What is Pollyanish but the fanciful? And what is Nature but the destroyer of fanciful ideas, towards grounding the self into the more ultimatum of existence? To choose more life not less, then, requires a focused attention on what is right around the corner. Because the beer is that easy to be had and lost.

In the clever scripting by Mr. Coppola et al of a one-act Tennessee Wiliams play, This Property is Condemned returns to that playwrights familiar ol’setting of a world secluded if not reclusive from the cosmopolitanism of other parts of the United Sates, let alone globe. It is here, nestled in the backroads and back-rails of agricultural cargo freight where an abandoned mother with two daughters make ends meet constantly entertaining the train jobbers in their boarding house.

Mother, played by Edith Sommer, is phenomenally matriarchal, in a balancing act of caring and caring for more important matters than her beautiful daughter Alva’s  (played terrifically by Natalie Woods) virginity. Indeed, this is a remarkable feat of the screenplay – in the examination of such feminine tactics (if not antics) in achieving those baseline metabolic drives of food and shelter. For the daughter is ostensibly conformist to the mother’s directive in loosening up the “boys” who fill the boarding room with flirtiness which becomes second-natured to her.

That typical, breadwinning, patrimonial care absent in the home leads to an impeccably witnessed little girl lost in a grown man’s world. To which she dreams about the bigger wonder out yonder with her fanciful “Mardis Gras” fodder; a goal which is given no prescriptions for filling in proper order; and so retain dogmatically unfulfilled in her mind’s eye as the seasons change and the knowing of her worth is that self-evident amongst the rowdiness of lower-class men. 

She strikes a chord with a new one, Owen by Robert Redford, who happens to be tired by loose lips by his probably double-digit forays into the economies of boarding stays which his railroad employer accommodates for him; as he frequents the byways terminating employment along the lines. 

That, yes, greater authority is implicated with such decision-making; this is simply upheaval in the lives of know nothings, just trying to have a gay old time.

That yes, greater authority by the time of the capitalized successes of railroad freight leads to the proper havoc he introduces to the rail-line foreman of the need to cut the losses from the commercial operations in backwater Mississippa’. 

And this immediately applies pressure on the earnest yet foolish Alva with her plans, and that of her mothers’.

That tension, that pull, between duty to obey, and the need to free oneself, from rebellion to independence, is a fantastic struggle that is laid bare in the film. It appropriately places the viewer into suppressing the judgments of someone like Alva who sees the writing on the wall, and is not going to settle for male patterned baldness in Memphis.

(Not that there is anything wrong with that.)

She has a genuine connection with Owen; and she is not going to drop that, despite his earnest candor in describing her appearancee: her brazen naughtiness.

It is high-minded that he knows what he is in for, as he plots to settle with her in marriage. 

Such a serious commitment to look past her ignorance with men; that lacking that patrimonial wisdom of appearing best through the most honorable conduct with one’s intuitions and natural power; does not populate her mind with family life, only endless New Orleans dancing, to absorb more and more of the centripetalism of socializing with higher ends in Nature.

That Earth calls to every young person, naive with their youth, unto the fate of family; leading to the gradient of qualities of those who are good and those who are bad at understanding this truth. It leads to such susceptibilities of the fairer sex contrasted to civil society’s favoritism of Mr. Johnson and his winnings from multi-decade efforts; in ways which undoubtedly made him compromise being fun at dances; which is the rub.

Unto that patterned hope that an Owen would overlook those blemishes of a poor family upbringing, as opposed to himself striving for more selection. If he will, she ought to take him up on it.

But this is not a matter of Natural Selection as it is with brute force reality of market systems causing new dramatic conflict in the human race. For, per Herr Joseph Schumpeter remarks, creative destruction leads many of the youth susceptible for the vicissitudes of pink slips. And therefore, the fate of families germinating out of such fateful choices of entertaining Mr. Johnson to keep mamma fed or to take a leap of faith. 

How to best prepare them (the youth)? With more true knowledge about themselves, beginning with the nature of the body, and ultimately the nature of free thought. It may be free, but it may not be wise. It may be pure, but it can be ruined by outside powers. Beginning from inside the family. 

That conceitedness of self-seeking, out of the body’s original anatomical design, works itself into the cosmic foray of the film. A quintessentially American ethos; of daring to know a better life with one’s freedom to go.

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהֹוָה֙ אֶל־אַבְרָ֔ם לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ׃

יהוה said to Abram, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. (Genesis 12:1 Sefaria Translation)

 

Grade: A