The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Drama

DIRECTOR

Elia Kazan

WRITERS

Tennessee Williams, Oscar Saul (screenplay); Tennessee Williams (play)

STARS

Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden

BEFORE

1950 Tennessee Williams adapts his own play, The Glass Menagerie, for the screen. It is a thematic companion piece to A Streetcar Named Desire.

AFTER

1954 Elia Kazan is reunited with Marlon Brando to make On the Waterfront.

1958 Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman star in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, another blistering adaptation of a Williams play.

There isn’t much kindness on display in A Streetcar Named Desire, which tells the story of Blanche Dubois (Vivien Leigh), a woman whose past catches up with her one stifling summer’s evening in New Orleans. “Deliberate cruelty,” she says, “is the one unforgivable thing.”

When she comes to stay with her younger sister Stella (Kim Hunter), Blanche thinks she is running away from her former life as a scandal-hounded teacher. In reality, she is running toward a cataclysm of destruction and cruelty in the hulking shape of Stella’s husband, Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando). Blanche has a horror of the naked truth, which she has a habit of disguising with illusions and wily fantasies: “I don’t tell the truth. I tell what ought to be the truth!” The moment Blanche arrives at Stella’s apartment, Stanley scents her fear, and a game of cat and mouse ensues. He is a predator who resents his sister-in-law’s snooty put-downs, and the game ends with a violent sexual attack. This taut adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play sparked outrage when its director, Elia Kazan, first screened it for Warner Bros., and he was forced to cut five minutes from his movie before the studio’s executives would release it.

One of only two movies in history to win three Academy Awards for acting, A Streetcar Named Desire made a household name out of its star, the now legendary Marlon Brando.

Controversial themes

These small but crucial edits papered over the more sordid aspects of the story—Blanche’s “nymphomania,” her late husband’s secret homosexuality, Stella’s lust for Stanley, and the climactic rape—inadvertently mirroring the self-delusional madness of its central character. However, the movie was also criticized for its staginess, and it is true that Kazan refuses to open up the drama beyond the four peeling walls of Stella and Stanley’s poky, run-down love nest. But it is the movie’s claustrophobic atmosphere that becomes the source of its electricity—the actors prowl and pace the set like caged animals, straying into each other’s territories and overstepping their marks.

This is especially true of Brando. A student of the “Method” approach to creating a character, he dedicated himself to unearthing the inner life of the brutish Stanley, and the results are truly volcanic. The performance made Brando into a star, but even he could not outshine Vivien Leigh’s flickering, iridescent portrait of a woman haunted by her own desires. “Whoever you are,” she says at the end of the movie, her Southern-belle accent fluttering delicately around the sad truth at the heart of her self, “I have always relied on the kindness of strangers.”

Stella’s husband Stanley has a brutish attraction for Blanche, but his attentions quickly turn to abuse.

Turkish-born US director Elia Kazan was one of the most famous practitioners of the “Method” technique developed by Lee Strasberg, which encouraged actors to draw on their personal experiences and to “become” the characters they played. In the 1930s, he joined New York’s experimental Group Theatre and triumphed on Broadway, cofounding the Actors Studio in 1947. By the mid-1950s he was a major player in Hollywood.

In 1952, Kazan testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Having been a member of the American Communist Party, he informed on eight former colleagues who had been communists. He resumed his career but his focus changed from controversial movies to historical allegories, such as an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

1951 A Streetcar Named Desire

1954 On the Waterfront

1955 East of Eden

1961 Splendor in the Grass

What else to watch: A Place in the Sun (1951) ✵ The Wild One (1953) ✵ Rebel Without a Cause (1955) ✵ The Rose Tattoo (1955) ✵ Baby Doll (1956)