This Property Is Condemned

A Southern Gothic Treat
How could a movie fanatic go wrong with this one? Sidney Pollack directing, with Francis Ford Coppola helping out with the adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play? A great cast , with especially memorable performances from Natalie Wood, Kate Reid and Mary Badham (as younger sister, Willie Starr)? Roberts Redford and Blake and Charles Bronson thrown in for lagniappe? Sounds like great gumbo to me.

Natalie Wood is absolutely alluring in this one. She and Redford, who also teamed together in the memorable INSIDE DAISY CLOVER, did indeed appear to have a lot of screen chemistry. He is the cynical company man who appears like the Grim Reaper in a small, shabby, depression-era southern town, carrying pink slips with him, instead of a scythe. The role has a lot of resonance now, what with all the corporate downsizing currently going on. Needless to say, the townfolk don't much cotton to Mr Owen Legate, with his fancy suit and self-assured ways.

With a couple notable exceptions. Tom...

I loved it as a kid and I love it still today!
When I first saw this film, as a preteen, I thought it was the ultimate romance. Well, I got older ... and saw it again. And it's still pretty romantic. In fact, it's still a film I watch over and over.

The performances are really juicy. Everyone in it seems to understand the over-the-top quality of Tennessee Williams, and no one disappoints. You'll find Charles Bronson and a very young Robert Blake in supporting roles here. Both Kate Reid, as Wood's driving, ambitious `Mama' using her beautiful daughter to hook the town's men, and Mary Badham, as `Willie', the not-so-beautiful younger sister who idolizes Wood, are quite simply superb. Every move, every look from both are truly sublime.

Natalie Wood has always been one of my favorite stars, and she is every inch the star in this one. It's clear from her first closeup how special, how different, and how exciting Alva Starr is to everyone she comes in contact with. She meets her match in Robert Redford, the man who has no dreams,...

Wish me a rainbow, wish me a star ...
A year after Tennessee Williams's 1945 breakthrough success with "The Glass Menagerie," a collection of his then-existing one-act plays was published under the title "27 Wagons Full of Cotton." Included in that collection was "This Property Is Condemned," a two-person play describing a chance encounter between a boy named Tom and an orphaned school drop-out named Willie by the railroad tracks outside a near-abandoned, post-depression-era Southern town. During their conversation, Willie tells Tom about her sister Alva, who was once the town's "Main Attraction" with suitors galore, fancy clothes and always out to party; but died young when her lungs "got affected." Yet, everything about Willie already spells "doom" as well: Her dreaminess and lack of realism, her cheap rhinestone bracelet and raggedy old-fashioned party dress (which were once her sister's), her shabby doll, and of course the fact that she still lives in her family's old railroad-side boarding house, long-since shut...

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