From its compelling opening soliloquy-Marlon Brando pleading before an unseen judge (the camera eye)-The Fugitive Kind, based on Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending, announces itself as a film that, like its protagonist, takes crazy, brilliant risks. Brando's Val "Snakeskin" Xavier is a wayfaring stranger in the American tradition of William Holden's Hal Carter, but life in this Louisiana backwater is no Picnic. Val has wandered into one of Tennessee Williams' waking nightmares, where the men are sadists and the women, caged birds. Our first glimpse of Anna Magnani's Lady Torrence is in longshot, looking used-up in an old cloth coat. The wife of a tyrannical invalid, Jabe Torrence (Victor Jory), her desire, ambivalence and beauty are aroused by the newcomer whom she takes on as a shop assistant, and then as a lover, while Jabe seethes behind a jail-like parapet. Brando and Magnani are two brilliantly mismatched actors: he unmasks in verse (lines like "We're all sentenced to solitary confinement within our skins" do not roll trippingly off the tongue), while she is...well, Anna Magnani, revealing herself in bruised bluntness. There is no Method to her madness. Also in the cast are Maureen Stapleton, a revelation as the wife of the vigilante sheriff who paints her way to sanity, and Joanne Woodward, too much of a wierd thing as an Ophelia-like waif in a top-down sportscar.