The man in the snakeskin
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The man in the snakeskin |
| Original title | The fugitive child |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1960 |
| length | 119 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Sidney Lumet |
| script |
Tennessee Williams Meade Roberts ; after Tennessee Williams' play Orpheus descends |
| production |
United Artists ; Producer: Martin Jurow Richard Shepherd |
| music | Kenyon Hopkins |
| camera | Boris Kaufman |
| cut | Carl Lerner |
| occupation | |
| |
The man in the snakeskin is an American film by Sidney Lumet from 1960. It is based on the play Orpheus descends (original title: Orpheus descending ) by Tennessee Williams , who also wrote the film script.
action
The place of the action is initially New Orleans , the time is the present. After a night in prison, Val Xavier is on trial. Val is a trademark nightclub entertainer who wears a snakeskin jacket and describes his guitar as his partner. He is at a personal turning point, is deeply tired of the soulless party life and wants to start a new life.
After his release he goes to Mississippi , where his car breaks down in a thunderstorm night in a small town in (fictitious) Two River County . The house in which he is looking for shelter belongs to Sheriff Talbot, whose wife Vee offers him night quarters in the prison cell. Vee is a warm but intimidated woman who takes refuge in painting from the bigotry and brutality of those around her. A particularly brutal representative of the evil little town is her husband, the sheriff, who chases and shoots an escaped prisoner during Vee's conversation with Val.
Another resident of the place is Carol Cutrere, a sensitive, rebellious and hungry for life, but bitter and run-down young woman who never tires of blaming others for her narrow-mindedness, her superstitions and her corruption: “And I'm not a reformer anymore . I'm just a lewd vagrant. And I'm gonna show them. Show them all just how lewd, a lewd vagrant can be when she puts her whole heart into it, the way I do mine “ (German: I'm no longer a reformer. I'm just an indecent vagabond. And I'll show you. Show them how indecent an indecent vagabond can be if she puts all her heart into it, as I do. ) The other residents therefore treat her like a leper; her drunk brother even got it that she is legally banned from being in the county . Since Carol immediately realizes that Val is also on the side of the outsiders, she desperately seeks his presence. Val rejects her, however, because he doesn't really want anything to do with her party background; Carol's fragility worries him at least as much.
With Vee's help, Val finds a job as a salesman at the Torrance Mercantile Store . The owner of this shop is the seriously ill and helplessly sadistic Jabe Torrance. His Italian wife, whom everyone calls Lady , is an intense and passionate personality who hates her tyrannical husband, but bears her fate devotedly. She was once pregnant with Carol's brother David's child, but lost the child in a miscarriage. David, who hushed up his secret love affair with the daughter of a bootlegger , only learns about it in the course of the plot.
Lady is immediately fascinated by Val, who is a narrator of strange and strangely beautiful stories. Although the stranger is much younger than she is, she throws herself into his arms. She shows Val the ruins of the vineyard that used to belong to her father until an anonymous mob of racist residents destroyed the place by setting fire to it; the father was also killed. Lady's dream is to resurrect the destroyed work of her father in the form of a pastry shop that she wants to open next to the shop.
Lady, who finds it difficult to conceal her desire, does not come closer to Val at first. Jabe, who follows everything from his sick bed, delights in the futility of their courtship. However, Val no longer believes in the possibility of human closeness:
- Val: (presses lady's hand) What do you feel? (German: What do you feel? )
- Lady: Your hand. ( Your hand )
- Val: That's right. The size of my knuckles and the heat of my palm. ( That's right. The size of my knuckles and the warmth of my palm. )
- Lady: What are you demonstrating now? ( What are you trying to show me now? )
- Val: That's how well we know each other. All we know is just the skin surface of each other (drops her hand). ( That's how well we know each other. All we know about each other is just the surface of the skin. )
- Lady: Why do you say these things to me tonight? ( Why are you telling me these things tonight? )
- Val: Because nobody ever gets to know anybody. We're all… we're, all of us, sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own lonely skins for as long as we live on this earth. ( Because one person never gets to know another. We are all ... we are, each of us, condemned to solitary confinement in our own lonely skin as long as we live on this earth. )
To make it easy for Lady to throw him out, he embezzles money from the till and uses it in gambling, but later puts the amount back in the till. Desperate over Val's inaccessibility, Lady has since begun to tyrannize him more and more, and when the tensions turn into a violent argument, Val eventually becomes Lady's lover.
Val builds a fairytale and bizarre pastry shop for Lady. On the day of the opening, Jabe confronts his wife with the fact that he himself was involved in the attack on her father's vineyard. On the street, Sheriff Talbot discovers Val talking to his wife Vee, becomes jealous and gives Val a deadline within which he has to leave the city. Although Val really loves Lady, he is ready to obey, but gets into another violent argument with Lady, who does not want to let him go. This is witnessed by Jabe's nurse Nurse Porter, who is full of bigoted contempt for her patient's wife. She elicits Lady to admit that Val is expecting a child. Jabe rises from his deathbed, sets the pastry shop on fire, and then shoots his wife. A fire squad consisting of Sheriff Talbot and his sadistic deputies arrives and prevents Val, whom Talbot believes is the arsonist, from leaving the burning building. Val dies in the flames, only his snakeskin jacket remains undamaged and is found by Carol, who then fled the place:
- Carol: Wild things leave skins behind them, they leave clean skins and teeth and white bones, and these are tokens passed from one to another, so that the fugitive kind can follow their kind. (German: Wild creatures leave skins behind, they leave behind clean skins and teeth and white bones, and these are pledges that one gives to the other so that the restless can follow their fellows. )
shape
The film largely sticks to the literary model and tells the story in strict chronological order, with later scenes often referring to earlier ones and explaining them in retrospect.
Unlike the very successful Tennessee Williams adaptation The Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), but just like the most famous others - The Glass Menagerie (1950), Endstation Sehnsucht (1951), The Tattooed Rose (1955) and Baby Doll (1956) - The Man in the Snakeskin was filmed in black and white.
Production and reception
template
The starting point of the film is Tennessee Williams' play Battle of Angels , which premiered in 1940, but was received so unfriendly by the public and critics that the play never made it to Broadway . Only years later did Williams attempt a rework, the result of which was premiered on Broadway in March 1957 under the title Orpheus Descending (German: Orpheus descends ). Williams wanted Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani to lead the Broadway version. Magnani was not available, however, because her English was insufficient for an English-language stage production; First, Brando no longer liked to play theater, and second, he was right to judge that the play was a vehicle for the leading lady , while the role of Val was comparatively small. Williams rewrote the role several times, but could not interest Brando. On Broadway, the leading roles were therefore cast with Maureen Stapleton and Cliff Robertson ; Lois Smith appeared in the role of Carol .
Production preparations
The stage production was a fiasco, which even the highly gifted Stapleton could not prevent. While there was really no reason why a play that failed twice on stage should have more success as a film, Williams pushed for an adaptation. When Magnani agreed to take part in a film adaptation - she was able to prepare her English text from scene to scene - Hal B. Wallis , who had produced The Tattooed Rose with Magnani , also got involved in the project, but then sold his rights the young producer team Martin Jurow and Richard Shepherd, who were soon supported by United Artists . Jurow was formerly Magnani's agent. Shepherd also got in touch with Brando's agent, Jay Kanter, who could only say that Brando was still not interested in the role. The role of Val was then offered to Anthony Franciosa , a choice that Magnani was extremely pleased because she had actually started a love affair with him while filming Wild Is the Wind in front of the camera. The script was written by Tennessee Williams with the assistance of young Meade Roberts; he borrowed the title The Fugitive Kind from a piece he had written in college. As a director, at a suggestion by Magnani, who had seen The Twelve Jurors , Sidney Lumet was signed, who was a veteran of the Group Theater and therefore an obvious choice for Williams.
The script was completed in autumn 1958. Afterwards new difficulties arose: Wallis had withdrawn from the production of the film, but from his original contract he still had a right to the collaboration of Anthony Franciosa, which he wanted to use in his film Career (1959), so that Franciosa for Der Mann in the snakeskin wasn't available after all. Surprisingly, Marlon Brando announced in December that he was interested in the role after all. At the time, Brando was more than busy shooting the film The Obsessive , but at the same time his divorce from Anna Kashfi fell , and Brando desperately needed a lot of money. He asked for $ 1 million for his participation in The Man in the Snakeskin - an outrageously high salary that had never been paid in Hollywood until then and which the President of United Artists, Arthur Krim , nevertheless agreed to because the film was cast with Brando and Magnani promised to be a box office magnet both at home and abroad. Since the success of The Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Tennessee Williams' reputation as a box-office writer had also been restored. Magnani and Lumet should each receive about $ 125,000 in addition to a profit sharing.
Brando, who was a lover of Italian neorealism , admired Magnani. Conversely, Magnani admired Brando and was more than compensated for the departure of Franciosa by the prospect of being able to play with him. In order to make the role of Val as attractive as possible for Brando, she even advocated an expansion of this role at Williams. At the same time Jurow and Shepherd filled the remaining roles. For the role of Carol, they selected Joanne Woodward, who had received an Oscar the previous year for her appearance in Eva with the three faces . The Man in the Snakeskin became the first film in American film history to feature three Oscar winners for best leading actor. Woodward was actually employed by 20th Century Fox , but could be "borrowed" for a fee of $ 30,000. Maureen Stapleton, who had played the role of the lady on stage, contented herself with the small role of the sheriff's wife Vee in the film.
Filming
The two-week rehearsal period, which began in early June 1959, was overshadowed by severe personal stress for all three main actors. Woodward had recently given birth to a child; Magnani was still a beautiful woman at 51, but struggled to get older; Brando had just had a serious argument with his divorced first wife and was simultaneously busy with the post-production of his film The Obsessed . Without reading the last draft of the script carefully, he surprised Williams with numerous suggestions for changes, none of which were accepted. One exception is the prologue in which Val testifies in court in New Orleans - a scene that many critics later rated as the best in the film. Brando had suggested the prologue primarily because it gave his role more weight.
Shooting began on June 22, 1959 in Milton , a small town in upstate New York that could easily be transformed into the backdrop of a southern town for the camera. The interior was later shot in a studio in the Bronx . Brando's collaboration with Magnani was difficult from the start. Their work style was incompatible; While Brando always needed a lot of time to feel her way into a role, the spirited Magnani threw herself into a new role from the beginning without reserves. She was also used to continuing the affairs she had with her film partners in front of the camera after filming had ended; Brando, who usually did the same thing with his film partners, pissed them off by treating them with almost parodistic courtoisie, but very distant. This friction made it extremely difficult for him at the same time to credibly implement the erotic tension that should exist between Lady and Val on the screen. Brando felt emotionally drained. The situation was just as uncomfortable for Magnani, as the role of an older woman wooing a younger man in vain forced her into a confrontation with a subject that was very delicate for her personally. In addition, she spoke hardly any English and had trouble making herself heard on the set, so that Brando and the rest of the shooting crew soon formed an almost united front against her. She then rightly complained that director Lumet was paying much more attention to Brando's acting than hers.
This conflict ended in a competition that Magnani and Brando then fought in front of the camera and in which they tried to steal each other's attention. For example, during the filming of the scene in which Val introduces himself to Lady and she demands a letter of recommendation from him, Brando was not satisfied with simply pulling out this paper and handing it to Magnani, he pulled a folded, crumpled letter out of his pocket which he then laboriously unfolded and smoothed out before finally handing it over to his partner. That was not only a brilliant acting idea, but also allowed him to stage himself broadly and impressively. At the end of that take, Magnani asked to repeat the scene again. Brando repeated his little game, but Magnani now picked it up and handled the paper just as extensively and laboriously as Brando had done before, so that she could now claim the effect for herself. Both also mastered the art of a take in which the screen partner had shown an all too brilliant acting performance, e.g. B. to spoil it apparently unintentionally by a slip of the tongue.
Additional problems arose from the immature script. B. did not make plausible why Val does not give his affection to Carol but to Lady. To make up for this weakness, Woodward had to play the role of Carol in an exaggerated hysterical manner and in a very unfavorable mask. In her baggy trench coat - her hair hydrogen-blonde and poorly coiffed, her face pale made up and her eyes blackened with kohl - she looked like a madwoman. Regardless of the script's shortcomings, Lumet took tremendous care in filming, for example, filming one of the key scenes - Val's monologue about the little bird that never touches the ground; the scene was particularly technically demanding - 39 times.
For the second time in his career, Brando could be heard in the film with a vocal number: with the song Blanket Roll Blues composed by Kenyon Hopkins and written by Tennessee Williams .
publication
At the beginning of December 1959, The Man in the Snakeskin was first presented to an audience for testing purposes. The performance was a disaster and in many places an involuntary laugh success. The film was then re-cut and shortened by 25 minutes, whereby the story was so taken out of context that much could no longer be understood. The revised version was released in April 1960, where it was played in front of empty houses. With a few exceptions, the reviews were devastating. The criticism was directed primarily at the characters who were not perceived as complex or interesting, but as pathological and ugly. The man in the snakeskin had to be compared above all with the Tennessee Williams adaptation, The Cat on the Hot Tin Roof , published the previous year , whose protagonists Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman had shown a much more impressive “chemistry” than Brando and Magnani. The Man in the Snakeskin was the first Marlon Brando film to lose money. The film did not come close to bringing in its production cost of $ 2.3 million.
Awards
The only film awards that The Man in the Snakeskin won were the Silver Shell (for Sidney Lumet) and the Zulueta Award for Best Actress (Joanne Woodward) at the Festival Internacional de Cine de Donostia-San Sebastián in 1960.
Reviews
“Aesthetically appealing variation of the Orpheus theme based on a play by Tennessee Williams, whose nihilistic message is disguised by the poetization of poor life. Well played and staged. "
"(...); a film full of melancholy poetry and inner truth. (Rating: 3 stars (very good)) "
literature
- Tennessee Williams : Orpheus descends , in: Orpheus descends / stairs up. Two plays (original title: Orpheus descending ). With an afterword by Helmar Harald Fischer. Jussenhoven and Fischer, Cologne 2002, 214 pages, ISBN 3-930226-07-3
- Peter Manso: Brando. The Biography , New York: Hyperion, 1994. ISBN 0-7868-6063-4 , pp. 497-514 .
Web links
- The Fugitive Kind in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Cinemythology article and photo (Eng.)
- en: Orpheus Descending
- Orpheus Descending in the Internet Broadway Database
- New York Times (English).
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Man in the Snakeskin. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed February 19, 2019 .
- ↑ Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-89136-392-3 , p. 540