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Not Ford's Georgia (Tobacco Road) but Elia Kazan's Mississippi, Tiger Tail, "the biggest old wreck of a place in the whole delta." The cloddish bigot (Karl Malden) rattles in the dilapidated manor, reduced to peeping through a hole at the nursery where his virginal teen wife (Carroll Baker) sleeps, thumb in mouth. Mocking laughter surrounds the unconsummated marriage, restarting the old cotton gin means burning down that of the Sicilian competitor (Eli Wallach) who swears revenge. "It's a good-neighbor policy, tit for tat and tat for tit." Tennessee Williams' whirlwind hothouse exhaustively presented, just the Gothic farce for detonating a rotting landscape and a repressed decade. Aspirin and Coca-Cola for breakfast, rooms picked clean by the Ideal Pay as You Go Plan Furniture Company, plenty of rubbish in the Old South backyard along with "poems of Nature" plucked by the feeble-minded aunt (Mildred Dunnock). (She visits hospital patients for their candy, cf. Buñuel's El Bruto.) "Ignorance and indulgence and stink," observes the immigrant, his long afternoon with the child bride moves from hushed insinuation on the porch swing to a riotous game of hide-and-seek. Kazan imprints a lewd image on the blanched screen (blues wailing on the Victrola, whip and mechanical horse and lemonade jar, Carroll squirming happily under Wallach's boot), "a peaceful siesta" follows the ithyphallic floorboard with a confession note nailed to it. "Oh, it feels funny all up and down." Realistic location shooting for the outsized comedy of avarice and cuckoldry, on the sidelines glimpses of segregation and budding resistance, "I shall not be moved." The nymphet grows up, "drift for a while and then vanish," the manse goes under new ownership. Polanski offers an abstruse reading in Cul-de-Sac. Cinematography by Boris Kaufman. With Lonny Chapman, Eades Hogue, Noah Williamson, and Rip Torn. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |