Paris Film Diary: This Property is Condemned

exploited for her beauty, sexualized way too young of an age, and taken too soon.

This Property is Condemned/1966/Sydney Pollack/
DCP/Majestic Bastille

In This Property is Condemned, on their only real date that we see, Robert Redford’s Owen and Natalie Wood's Alva go to see my favorite Kay Francis movie, One-Way Passage. After the movie, they talk about how sad it was when Kay’s character, Joan, died. But if Joan actually dies of her mysterious fatal disease, it happens off camera, and One-Way Passage seems to want to leave her fate ambiguous — or, at the very least, it wants us to remember Joan when she was full of life, and not think about what it would look like to watch her die. This line of dialogue is all the more conspicuous, because This Property is Condemned does the same thing, sort of: it kills off its female protagonist off-camera, leaving her fate ambiguous for much of the movie’s running time, and maybe even in the end, too — if you don’t see a character die, can you be sure it actually happened?

This Property is Condemned is framed by a conversation between Alva’s preteen sister Willie (Mary Badham) who she meets when both truants are playing around some disused railroad tracks. Willie is wearing gobs of costume jewelry and a ratty gown which she claims she “inherited” from Alva, who Willie describes as having been the “main attraction” when the now-condemned boarding house that Willie squats in had been the vibrant center of this tiny Mississippi town. We flash back to the night Robert Redford first arrives in that town, to serve as the George Clooney-in-Up in the Air of this town’s primary employer, a depression-era rail outfit. Owen takes a room at the boarding house run by Alva and Willie‘s mom, Hazel, played by Kate Reid, an actress previously unknown to me who here feels like a steelier Shelly Winters. In addition to the three women, the house is home to a number of men, most of whom work on the railroad, including Hazel’s sleazy boyfriend JJ (Charles Bronson) and Sydney (Robert Blake, who is extremely hot in this movie. Instagram must never be allowed to know how hot Robert Blake looks in this movie).