This Property Is Condemned (1966)

Williams' "This Property Is Condemned" On Film

This 1966 movie, "This Property is Condemned" is based loosely on a short, early Tennessee Williams play published in 1946 in a volume of one-act plays titled "Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton." I became interested in seeing this film by reading Williams. The film credits state that the movie was "suggested" by Williams' play, indicating a substantial divergence between the two. Indeed, Williams was displeased with the film and tried to have has name removed entirely from the credits. Especially for a short play of only a few pages, film and live theater are two different genres. Each should be enjoyed on its own terms.

The opening and closing scenes of the film are closely related to the play, which includes only two characters, a young girl, Willie, 13, and a boy, Tom, 16. The two meet while walking along the railroad tracks in a shabby Mississippi town during the Depression. Willie gradually tells her story to Tom. She lives alone in an old house along the tracks that served as a rooming house for railroad workers. The house has been condemned. Willie tells how both her mother and her father had run off and her older sister Alva had supported the family by sleeping with the transient railroad workers. Alva has died from consumption and young Willie is following her sister's path by likewise providing entertainment to the railroaders.

Alva never appears in the play but she becomes the lead character of the film which turns Williams' play into a romance. Natalie Wood plays the beautiful and doomed Alva and her beau is a young, handsome Robert Redford playing a character called Owen Legate. The film is set in a fictitious, dusty Mississippi town called Dotson. Alma does indeed sleep around as her hard, gimlet-eyed mother Hazel Starr (Kate Reid) encourages her older daughter to sell her services where they will do the most good and not to worry about love and romance.

When Legate appears to fire many of the local railroad workers in the Depression-plagued community, an instant chemistry develops between him and Alma. Legate is a tough-minded rising worker who does what he needs to do in his job. For all his ambition, he and the beautiful Alma fall in love. Alma's mother, however, has other plans for her daughter. The love affair develops through many twists and turns until Alma meets her tubercular fate, as in Williams' play. Legate, the love affair, and Alma's mother are not characters in Williams' play. (The mother is mentioned in passing. But she runs off first, leaving Alma and Willie in the custody of the father.)

The Alma-Legate story has little of Williams and a good deal of Hollywood. Even so, Natalie Wood is stunning in this movie and a treat to watch as she falls in love with Redford and struggles to find her own path in life. The movie was filmed in a small Mississippi town with realistic scenes of the rural deep South that include the rooming house itself and the main street of the town. The scenes of the tracks -- and all sides of these tracks are wrong -- of the railroad yards, and of the steam trains roaring by through the poor town all capture well the small-town Depression era South. The character of Willie (Mary Badham) sings a little song, "Wish Me a Rainbow" that is emblematic of both movie and film and that has become a small standard.

The movie largely works in its own right, particularly with Natalie Wood, Redford, and the railroads even though it is thematically different from Williams' play. Admirers of Tennessee Williams or Natalie Wood, or those interested in Southern stories will enjoy this film.

Robin Friedman