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| Images courtesy of Warner Brothers |
American playwright Tennessee Williams’ 1947 stage play A
Streetcar Named Desire originally reached the theater under the direction
of none other than future On the Waterfront filmmaker Elia Kazan with a
then-unknown Marlon Brando in one of the three central roles. Across the globe in Great Britain, Laurence
Olivier directed his own version with his wife Vivien Leigh also playing one of
the main parts. A tightly claustrophobic
chamber piece primarily involving a trio, it tells the story of Blanche DuBois
a former Southern debutante who has fallen on hard times and abandons her home
to shack up in a drab New Orleans apartment with her younger sister Stella
Kowalski and her brother-in-law Stanley.
Touching on the old Desire streetcar which ran in New Orleans just a
block away from where Tennessee Williams lived, it is a trained portrait of
burning tensions boiling over into physical altercation and like some of the
best stage plays leaves the audience with a lot to process over what transpires
between its characters trapped together in a kind of urban Hellscape.
With the play itself something of a lightning rod for
controversy with its allusions to homosexuality and sexual assault, the idea of
bringing the Pulitzer Prize winning play to the silver screen seemed unthinkable
with a nervous Warner Brothers complying with the then-functioning Hays Code
censorship board as well as the National Legion of Decency. Despite subtle changes made to meet
production code standards, many of which were reversed in 1993 after previously
excised scenes and moments of footage were relocated and restored to the film,
the 1951 film of A Streetcar Named Desire went on to become first film to
win Academy Awards for three of the main acting categories. From the innovative set shrinking Oscar
winning production design, wholly original jazz score by Alex North to its
daring, refreshingly adult themes and performances, it invariably paved the way
for the kind of provocative yet nonjudgmental character studies Martin Scorsese
would become known for and only two feature films into his career cemented
Marlon Brando as one of the major acting talents to come out of the 1950s.
Middle-aged high school teacher Blanche DuBois (Vivien
Leigh) having vacated her hometown of Auriol, Mississippi (a fictional town for
the film), has just arrived in New Orleans having boarded the titular Streetcar
Named Desire to her younger sister Stella Kowalski’s (Kim Hunter) squalid
apartment where she lives with her husband Stanley (Marlon Brando). Claiming to be on job leave, Stella takes
Blanche in much to the constant chagrin and criticisms of her boorish yet suspicious
husband. With their tenuous coexistence
threatening to fly apart at the sims, Blanche reveals her family estate fell to
creditors and was widowed at an early age following her husband’s suicide. Meanwhile as the antagonism brews between
Blanche and Stanley who claims Stella is pregnant, she strikes up a romance
with one of his card playing pals Mitch (Karl Malden). Amid this pressure cooker scenario, the
increasingly infuriated Stanley begins acting out violently with Blanche begging
the question why does her sister Stella remain with this “sub-human animal”?
A searing, cinematic frontal assault rich with emotion,
heart and complex characters graced with nuanced performances and careful
blocking, A Streetcar Named Desire from stage to screen is one of the frankest
expressions of torment and inner turmoil as there ever has been in cinema
history. From Marlon Brando’s primal
howling of his battered but devoted wife’s name to Kim Hunter and Vivien Leigh’s
daring, impassioned and vulnerable performances to the claustrophobic shape
shifting sets, the film is a masterwork of bold character driven
storytelling. Featuring luminous, noir
inspired cinematography by Pygmalion cameraman Harry Stradling, Alex
North’s arrestingly seductive jazz score and razor-sharp cutting by Mildred
Pierce editor David Weisbart, this is technically proficient filmmaking
across the board of the highest order. Despite going through some censorship and a slightly more Hollywood friendly coda, the film is generally regarded as one of the most accurate adaptations of Tennessee Williams.
A large portion of why the film translates so well from
stage to screen involves Kazan’s own directorial reprisal as well as much of
the principal cast members. Almost
everyone save for Vivien Leigh who mastered the part in her husband’s British
theater production returned from stage to screen though legend has it Leigh and
Brando briefly clashed over one another’s mannerisms and acting styles, a short-lived
“conflict” as the two quickly became good friends. Though Brando himself would later comment he ‘detested’
the role of Stanley, it nevertheless garnered him an Oscar nomination for Best
Actor in only his second feature and ushered him in as the poster child of 1950s
‘angry young men’. Kim Hunter whose last
feature included Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death took
to the stage until 1951 with the role of Stella which she too came to know like
a family relative and channels her own ferocities into the character. Karl Malden who would reunite with Elia Kazan
and Brando again a few years later with On the Waterfront as brutish Stanley’s
nice guy friend Mitch creates a measure of complicated sympathy and is the
audience’s window into what’s left of Blanche’s fractured heart.
Against censorship and in the months following its initial
release, A Streetcar Named Desire took in $4.2 million against a $1.8
million production budget with an additional $700,000 raked in following a 1958
theatrical reissue. Garnering effusive
unanimous praise from critics and audiences and earning a total of twelve
Academy Award nominations (four of which won), the film has been cited by
directors like Woody Allen and Akira Kurosawa as among their favorites. Opening the doors wide to a kind of proto-New
Hollywood film movement that continued throughout the 1950s and only rose again
with the emergence of films like Bonnie and Clyde or Midnight Cowboy,
shying away from glitz and glamour to unearth the underbelly of real life in
all of its squalor and ingloriousness, A Streetcar Named Desire though
losing the Best Picture win to the escapist An American in Paris stood
the test of time as the arguable rebirth of modern adult contemporary cinema
trying to shine a spotlight on some of the world’s darkest corners.
--Andrew Kotwicki
