Rent This Property Is Condemned (1966)

Southern Melodrama (spoiler). - This Property Is Condemned review by Steve

It is apt this film came at the back end of the cycle of post-war southern melodramas influenced by Tennessee Williams, because it is a story about the end of things. Natalie Wood is a sex bomb living in a small Mississippi backwater who falls for a stranger (Robert Redford) who arrives from New Orleans in the 1920s to shut down the railway works. He represents the escape she dreams of.

The film is expanded from a one act play by Williams and the closer the script stays to its elegiac poetry and symbolism the better. The screenwriters (including Francis Coppola) produced an uneven adaptation. The story is told by the siren's sister (Mary Badham), a child who has been left behind to live alone in the closed down guest house once run by her mother.

The property is condemned when the town fails to survive the loss of its industry. Natalie is property too, bartered for the value of her body by her rapacious mother. To her death. It's a story of the impact of the depression on the decline of the poor rural south, the land Williams grew up in. 

There are his familiar themes of guilt and escape, and particularly the failure of the impractical, romantic south to survive the realism of capitalism. There is a powerful evocation of humid summer nights on the river: Natalie Wood is so hot she is continually trying to lower her body heat! Of course she and Redford are beautiful leads. Not a critics favourite but a treat for fans of Williams.