“An exceptional unsung collaboration for all involved.” Slant

The small-mindedness of a beaten-down Mississippi hamlet can't bear another resident, especially big-hearted “Snakeskin” Xavier (Marlon Brando), a guitar player fleeing his tawdry life in New Orleans, who, one dreary night, emerges out of the rain. With his damaged swagger and febrile exclamations, Snakeskin arouses a long-repressed sense of desire in several of the town's women: Vee (Maureen Stapleton), a bewildered amateur artist married to a gut-angry sheriff, Carol (Joanne Woodward), a Southern belle wilted and debauched, and Lady (Anna Magnani), a worn-out shopkeep whose husband lies festering in his deathbed. Shot by Boris Kaufman with the compositional claustrophobia of the best noirs, Sidney Lumet's overgrown adaptation places these consummate actors in a backwoods bastion of stifling meanness where passion is as fallow as the fields. Based on Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending, Brando seems less an Orpheus, bearer of song, than a Dionysus, god of fertility. His need to shed his signature snakeskin jacket bears an unexpected vulnerability beneath his rustic eroticism. Inflaming dormant desires in the woman around him, Snakeskin's sultry comportment is enough to set the town on fire.