It's set in smalltown Mississippi in the 1950s and follows a down-and-out character who is trying to turn his life around and the doomed relationships into which he stumbles.
Valentine Xavier (Marlon Brando), also know as Snakeskin because of the snakeskin jacket he wears, gets out of jail in New Orleans and hits the road. His car breaks down in the middle of a rainstorm in a little Mississippi town, so he stops and gets a job in a little mercantile store run by Lady Torrance (Anna Magnani). She's lonely and has an older sick husband, Jabe (Victor Jory), who doesn't trust her or the good-looking clerk she just hired, especially when she fixes up a little bedroom for Xavier in the back of the store.
Lady Torrance gets some competition from a young rich woman, Carol (Joanne Woodward), who is often drunk and remembers Xavier from New Orleans. She's too over the top to be real competition for Lady Torrence, however.
After Lady Torrence learns her husband was among an earlier group of vigilantes that burned down her father's vineyards and home with her father inside, she is determined to open a "confectionary" attached to the mercantile store, that is designed like a vineyard. She wants Jabe to see before she allows him to die.
However, there is a conflagration at the end that unhappily resolves the plot.
This is Tennessee Williams with his grimiest southern town filled with malfunctioning human relationships. There are only dim flares of hope throughout, only to be extinguished by the end. Marlon Brando, as one reviewer put it, is "an astonishing physical specimen, a statuesque hunk with the intellectual ennui of a philosopher, who moves with a panther-like ease" and is "the misfit we all want to be." Anna Magnani is the earthy older woman who is finally trying to grasp some joy from life. They are a potent combination, though I sometimes find Tennessee Williams' words to be overwrought.
Valentine Xavier (Marlon Brando), also know as Snakeskin because of the snakeskin jacket he wears, gets out of jail in New Orleans and hits the road. His car breaks down in the middle of a rainstorm in a little Mississippi town, so he stops and gets a job in a little mercantile store run by Lady Torrance (Anna Magnani). She's lonely and has an older sick husband, Jabe (Victor Jory), who doesn't trust her or the good-looking clerk she just hired, especially when she fixes up a little bedroom for Xavier in the back of the store.
Lady Torrance gets some competition from a young rich woman, Carol (Joanne Woodward), who is often drunk and remembers Xavier from New Orleans. She's too over the top to be real competition for Lady Torrence, however.
After Lady Torrence learns her husband was among an earlier group of vigilantes that burned down her father's vineyards and home with her father inside, she is determined to open a "confectionary" attached to the mercantile store, that is designed like a vineyard. She wants Jabe to see before she allows him to die.
However, there is a conflagration at the end that unhappily resolves the plot.
This is Tennessee Williams with his grimiest southern town filled with malfunctioning human relationships. There are only dim flares of hope throughout, only to be extinguished by the end. Marlon Brando, as one reviewer put it, is "an astonishing physical specimen, a statuesque hunk with the intellectual ennui of a philosopher, who moves with a panther-like ease" and is "the misfit we all want to be." Anna Magnani is the earthy older woman who is finally trying to grasp some joy from life. They are a potent combination, though I sometimes find Tennessee Williams' words to be overwrought.