holds up very well. The cast is excellent. Look for a young Robert Blake as one of Alva's admirers, of which there are many. Mary Badham shows how natural and good a child actress she truly was and that her performance in Mockingbird was not just a flash in the pan. I wish she had done more. Charles Bronson is fine as Hazel's boyfriend who is in lust with Wood's character. I think the plot is fine, not sure why so much criticism. It develops the characters and moves along just fine. Robert Redford is solid in his role. He struggles with his job and morality. That is never easy. But Natalie Wood is outstanding. Not only her screen presence is mesmerizing, but her interpretation of her role is a revelation. She is no innocent, yet she is innocent and she portrays that very well. She has never been more beautiful and to me she rivaled Elizabeth Taylor in looks. She was not nominated for an Academy Award that year, but I believe she she deserved it.

A small town southern girl is exploited by her mother until a handsome stranger comes to town. The romantic tale is told in one long flashback. Overall, it's a slow going star vehicle. I may be a minority, but Wood's unabashed histrionics do get tiresome. Too often, we get the point without her heavy-handed effusions, ones that kept reminding me that this is just a movie, after all. All in all, Wood's Alva and Redford's Owen amount to emotionally repressed opposites. He's all walled-off emotion and starkly tied to reality, while she's all dreams and escape from a dreary existence. Owen's icy attitude is understandable since his job amounts to ruthlessly laying off working men. As a result, he can't afford to acknowledge his true feelings. But Alva's character is also understandable (Reid) since her life is emotionally barren thanks to a ruthless Mom (Reid), a cheap boardinghouse, and a round of men pimped by Mother. Thus Alva's emotionally confused and victimized. Nonetheless, each could provide what the other needs to overcome their crippling isolation.That's a good premise, but the package is really overdone by both Wood and indulgent director Pollack. On one hand, Pollack's bound down by a spotty script with scenes that too often fail to advance the plot. On the other, the director too often stretches things out by indulging in fashionable slow pans. Fortunately, photographer Howe blends the colors of Depression era poverty in a smoothly done style. And catch spunky little Mary Badham stealing the film as a plain-faced adolescent. Her manner is both refreshing and natural. Too bad the powerful duo of Bronson and Blake are wasted with too little dialog and no chance at personality. Anyway, I sure didn't see that ending coming. It's a surprise, and explains why the romantic New Orleans scenes are drawn out.All in all, a better script, a more disciplined lead actress, and a less indulgent director might have salvaged the promising premise. As things stand, however, the movie's an unfortunate misfire.

In 1961's "Splendor in the Grass," Natalie Wood gave what is perhaps her finest performance, an Oscar-worthy one, playing the part of Wilma Dean ("Deanie") Loomis, a lovesick teenager in Depression-era Kansas. Five years later, Natalie played a similar role, with some important differences, in the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams' one-act play "This Property Is Condemned." Told in flashback via the reminiscences of her younger sister Willie (Mary Badham, who most viewers will know as Scout from 1962's "To Kill a Mockingbird"), the film tells the story of Alva Starr, "the main attraction" in the fictitious town of Dodson, Mississippi in the early '30s. Alva, it seems, was a beautiful young woman who was used by her mother to attract men to her boardinghouse, but Alva--a dreamy, fantasizing sort whose primary ambition was to get out of this small town and go to New Orleans--never really fell in love until she met Owen Legate (Robert Redford), a hatchet man for the railroad who came to Dodson to lay off many of its male workers. Thus, before long, Alva was having an affair with the most unpopular man in town....An entire treatise could be written comparing the characters of Deanie and Alva, but let's keep things simple here and say that both young women become involved in first love affairs that lead to unfortunate conclusions; both have unlikable mothers who interfere with their love lives; both are living in small towns in the early days of the Depression. But whereas Deanie was virginal, and a woman whose frustrated love drove her to the brink of insanity, Alva was anything but, and she at least got to share some passionate moments with the man she lusted after. Natalie Wood, it should be said here, looks absolutely gorgeous in "This Property" (indeed, the woman grew more beautiful every year that she lived!), and director Sydney Pollack, in this, his second film, wisely gives her any number of stunning close-ups. (Pollack and Redford, of course, would go on to work together professionally for many years, in films such as "Jeremiah Johnson," "The Way We Were," "Three Days of the Condor" and "The Electric Horseman.") Natalie and Redford make a handsome-looking couple, to put it mildly; they had just appeared together in "Inside Daisy Clover" the year before. Pollack's direction is just fine here, in his sophomore film effort, DOP James Wong Howe's work is typically excellent (I love his soaring camera work as Alva enters New Orleans by train, and in the film's very last scene), Edith Head's costumes are marvelous, and co-screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola's script is just aces. So why does the often-dubious Maltin film guide call the picture "absurd" and "trash" and give it a lousy 2 stars (the same rating it gives "Taxi Driver," please recall)? Don't ask me. I feel that Natalie Wood is just terrific in this film, and she is given many scenes in which to shine. Just check out how great she is in her drunken scene, telling off her mother (Kate Reid) and coming on to the brutish J.J. (a well-cast Charles Bronson). So does the film allow a happy ending for Alva and her hunky Owen? Well, let's just say that portents such as Alva's breathing problems, a discussion of the 1932 tearjerker "One Way Passage," and an afternoon stroll through a New Orleans cemetery might give that answer away. Wilma Dean may have appeared in the superior film and lived to tell her tale, but at least the tragic Alva had more fun. "Just because some people might think I'm beautiful that doesn't mean I'm everybody's property," she tells Owen at one point. Turns out that the film's title doesn't just refer to the dilapidated Starr Boardinghouse!

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.