The Fugitive Kind
1959 film by Sidney Lumet
The Fugitive Kind is a 1960 American drama film starring Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, and Joanne Woodward, directed by Sidney Lumet. The screenplay by Meade Roberts and Tennessee Williams was based on the latter's 1957 play Orpheus Descending, itself a revision of his 1940 work Battle of Angels, which closed after its Boston tryout. Frank Thompson designed the costumes for the film.
Despite being set in the Deep South, the United Artists release was filmed in Milton, New York. At the 1960 San Sebastián International Film Festival, it won the Silver Seashell for Sidney Lumet and the Zulueta Prize for Best Actress for Joanne Woodward.
The film is available on videotape and DVD. A two-disc DVD edition by The Criterion Collection was released in April 2010. It was upgraded to Blu-Ray in January 2020 and includes three one-act plays by Williams (among them This Property Is Condemned, also later adapted for the screen) performed on NBC television network also directed by Lumet.
Plot
Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier is a guitar-playing drifter who earns his nickname from his jacket. He flees New Orleans after landing in jail following a police raid on the establishment he was playing at on New Years Eve, to a small town to avoid imprisonment. On his 30th birthday he decides to change his drifting "party boy" life.
“The Fugitive Kind” enters the record as 1959 film by Sidney Lumet. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fugitive, Kind and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“The Fugitive Kind” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Fugitive, Kind and film provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1195600. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 4 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1957, 1940 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Fugitive Kind” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.