"This Property Is Condemned" came towards the end of Hollywood's Tennessee Williams cycle of the fifties and early sixties. By 1966 most of Williams's most famous plays- "A Streetcar Named Desire", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", "The Glass Menagerie", etc.- had already been filmed, and this film was based on a much less well-known one-act play from 1946.
The story takes place during the depression era of the early thirties in the fictional Mississippi town of Dodson, a major railroad junction. The film takes the form of a frame story in which a girl named Willie Starr (her parents wanted a boy) tells the story of her older sister Alva to a friend. Alva's story is largely shown in flashback, although at the very end the film cuts back to Willie explaining what eventually happened to her sister.
Willie and Alva's mother, Hazel, runs the Starr Boarding House in Dodson, their father having deserted the family. (The film's title derives from the fact that by the end of the film the boarding house has fallen into disrepair and has been condemned by the local authorities as unfit for human habitation). Because of the depression, business is not good, and Hazel hopes to exploit the good looks of her elder daughter to improve her financial prospects. She encourages Alva to "get friendly with" (euphemism for sleep with) an older man named Mr. Johnson, one of the guests in her boarding house, who has taken a fancy to her. Johnson is already married, although he is separated from his wife, an invalid, but Hazel is not particularly worried about his domestic circumstances; all she cares about is that he pays good money for his room, and that if Alva is "friendly" to him he will want to stay longer.
The flirtatious Alva, however, is not interested in being a pawn in her mother's schemes. She is much more interested in another of her mother's guests, Owen Legate. Part of the attraction is that Owen, a railroad official, is young and handsome, and part is that he is from New Orleans, a city which to the small-town girl Alva seems a very glamorous, sophisticated place, with the same sort of allure that Moscow has to Chekhov's "Three Sisters". Owen, however, is very unpopular with the townsfolk of Dodson because his task is to lay off several railroad employees due to cutbacks made necessary by the depression.
One of the attractions of Tennessee Williams adaptations to the film stars of the period was that he created some great characters who gave those stars the chance to show off their acting skills in a way that more standard Hollywood fare did not. "This Property Is Condemned" gave Robert Redford, not the huge name in 1966 that he was to become a few years later, a chance to prove himself a serious actor, just as his friend Paul Newman had done earlier in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "Sweet Bird of Youth". Redford was also to star in "The Chase", another drama with a Deep South setting, later the same year. This was Redford's second film in his long collaboration with director Sydney Pollack; the first had been "War Hunt".
Redford's style of acting was generally very different to that of his co-star Natalie Wood, he being calmer and more controlled, she often more nervous and agitated. They combine well here, however, with their different styles well-suited to their respective characters. Owen is the stronger character, emotionally in control; he finds his duties as an officer of the railroad distasteful but this does not prevent him from discharging them as efficiently as possible. Alva, beneath her flirtatious exterior, is a sensitive young woman, but one who can also be wild and impulsive. There is another particularly good acting performance from Kate Reid as the scheming, domineering and manipulative Hazel, a woman happy to prostitute her own daughter for her own financial advantage. Reid was only 36 at the time she made this film, only nine years older than her supposed daughter Wood, but nevertheless is still completely convincing. It was interesting to see Charles Bronson in something other than an action thriller, although before he became typecast as a tough guy leading man he did sometimes take supporting roles in more thoughtful dramas. ("The Sandpiper" is another example).
Like the play upon which it is based, the film, despite some big names among the cast, is also not particularly well known. Having recently seen it for the first time, however, I feel that it deserves to be better known. It is not perhaps a classic of the cinema like "A Streetcar Named Desire" or "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", but nevertheless contains some fine acting and works well as a touching human drama and love story. 7/10
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