Adaptation “suggested by a one act play by Tennessee Williams” is an all-star roster of talent: directed by Sydney Pollack, produced by John Houseman, co-written by Francis Coppola (with Fred Coe and Edith Sommer), photographed by James Wong Howe and starring Natalie Wood, Robert Redford and Charles Bronson, with appearances by Robert Blake and Dabney Coleman.
Redford plays a railroad rep who hops off the train in a small Mississippi town to announce the suspension of three rail lines and to lay off fifteen men – including Bronson and Blake – during the Depression. He rooms in a boarding house run by a woman whose whimsical daughter (Wood) is the town’s “main attraction” and lives larger than life while pining to get away.
Natalie Wood and Robert Redford have probably never looked better in a movie, but This Property Is Condemned is clumsy from the start, a mishmash of genres and emotions that is never effectively executed by young filmmakers Pollack and Coppola. Related in flashback by Wood’s younger sister after the boarding house and town have effectively been shut down, the first hour is devoted purely to atmosphere and bustle as men circle Wood, while she circles Redford.
The final twenty minutes turns to minor intrigue when the action shifts to New Orleans and the couple must briefly deal with Wood’s scheming mother. The story jumps into 1940s-styled melodrama and has probably one of the most theatrical and anticlimactic resolutions ever filmed.
As an early directorial job, Pollack seems ill-equipped to pull all this theatrical ado together and produce a satisfying film. Stoic tough guy Bronson is miscast as a guy who can’t get the girl.
The chief reason to see the film is James Wong Howe’s lush, exquisite photography, including two memorable helicopter shots sweeping away into the sky. The film is lensed much like a 1940s studio picture, yet in vivid color and with the technological improvements of the time. And how nice is it to watch Natalie Wood cavorting around in such compositions.
            According to legend, Wood had so much trouble performing her drunken bar scene, she got lit for real.
2 responses so far ↓
1 stuart // Sep 13, 2010 at 11:52 pm
I remember well the closing helicopter shot. The screen is filled with natalies face then as it pulls back she is at a window and then window is in a train carriage then a whole train and then its travelling over a causeway across a huge body of water……..utterly superb and all done in one long take
The camera mount /stabiliser in the helicopter was a very new thing and this was I beleive first time it was used in a big movie…
2 steve hansen // May 25, 2011 at 8:53 pm
never saw this, but from looking at the stills i have found on the web, i have to agree, what a knockout couple they were visually. time gets us all in the end — redford aged; wood, tragically died.
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