NFR Project: 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (1951)

 

NFR Project: “A Streetcar Named Desire”

Dir: Elia Kazan

Scr: Tennessee Williams, Oscar Saul

Pho: Harry Stradling

Ed: David Weisbart

Premiere: Sept. 19, 1951

125 min.

It’s one of the best film adaptations of a great American play – until it blows the ending.

This film features three actors – Marlon Brando, Him Hunter, and Karl Malden -- in the roles they originated in this play on Broadway in 1947. Tennessee Williams’ landmark drama was a huge hit, and soon spawned a British production starring Vivian Leigh as the tragic heroine Blanche DuBois.

When the time came to make the film, the eminent director who opened the play, Elia Kazan, was behind the camera. Jessica Tandy, who originated the role of Blanche on stage, was out of the running as the producers wanted more of a name in the title role. Fortunately, they engaged Vivian Leigh, who is iconic here. Together with the three original actors, she staged the definitive interpretation of a stunning and savagely beautiful drama. Leigh, Malden, and Hunter won Oscars for their roles (Brando lost out to Bogart that year).

The film is largely stagebound, barring a few attempts to take the audience out of the seedy New Orleans flat inhabited by crude, working-class Stanley (Brando) and his wife Stella (Hunter). Along comes Stella’s sister, ex-teacher Blanche (Leigh), who is at the end of her rope. A self-styled delicate Southern belle, she is penniless – having lost the family home and been fired for a dalliance with a young student.

She camps out in Stella and Stanley’s place, infuriating Stanley, who begins to poke into her past. Meanwhile, Blanche sparks a courtship from Stanley’s buddy Mitch (Malden). As Blanche becomes more and more delusional, Stanley reveals Blanche’s indiscretions to Mitch, who rejects her. At the same time, Stella has her baby. The night she’s at the hospital, Blanche and Stanley clash for the final time, which ends in him raping her (it is implied – his famous line, “We had this date with each other from the beginning,” is absent here).

Soon after, Blanche is committed to a mental asylum. The doctors come for her; she leaves tentatively, now completely mad. “Whoever you are,” she says, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

Then the movie blows it. In the play, nothing changes between Stanley and Stella at the end. Due to the consideration of the film censors, Stanley could not be seen as getting away with doing evil, as he does in the play. Therefore, in the film Stella walks out on Stanley. Finis.

Despite this, it’s an extraordinary film document. The quartet of primary characters – Blanche, Stanley, Stella, and Mitch – are expertly embodied. Leigh is masterful. Her Blanche is like a ravaged, unstable Scarlett O’Hara, living feebly on the remnants of her charm. Her world is gone; she drifts aimlessly in the present, one step above homelessness. Her belief in the illusion of grace and propriety is belied by her alcoholic, slatternly behavior – a division of personality she resolves by losing her mind.

And Brando. He blew the door wide open with this performance. If he had done nothing else in his decades-long career, he would be remembered for his Stanley. He is a force of nature – completely immersed in the scene, violently unable to do otherwise than to inhabit this frustrated, angry dynamo of a character. Williams intended Blanche to be the heroine, but Stanley is played with such a raw edge of energy and unpredictability that it almost becomes Brando’s film. This performance would codify and popularize the acting discipline known as “the Method.” The Oscars they won are a tribute to the other three actors that they stand up to Brando and acquit themselves honorably.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Thing from Another World.