is not trying to draw attention to a perceived "ugliness" in Lady, but instead a perceived beauty in Snakeskin.…

• Review by Graham ★★★½

  Another Brando film, another masterclass in character acting, only this time he is upstaged by a powerhouse performance from Joanne Woodward as the young and feisty Carol: brave, loud, needy, fragile.

  Going into a Brando film, it's normal to expect him to hold the audience on his every husky word and he doesn't disappoint here, but this was absolutely the Woodward show. Brilliant stuff.

  Sidney Lumet's direction of this classic Tennessee Williams tale is controlled and luscious, full of joie de vivre and lighting panache to bring a warm glow to the features of the cast, especially Brando's 'Snakeskin' who seems to glisten with the moisture of a thousand watching wet lips.

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  The Criterion Challenge 2022
  46. Michael K. Williams’ Closet Picks

• Review by sakana1 ★★★½ 16

  The Fugitive Kind, based on Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending, reveals how far humanity has fallen, so desperate for meaning and connection that an aimless, indecisive man is turned into a savior by women who can find nothing better. Without any of Orpheus' talents and offering only hackneyed, tryhard profundity in place of meaningful words, Valentine Xavier (Marlon Brando) is a comment on his time, not a human being. He's stitched out of sexual fantasy, brooding good looks as distraction from shapeless uncertainty and secret weakness, all wrapped in a cloak of tissue-thin resolve.

  Opposite this snakeskin-clad wraith is the most achingly human of creatures, a woman made of disappointment and suffering who drags herself on because it is what women…

• Review by HKFanatic ★★★★

  Might be one of the most avant-garde pictures released by a Hollywood studio (it bombed): there are scarcely any commercial considerations, outside of the casting of three Oscar-winning actors in the lead; and no real urgency or driving force to the plot, just a drifter navigating the petty squabbles and longstanding feuds of a Faulkner-esque Southern town, at least until it all boils over into an American Inferno. You can bet your life David Lynch saw this at a formative age.

• Review by theriverjordan ★★★★

  Sidney Lumet takes the lyrical writing of Tennessee Williams and makes it sing for the screen innoir-soaked shades of black and white.

  Williams is rightfully considered one of the greatest American playwrights, but the movie adaptions of his work often highlight their melodrama and not their pathos. Lumet mostly succeeds in correcting this, helped by a masterful Marlon Brando performance.

  Brando tapers down the raw emotion of Stanley Kowalski in ‘Streetcar Named Desire,’ and gives a more restrained (and far more interesting) portrayal of a drifter only barely managing to keep a hold on the emotions crawling beneath his own skin. The way the streaks of stark white light hit his eyes as he looks at Lady are more then enough to rocket “Fugitive Kind” to classic territory.

• Review by eely 🎄 ★★ 1

  some things are simply too good for this world and joanne woodward is one of them. coincidently, she is also too good for almost every movie she is in.

  also I know this is going to be an extremely sour take, but I have yet to watch a marlon brando movie that has not bored me to tears. please give me some recs for brando movies that are not boring so I can set my taste compass to true north.

• Review by cinema_made ★★★

  A trouble-prone drifter becomes involved in the problems of an alcoholic as well as an unhappily married woman, and also runs afoul of the woman's vicious husband. Written by Tennessee Williams, his intimate script challenges our sense of morality. Redemption and forgiveness are challenging in a world whereby the locals will forever remember your sins. Relationships that change prompt urges that cannot be repressed.

  The film has a strange pull nevertheless, as its powerful and embarrassing moments merge to offer a fever dream of an America, on the verge of the civil rights movement, that’s about to eat itself alive. There are pointedly no people of color in The Fugitive Kind, but the white characters divide over how to combat…

• Review by Frances Meh (mirthful edition) ★★★

  This early Lumet / Tennessee Williams collab is basically just Brando walking around being so hot it drives women into desperate heat and men to violence. Believable.