I've tried to give his material a chance, but I really can't stand any of his characters. They seem so one dimensional.
Baby Doll, Streetcar, and The Fugitive kind are the only three I've seen and they all have a common thread of people who are dysfunctional without a thread of sympathy. Very boring.
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The characters in Streetcar are anything but one-dimensional. And I don´t really get how are dysfunctional, not-very-sympathetic folks "boring" necessarily - mostly, they tend to be more interesting than functional, sympathetic people.
As for Williams´s writing in The Fugitive Kind, it does seem somewhat incoherent and poorly thought through, rendering Brando´s philosophical speeches kinda forced, unconvincing and pretentious, trying to plumb for pathos and a sense of tragedy that isn´t organically there.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan
If you think this film is about ordinary people in the south of the USA in the 1950s and that the dialogue is unconvincing, you are starting in quite the wrong place.
It is about Orpheus, a man with magic powers who descends into Hell. The males there may hate him but cannot touch him, while the females all fall for him. With another outsider he finds true love, but she is trapped in marriage to a devil and Orpheus is forced into the flames, where he dies.
Not usually, but The Fugitive Kind, based on Williams' Orpheus Descending, is brutally bad. It's also the only time I've seen Joanne Woodward give a bad performance.
shareSo yeah, the film's a mess.
But I think it's pretty safe to say in their original form, Williams plays and characters are the work of genius.