People, as well as institutions, often become victims of their own triumphs. The world of cinema does not lack such examples. Many artists suffer because the rest of their, otherwise good, career gets unfairly compared with their single and often accidental masterpiece. Great films often get so praised only to have their reputations decline when they fail to meet the big expectations created by overzealous critics and film scholars. In many ways, this phenomenon occurred with A Streetcar Named Desire, the powerful Oscar-awarded 1951 drama directed by Elia Kazan. Half a century after its premiere, the original power of the film has declined, being diluted with numerous parodies and homages (the latest being Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre), and many talents associated with this film slid into relative obscurity, not being able to repeat its success.
The film is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 stage play by Tennessee Williams. The plot is set in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where Blanche DuBois (played by Vivien Leigh), a small-time schoolteacher and daughter of a once wealthy land-owning family from Mississippi, comes to calm her nerves, stressed after the loss of the family property. At least, this is the story told to her sister Stella (played by Kim Hunter), who seems to be happily married to Stanley Kowalski (played by Marlon Brando), a brutish, uneducated working-class Polish American. Blanche, posing as a refined aristocrat, simply cannot stand the ape-like Stanley, who, in return, cannot stand the ageing Southern beauty who has brought discomfort to his harmonious marriage. Friction between the two rises as time goes by and intensifies with Stella’s pregnancy and Blanche’s seduction of Stanley’s shy and mild-mannered best friend, Harold “Mitch” Mitchell (played by Karl Malden). When Stanley discovers some unflattering details of Blanche’s past, the conflict reaches its violent climax.
A Streetcar Named Desire is often viewed as one of the most important milestones in the history of American cinema. Based on a powerful play, but also very controversial in its time, this film introduced topics that used to be taboo in Old Hollywood – female sexuality, nymphomania, domestic violence and, finally, rape. Even after being thoroughly reviewed by censors (who did everything to tame the raw and shocking original, including the removal of all references to homosexuality), A Streetcar Named Desire was a film quite shocking for its time. Director Elia Kazan, known for the ground-breaking character of his socially conscious films like Gentleman's Agreement, also used this film as an opportunity to comment on the social conflicts in post-WW2 America, when the romantic visions of the American rural and WASPish past clashed with the down-to-earth reality of an industrial, urbanised and multicultural present.
This film was not ground-breaking just in the reality it presented; it was also ground-breaking in the way it presented such reality. Kazan was fortunate to master the play on the stage and twice fortunate to bring most of the original stage cast for the film adaptation. Among them excelled the actors who had embraced the new Method style of acting, so popularised by Kazan in his films. The best known was, of course, Marlon Brando. When we look at his first major film role, the intensity of emotions displayed and raw strength of performance seems earth-shattering in comparison with everything Hollywood had to offer before. For newer generations, A Streetcar Named Desire is an excellent opportunity to see the young Brando, quite different from the roles he played in the last few decades. His role of Stanley Kowalski was for many years considered the best in his entire career, until, of course, Don Vito Corleone in Coppola’s The Godfather changed all parameters. In this film, Brando does not just show a very complex character; he also revolutionises the way male sexuality is displayed on screen. His biceps, lustful looks and tendency to have a bare chest explain why Brando happened to be one of the first major heartthrobs of 1950s America – something almost inconceivable today, when we picture him as nothing more than an overweight eccentric caricature of himself.
Brando was also fortunate to have some of his stage partners back on screen. Kim Hunter is a marvel to watch, as a woman caught between conflicting loyalties, troubled by her social obligations and the obvious and very primordial lust she feels for her husband. Unfortunately, she did not manage to build an equally impressive career on her Oscar-awarded triumph. Karl Malden, another member of the original cast, again proves his excellent qualities as a character actor in the role of the deceived, shy but still most likeable character; his performance was also awarded with an Oscar. But the most memorable (and most parodied) performance of them all belongs to Vivien Leigh. Her role of Blanche DuBois was often portrayed as a parody itself; the character of an aristocratic Southern belle bears a certain resemblance to Vivien Leigh’s best-known incarnation in Gone with the Wind. But this resemblance is only superficial – Blanche DuBois is much more complex, troubled and fragile, and her once all-conquering beauty and irresistible charm are rapidly becoming things of the past. Leigh did a terrific job of detailing her gradual but inevitable decline into madness. This Oscar-awarded performance becomes even more devastatingly powerful when we take into account that the real life of Vivien Leigh in later years in many ways resembled the life of the character.
Thanks to the excellent text and superb actors, Kazan managed to create a very good film, but he still failed to turn it into a genuine and everlasting masterpiece. Kazan worked very hard to improve the stage production with the benefits of the new medium, but A Streetcar Named Desire still looks less like an original film and more like a stage play adapted for the screen. Almost the entire film takes place in a very limited space, and the scenes that show the outside world seem to come out of the picture. With a film almost exclusively concentrated on the four major characters, anyone else is distracting, even the boy whose brief appearance would trigger some well-hidden impulses in Blanche. The musical soundtrack by Alex North, although revolutionary for Hollywood through its use of jazz, is not particularly impressive. Finally, modern-day viewers simply could not avoid noticing some rather awkward treatment of some grim subjects due to the different censorship standards.
A Streetcar Named Desire is nevertheless still an essential film for anyone who wants to be familiarised with 20th-century cinema.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on May 19th 2000)
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Movie URL: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/702-a-streetcar-named-desire
Critic: AAA