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As a playwright, Tennessee Williams was to the South what William Faulkner was as a fiction writer: a creative genius who revolutionized not only the region’s arts scene and literature but that of 20th century America as a whole, bringing a Southern content to the forefront while addressing universally vital themes, and influencing and consuming generations of later writers.
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Pulitzer-Prize-winning “A Streetcar Named Desire” dates from the peak of Williams’s creativity, the period between 1944 (”A Glass Menagerie”) and 1955 (”Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” his second Pulitzer-winner) . After its successful 1947 speed on Broadway, “Streetcar” was adapted into a screenplay by Williams himself for this movie produced and directed by Elia Kazan, starring the entire Broadway cast except Jessica Tandy, who was replaced by the star of the play’s London production, Vivien Leigh. The part takes its title from one of the Novel Orleans streetcar lines that protagonist Blanche DuBois (Leigh) rides on her plan to the apartment of her sister Stella (Kim Hunter), foreshadowing her later path, from (ever-unfulfilled) Desire to Cemetery (death, or the loss of reality) and a street called Elysian Fields, like the feeble mythological land of the unimaginative.
Although Blanche is the person most visibly absorbing in deception (of herself and others), almost everyone of the characters suffers loss after a brutal reality check: Stella, who hasn’t been abet home for years, first learns from Blanche that their genteel home Belle Reve (literally: “heavenly dream”) is “lost” – although in what manner precisely Blanche doesn’t specify, which immediately raises the suspicion of Stella’s husband Stanley (Marlon Brando) – only to later hear from Stanley that under the veneer of Blanche’s appearance as a radiant Southern lady lies a promiscuous past, and the accurate circumstances of her ouster from her job and ultimately from their home town were not as Blanche would have Stella possess. Stanley’s friend Mitch (Karl Malden), who despite their disparate social backgrounds intends to marry Blanche after they are drawn to each other by their mutual need for “somebody” in their life, is similarly disillusioned by Stanley, and subsequently by Blanche herself when he insists on seeing her in gleaming light instead of the shaded light of dancehalls and of the paper lamp she has insisted on hanging over Stella and Stanley’s living room lamp, neither able to face the effects of age and a profligate lifestyle herself nor willing to declare them to others. And Blanche’s enjoy loss of innocence, finally, plot in years earlier, when she found her young husband in bed with another man and he committed suicide after she publicly reproached him. “Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their beget egos. That is the map we all search for each other in life,” Tennessee Williams says about “A Streetcar Named Desire” in Kazan’s 1988 autobiography “A Life;” and in a letter opposing the movie’s censoring before its release he described the memoir as being about “ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the elegant, by the savage and brutal forces of unusual society.”
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The brute, of course, is Stanley, who not only becomes the catalyst of Blanche’s fate and the destroyer of Stella’s, Mitch’s and Blanche’s fill illusions, but is her antagonist in everything from background to personality: Where she is a fading belle dreaming of days gone by he is all youthful virility, a working-class man living in the here and now; where she is refined he is obscene, and where she engages in pretense, he tears down the facade slack which she is hiding. The conversation during which Stanley tells Stella about Blanche’s past is pointedly spot against Blanche’s humming the Arlen/Harburg tune “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” which sees esteem transforming life into a fantasy world, which in turn however “wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me.” Yet, as portrayed by Marlon Brando, who with this movie stormed into public awareness with his modern and volcanic near to acting, Stanley is no mere extreme beast but a complex, often controversial character, despite his brutal saunter almost childishly dependant on his wife and frequently hiding his acquire insecurities under his raw appearance (thus putting up a determined front as well, but unlike Blanche’s, a socially acceptable, even current one) . Ever the device actor, Brando reportedly stayed in character even during filming breaks; mighty to the disgust of Vivien Leigh, for whom lines like “[h]e’s like an animal. … Thousands of years have passed him correct by and there he is: Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the stone-age, bearing the raw meat home from the ruin in the jungle” must consequently have arrive from the bottom of her heart.
In early 1950s’ society, “Streetcar” was considered method too risque – even downright sordid – to be presented to moviegoing audiences without severe censorship, which Williams and Kazan were only partly able to fight. One of the most sizable changes made in the adaptation was that at the kill of the movie Stanley is punished for his brutality towards Blanche, whereas in the play’s cynical unusual ending he is the only character experiencing no loss at all; indeed seeing his world restored after Blanche’s exit. Since Kazan’s suggestion to form two alternate versions (one to please the censors, one in conformity with Williams’s play) was rejected, even the 1993 “Fresh Director’s Version” retains its altered, censorship-induced ending. Therefore, the play will forever constitute the last word on Williams’s intentions. But even in its censored version this movie was a deserved quadruple Oscar- and multiple other award-winner (albeit undeservedly not for Brando) . It has long-since become a right classic: a cinematic gem of reliable direction and superlative performances throughout.
And so it was I entered the broken world
To sign the visionary company of worship, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to bear each desperate choice.
Hart Crane, “The Broken Tower”: Preface to the published version of Tennessee Williams’s play.
Also recommended:
Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937-1955 (Library of America)
Tennessee Williams: Plays 1957-1980 (Library of America)
Tennessee Williams Film Collection (A Streetcar Named Desire 1951 Two-Disc Special Edition / Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 1958 Deluxe Edition / Sweet Bird of Youth / The Night of the Iguana / Baby Doll / The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone)
Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (Broadway Theatre Archive)
The Rose Tattoo
Suddenly, Last Summer
Baby Doll
This Property Is Condemned
Tennessee Williams’ Dragon Country (Broadway Theatre Archive)
The film (like virtually all pre-1952 films) was shot in the Academy format of 1.37 to 1. Because your non-widescreen TV is 1.33 to 1, there is no reason to letterbox the DVD image. So the aspect ratio has only been altered to the extent that you’re losing a few millimeters on each side. (The same is good of virtually all other pre-1952 films, despite numerous posts at Amazon.com complaining about no widescreen and pan-and-scan cutting, etc. It’s astronomical that people now watch for widescreen videos and DVDs, but it’s not so tall that people don’t understand that you’re not going to gather them before the fifties.) “Streetcar” is a masterpiece, certainly one of the top 50 American movies every made. The only reason I’ve given it 4 stars instead of 5 is because the film print musty for this DVD is somewhat warn and there is noteworthy graininess in the image. There’s also a philosophize on the mono audio. Hopefully, this film will be remastered for DVD someday. In the meantime, this is peaceful the best the film has ever looked for the home market. Also, at this tag it’s a exact bargain.
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