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Sydney Pollack reveals his modalities right off the bat, The Magnificent Ambersons (a moving camera on the dilapidated remains of the boarding house) and Il Gattopardo (a Saturday night soiree in full bloom, then dissipating). Mississippi during the Depression, "the main attraction" of the small-town belle (Natalie Wood), juggling suitors and dreaming of Mardi Gras. Mama (Kate Reid) has big plans for the married moneybags (John Harding), her own lover (Charles Bronson) joins the maiden in a skinny-dipping session. The stranger (Robert Redford) is no drifter but the railroad representative passing out pink slips, he stays in the room that belonged to the heroine's late father and has a difficult time deciding whether her constant swooning is "unique" or "just... peculiar." "Bye-bye to a rare chance," the younger sister (Mary Badham) recounts the story. Tennessee Williams expanded in the key of William Inge, a transition between classical and modern Hollywood that even counts Francis Ford Coppola among its screenwriters. Sweltering nights, "fainting weather," fireflies like diamonds. That Blanche DuBois "poetic nature," it transforms the ruined passenger car into the Honeydew Express and dust into "talcum, lilac talcum." Garnett's One Way Passage at the local theater, Cukor's Camille half-remembered by the raggedy teenager, Logan's Picnic as a stylistic mainstay. (James Wong Howe dilates his closing shot from that film with an aerial view that pulls back from Wood's face at the window of a train on a lake bridge.) Bourbon Street reunion, upside-down reflections on a fountain before the thunderstorm that interrupts a music-box pirouette. "New Orleans is not a place where a person needs to feel the pain of separation for long." Redford's own A River Runs Through It is a close study. With Alan Baxter, Robert Blake, Ray Hemphill, Brett Pearson, Jon Provost, Bob Random, and Quentin Sondergaard.
--- Fernando F. Croce |