A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) – E. Kazan

Undoubtedly, the intensity and themes of the play by Tennessee Williams are responsible for the power of this film -- but there is also no doubting the fact that the acting craft on display heightens that power yet further.  Vivien Leigh plays Blanche DuBois as pathetic yet somehow noble, deluded and debauched but worthy of our pity and sympathy.  As the only central member of the cast not to step straight from the Broadway production into the film, she was thrust into the web of Method actors, led by 25-year-old Marlon Brando (and also featuring Karl Malden and Kim Hunter).  Brando pulls out all the stops in showing Stanley Kowalski to be a thug, pitting his raw unbridled style against Leigh’s more composed acting (and this contrast meshes perfectly with the dynamics of the drama).  Of course, the play was sanitized when it was refashioned for the screen but it isn’t too hard to read between the lines.  Blanche DuBois arrives in New Orleans to stay with her sister, Stella, and brother-in-law Stanley in a small seedy apartment in the French Quarter. Tensions erupt between Blanche and Stanley.  She begins a romance with his friend Mitch (Karl Malden) which is dashed when Stanley investigates Blanche’s past and reveals all to Mitch.  Then, when Stella is in the hospital having a baby, Stanley does the unthinkable to Blanche which causes her to lose her grip on reality (which was already tenuous).  Director Elia Kazan (who infamously named names to HUAC the next year) translated his Broadway success to the screen by breaking it out of the small apartment and including other locations (sparingly); one innovation was to keep shrinking the set so that Blanche’s growing claustrophobia becomes real to the audience.  To his credit, Kazan doesn’t get in the way of the play or the acting but instead manages to create the perfect environment for both to flourish. The result is gripping but deeply unsettling.