SnoopyStyle Willie Starr (Mary Badham) is walking the train tracks next to her home in Dodson, Mississippi. It's her family's boarding house since condemned. She is befriended by Tom and she recounts the former glory days of the lively house. The beauty of her sister Alva (Natalie Wood) entrances newly arrived railway man Owen Legate (Robert Redford). Everybody wants her including mama's boyfriend J.J. Nichols (Charles Bronson). It's later revealed Owen's true purpose in town.This was adapted from a Tennessee Williams one act play. Writers include Francis Ford Coppola and the director is Sydney Pollack. With such great beautiful stars, this really can't lose. Natalie Wood is vamping for all her worth but Redford is holding back in a cool demeanor. Mary Badham played Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. It's too bad that she couldn't succeed beyond a child star. She's loads of energy and has a very compelling screen presence. This may not be a classic but it does hold some nice stuff that movie lovers should check out. The length is a bit over-extended. When they leave the town, the movie loses a bit of intensity. It would be better to resolve the story and ride out into the sunset.

DKosty123 This film has the best of the best in big names. Granted making a 1 act play into a 2 hour film is a stretch, with all the quality involved this movie does it and then some. It is a tale of a domineering Southern Mother who is using her oldest daughter on the bottom to try and elevate herself to the top. It is interesting to see mom take an older man whose wife is in a nursing home, and force her older daughter to please him to get some money. The basic theme is a bit flawed in that if mom were not so obnoxious a gold digger, she could get the money from him directly without subjecting he daughter to such a terrible ugly truth.Performances are elevating this film. Natalie Wood acts and looks her best and at this point she is the best looking actress to grace a 1960's screen. Kudos to Ann Lander's and Edith Head for costume designs as the way they dress her looks perfect and yet is not a typical look of a woman whose being used by a pimp mom. The story of what a dysfunctional family in the old south was like is perfectly conveyed and then some. There is one scene with Wood lying on her stomach with Redford on a bed where he wraps his arm around her waist that wood looks so fetching that if I had been doing the scene I have no doubt I would have not been able to resist massaging her rump. Not sure how Redford did resist.This movie has a lot of strength, more than it has ever been given credit for as all the performances are strong and lusty. Even the skinny dipping scene has mom jump in and yet it seems natural. While the ending is very typical of period films. getting there is a guilty incestuous pleasure which makes this one must viewing for any man who is looking for an imagination of one of the most beautiful women ever being forced to please men. She is powerless to stop it, yet she is looking so good that plucking Wood by watching this one is a trip well worth taking. The rest of it is a bonus.

jzappa What stays with me about this ably produced, well-acted Depression-era drama about the upshot of railroad cutbacks on a cluster of boarding-house folks is the controlling effect Kate Reid has on her daughter Natalie Wood, to the point perhaps of tragedy. Why does she control her this way? For her own selfish reasons, maybe, but also for her own feelings of security and peace of mind, which Wood herself is longing for. The real tragedy could be the society for whom Redford, Wood's object of passion, works, which pits mother against daughter in a way that happiness can only be had one way or another, with or without the happiness of one or another.Sydney Pollack would become a maker of classic, star-studded Hollywood period dramas, thrillers, romances and comedies, but This Property is Condemned, which is maybe a little overdone, is one of his strongest pieces because it has a beautifully tragic understanding of the trap that is set by a desperate society of people. People who love each other resort to respectively manipulating each other to the point of excruciating emotional pain and abandoning one another's penultimate wishes. It is either Tennessee Williams' original one-act or the script by Francis Coppola, Fred Coe and Edith Sommer that makes this come so powerfully alive in at least two scenes, but it's the strong acting between Reid and Wood, and the one she gives me. She stars as the youthful Dixie belle, older daughter of the former who plays a sordid proprietor to some railroad men. Wood longs for another life while she teases every drop of testosterone in town, functioning as the shill for her mother. It is a movie that's adult without being scandalous, poignant without being slushy. Charles Bronson is first-rate as a coarse lodger, by the way.Does it have the vibrant energy between performers that Tootsie does? No. Does it have the brilliant editing touch and metaphoric tragedy of They Shoot Horses, Don't They? No. But I would still consider it among the strongest of Pollack's directorial works, the first collaboration between he and star Robert Redford, who gives an exceptional performance as the railroad efficiency specialist sent to dismiss nearly all of the crew. In narrative terms, the role is unrewarding and burdensome, but Redford, through tone, look and physicality, consummate acting, makes the character fully human.

Jay Raskin It is hard to decide what is most outstanding: the atmospheric story and script by Tennessee Williams and Francis Ford Coppola, the gorgeous cinematography by James Wong Howe, the smooth direction by Sidney Pollack, or the dazzling performance by Natalie Wood.Elizabeth Taylor won the Academy Award for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe," that year and certainly deserved it, but Natalie's performance was as fine as the other nominees: Lynn Redgrave in "Georgy Girl," Vanessa Redgrave in "Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment," Ida Kaminska in "The Shop on Main Street" and Anouk Aimee in "Un homme et une femme" She did receive a Golden Globe best actress nomination for the film.Robert Redford is laid back here and it works perfectly. He just has to be charming and adorable and he is. In the four great romantic movies he did, "Barefoot in the Park" with Jane Fonda, "The Way We Were," with Barbara Streisand, "Out of Africa," with Meryl Steep, and this one, Redford basically allows his leading actresses to be the focus of every scene. He is at his best when underplaying and interacting and that is what we get here.Mary Badham, who was nominated as a child for her performance in "To Kill a Mockingbird" shows that she was perhaps the most natural child actress of the 1960's. It is also fun watching Robert Blake and Charles Bronson is small supporting roles.The movie is absorbing with the type of wonderfully drawn lonely, sexy, and ordinary people with grand illusions that make all of Tennessee Williams works so wonderful.Don't miss it if you haven't seen it, and see it again if you haven't seen it in a while. It hasn't aged at all.