Sydney Pollack directs this steamy drama in which Robert Redford plays Owen Legate, a railroad official with a pocketful of pink slips for the yard employees who work in Dodson, Mississippi. When he comes to town, he checks into a boardinghouse whose inhabitants include Alva Starr (Natalie Wood), the coquettish town flirt, who suffers from tuberculosis and whose affair with Legate ignites her mother's revenge. The screenplay is based on the depression-era play by Tennessee Williams.