Translating a theatre production to the big screen is always a challenge. What you usually find is that the story is solid, the acting is fantastic but what is left is a very self-contained, wordy and overly-dramatic movie which lacks the pace or action the big screen requires. A Streetcar Named Desire is no different.
The story is solid. The film follows Blanche DuBois as she moves in with her sister to get over a trauma back home. In reality, Blanche is slowly losing her mind and this process isn’t helped by her brother-in-law, played by a young, brooding and full of acting potential, Marlon Brando.
Watching this slow descent into madness is interesting at first and because the film is based on a play, it takes its time to sow the seeds. Blanche doesn’t show-up unhinged but her behaviour is erratic and slightly bizarre. This puts her at odds with Brando’s Stanley and its in the scenes where Brando and Blanche, played by Vivien Leigh, are bouncing off each other, sometimes literally, that the film is at its most interesting. Unfortunately, these are too few and too brief.
The film is two hours long and really feels it. The slow pace can be unforgiving at times and you are longing for a moment of drama to unfold amongst the dull, drab exposition and contemplating. These scenes may be forgiven in a theatre, where the performance is raw and feels real but here it makes you shift uncomfortably in your seat and look to your watch waiting for next interesting scene.
When these moments do come, they are over-played. Again, a big performance is needed on stage but here it can sometimes look ridiculous and Leigh is the most guilty of all. Shrieking her way through the scenes of madness, it can take you away from what the story is clearly trying to achieve. Although the best aspect of the movie, Brando can sometimes fall into the same trap as well, barking his lines at the desperate female lead.
Its a shame too because there are some great scenes and very familiar moments. Brando shouting “Stella” from the courtyard is iconic but alongside it is a horrible date, an awkward game of poker and a fairly depressing finale. When the film remembers it is trying to tell a story, it can be very entertaining but too often it feels slow and plodding.
Overall, A Streetcar Named Desire has an interesting story at its core, supported by performances which have fantastic moments. Unfortunately, Leigh and Brando also find themselves over-acting and the movie leans too heavily into its theatre roots, feeling slow and lacking the drama a movie really needs.
Rating – 2.5
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Marlon Brando didn't win the Academy Award in 1951 for his acting in "A Streetcar Named Desire." The Oscar went to Humphrey Bogart, for "The African Queen." But you could make a good case that no performance had more influence on modern film acting styles than Brando's work as Stanley Kowalski, Tennessee Williams' rough, smelly, sexually charged hero.
Before this role, there was usually a certain restraint in American movie performances. Actors would portray violent emotions, but you could always sense to some degree a certain modesty that prevented them from displaying their feelings in raw nakedness.
Brando held nothing back, and within a few years his was the style that dominated Hollywood movie acting. This movie led directly to work by Brando's heirs such as Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Jack Nicholson and Sean Penn.
The film itself, hailed as realistic in 1951, now seems claustrophobic and mannered - and all the more effective for that.
The Method actors, Brando foremost, always claimed their style was a way to reach realism in a performance, but the Method led to super-realism, to a heightened emotional content that few "real" people would be able to sustain for long, or convincingly.
Look at the way Brando, as Kowalski, stalks through his little apartment in the French Quarter. He is, the dialogue often reminds us, an animal. He wears a torn T-shirt that reveals muscles and sweat. He smokes and drinks in a greedy way; he doesn't have the good manners that 1951 performances often assumed. [As a contrast, look at Bogart's grimy riverboat captain in "The African Queen." He's also meant to be rude and crude, but beneath the oil and sweat you can glimpse Bogart's own natural elegance.] At the same time, there is a feline grace in Brando's movements: He's a man, but not a clod, and in one scene, while he's sweet-talking his wife, Stella [Kim Hunter], he absent-mindedly picks a tiny piece of lint from her sweater. If you can take that moment and hold it in your mind with the famous scene where he assaults Stella's sister, Blanche DuBois [Vivien Leigh], you can see the freedom Brando is giving to Stanley Kowalski - and the range.
When "A Streetcar Named Desire" was first released, it created a firestorm of controversy. It was immoral, decadent, vulgar and sinful, its critics cried. And that was after substantial cuts had already been made in the picture, at the insistence of Warner Bros., driven on by the industry's own censors. Elia Kazan, who directed the film, fought the cuts and lost. For years the missing footage - only about five minutes in length, but crucial - was thought lost. But this 1993 restoration splices together Kazan's original cut, and we can see how daring the film really was.
The 1951 cuts took out dialogue that suggested Blanche DuBois was promiscuous, perhaps a nymphomaniac attracted to young boys. It also cut much of the intensity from Stanley's final assault of Blanche. Other cuts were more subtle. Look at the early scene, for example, where Stanley plants himself on the street outside his apartment and screams, "Stella!" In the censored version, she stands up inside, pauses, starts down the stairs, looks at him, continues down the stairs, and they embrace. In the uncut version, only a couple of shots are different - but what a difference they make! Stella's whole demeanor seems different, seems charged with lust. In the apartment, she responds more visibly to his voice. On the stairs, there are closeups as she descends, showing her face almost blank with desire. And the closing embrace, which looks in the cut version as if she is consoling him, looks in the uncut version as if she has abandoned herself to him.
Another scene lost crucial dialogue. Stella tells her sister, "Stanley's always smashed things. Why, on our wedding night, as soon as we came in here, he snatched off one of my slippers and rushed about the place smashing the light bulbs with it." After Blanche is suitably shocked, Stella, leaning back with a funny smile, says "I was sort of thrilled by it." All that dialogue was trimmed, perhaps because it provided a glimpse into psychic realms the censors were not prepared to acknowledge.
The 1993 version of the film extends the conversation that Blanche has with a visiting newspaper boy, making it clear she is strongly attracted to him. It also adds details from Blanche's description of the suicide of her young husband; it is now more clear, although still somewhat oblique, that he was a homosexual, and she killed him with her taunts.
Despite the overwhelming power of Brando's performance, "Streetcar" is one of the great ensemble pieces in the movies. Kim Hunter's Stella can be seen in this version as less of an enigma; we can see more easily why she was attracted to Stanley. Vivien Leigh's Blanche is a sexually hungry woman posing as a sad, wilting flower; the earlier version covered up some of the hunger. And Karl Malden's Mitch - Blanche's hapless gentleman caller - is more of a sap, now that we understand more fully who he is really courting, and why.
The movie was shot, of course, in black and white. Dramas made in 1951 nearly always were. Color would have been fatal to the special tone. It would have made the characters seem too real, when we need them exactly like this, black and gray and silver, shadows projected on the screens of their own dreams and needs. Watching the film is like watching a Shakespearean tragedy. Of course the outcome is predestined, but everything is in the style by which the characters arrive there. Watch Brando absently scratching himself on his first entrance. Look at the way he occupies the little apartment as if it were a pair of dirty shorts. Then watch him flick that piece of lint.
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
What is so great about A Streetcar Named Desire?
“A Streetcar Named Desire” is a brilliant, implacable play about the disintegration of a woman, or, if you like, of a society; it has no possible need for the kind of pseudo-poetic decoration that more vacant authors so often employ to disguise their fundamental lack of thought.
Why was A Streetcar Named Desire controversial?
Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire presents an ambiguous moral puzzle to readers. Critics and audiences alike harbor vastly torn opinions concerning Blanche's role in the play, which range from praising her as a fallen angel victimized by her surroundings to damning her as a deranged harlot.
What is the main point of A Streetcar Named Desire?
A Streetcar Named Desire is a play by Tennessee Williams written during a period of change in America after World War II. In short, it is about a woman who comes to live with her sister and her sister's husband. She eventually loses her grip on reality as she fails to get what it is she most desires.
What did critics say about A Streetcar Named Desire?
Some reviewers thought Blanche Du Bois a “boozy prostitute,” and others believed her a nymphomaniac. Such designations are not only inaccurate but reveal a total failure to understand the author's intention and the theme of the play.