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Rating: A long shot, in the distance a young girl dressed in a red dress, inappropriate for her age, tries to balance on a railway track passing through her area. A sense of alienation and melancholy conveys her singing, a little sad, so disillusioned and alone.
In 1966, Sydney Pollack created "This Property Is Condemned", a cinematic adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola of the one-act play "This Property Is Condemned" by Tennessee Williams. The gaze turns towards the South of the USA in full depression, a small rural reality where people live an ordinary existence driven by lazy inertia, only the railway brings work and manages to give a sense to the community. In this sad and desolate corner of Mississippi lives Alva (Natalie Wood). Alva is a girl with a dream: to leave the damp prison in which she's forced to live to see a bit of the world, represented for her by New Orleans or other big cities the railway passes through. She lives in a land that can give her nothing but demands much, even her dignity. The arrival in town of Owen Legate (Robert Redford), a railway executive sent to make staff cuts and downsize the railway, causes a stir among the workers, and when he tries to take Alva away and save her from a miserable existence, the community rebels.
Shot with a personal fluid style, concrete but with some allowances for passages of great effect, this film has the merit of telling a story yes, simple, but interesting and decidedly on the margins. The rural world of the southern USA has always been an inexhaustible source of stories, and in this film, portraying a female figure crushed by the environment that raised her is a confirmation of Pollack's interest in escaping more conventional narratives (three years later it would be "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?", again with the great depression as a protagonist). Natalie Wood gives us a very beautiful and tormented character, sometimes disenchanted, sometimes colder and more rational, but in the end, Alva is a girl trying to improve a bitter reality by enriching her life with fragile and naive lies:
Owen: "... is it the same Peabody Hotel in Memphis where alligators and ducks swim together in the same small pool?"
Alva: "Yes! Exactly that one"
Owen: "... oh, but look at that. I just wish I knew how they manage to make sure the alligators don't devour the ducks. Can you believe it.."
Very beautiful photography; the beginning is splendid, the flashback technique used to tell the protagonist's life through the story of the younger sister Willie (it's she who walks along the railway track at the beginning) is well managed by Pollack. Excellent Redford and Wood; always recommended for those who love simple stories of ordinary people.
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