This Property Is Condemned

In response to the passing of Sydney Pollack a few months ago, I'm going to take a look at some of his key films. Over the next few weeks I've arranged for ten of his films to rest atop my Netflix queue. Some of them I have seen before, but not in a long time. Pollack was a man who worked in quite a few genres and styles, and it's difficult to come up with a typical "Pollack film," so perhaps after taking a survey through his most notable work one will emerge.

His first film was The Slender Thread, which is not available on DVD. (It was aired by TMC in a tribute to him after his death, but I didn't catch it). This was followed by This Property Is Condemned, which was suggested by a one-act play by Tennessee Williams. The screenplay was co-written by Francis Coppola.

As one would imagine in a work based on Williams, the film is a slice of Southern Gothic. Set in a Mississippi town during the depression, Robert Redford plays a stranger who comes to town and takes a room at a boarding house. The town's economy subsists on the railroad, and it turns out that Redford works for the railroad, and is there to lay workers off. Complicating this is his relationship with the daughter of the boarding house, the town flirt (and perhaps much more), Natalie Wood.

This is an odd, unsatisfying film. It's filmed in glorious Technicolor by the great James Wong Howe, but has a small, black and white Playhouse 90 feel to it. As seen by the poster, it was sold as a steamy soap opera, but seems absurd in retrospect, and I suspect it was absurd even back in 1966. At big dramatic moments there are ridiculous music cues, and none of it seems authentic. Wood never really gets a handle on her character, who is a facsimile of a Williams heroine--independent, flashy and bold, but Williams didn't really create her (the original one-act consisted of her younger sister telling her story). Redford, who would end up making six films with Pollack, seems at a loss, too, playing the part of a stoic. It's unclear why these two characters are attracted to each other, other than that they are the most beautiful people around.

Also in the cast are Charles Bronson, Robert Blake, and Mary Badham, who was memorable as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. She was about fourteen in this film, and sad to say it's easy to see why she gave up acting, as she was outgrowing the appeal of her child roles.

Pollack would seem to have been a director-for-hire on this project, so other than it being an initial teaming with Redford, this film doesn't suggest anything of what was to come from him.