Belle Wringer

This Property Is Condemned begins and ends with excerpts from a fragile one-act play by Tennessee Williams. Its heroine, a waif named Willie, picks her way along the railroad tracks in a desolate Mississippi town, carrying "a banged-up doll and a piece of a rotten banana." Brazenly recounting her hardships to a neighborhood lad, Willie on screen (Mary Badham, the perky tomboy of To Kill a Mockingbird) is still affecting as she sashays through a world of half-truths and childish fantasy in her dead sister Alva's tattered finery.

What condemns This Properly is a plot tacked on by three zealous screen writers, to whom the Williams original "suggested" a long, lurid flashback starring Natalie Wood as Alva. During her tenure as main dish at her mother's boarding house for railroad men, Natalie catches her breath occasionally to indicate that she is not long for this whirl. Meanwhile, Kate Reid plays Mama as a sleazy old bagful of Southern comforts who snaps like a lizard whenever Alva mentions striking out alone to taste the high life of Noo Awlyuns.

Certainly the high life at home seems varied enough, what with nude swimming, hot summer nights at the Moon Lake Casino, and Kay Francis movies at the Delta Brilliant Theater. Added excitement turns up, though, in the person of Robert Redford, exuding chin-out charm as a railroad troubleshooter who comes to town with enough pink dismissal slips to put most of Mama's boarders on relief. Ultimately, Alva follows her lover-man to the Big City where she tries both streetwalking and light housekeeping with Redford before fleeing into a rainstorm one wretched night to catch a fatal cold. Sister Willie, in a teary epilogue, attributes Alva's off-screen death to "lung affection."

Aiming for bold, big-screen entertainment, Director Sydney Pollack emphasizes rowdy period flavor and gives his cast leeway for showy performances. The movie as a whole is too bright and vulgar to be dull, but expensive talent has been squandered on every chore except the crucial one of keeping a small, evanescent tragedy in focus.

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