Saturday Night Cinema
A Streetcar Named Desire

Ah, where to begin. Tonight's Saturday night feature, A Streetcar Named Desire, is American cinema at its most brilliant, poignant, painful, and emotionally violent. I have seen this film so many times, and each time is as moving and jarring as the first. It shakes me to my core. But my words cannot do this film justice, as Bosley Crowther said in his 1951 Times review: "But comments cannot do justice to the substance and the artistry of this film. You must see it to appreciate it. And that we strongly urge you to do."

Indeed. Forgive the subtitles, but I could only find it on a Romanian web-hosting site 🙂

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

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By Bosley Crowther

Published: September 20, 1951

Out of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, which gathered up most of the drama prizes that were awarded when it was playing on Broadway, director Elia Kazan and a simply superlative cast have fashioned a motion picture that throbs with passion and poignancy. Indeed, through the haunting performance England's great Vivien Leigh gives in the heartbreaking role of Mr. Williams's deteriorating Southern belle and through the mesmerizing moods Mr. Kazan has wreathed with the techniques of the screen, this picture, now showing at the Warner, becomes as fine, if not finer, than the play. Inner torments are seldom projected with such sensitivity and clarity on the screen.

Of course, the first factor in this triumph is Mr. Williams's play, which embraces, among its many virtues, an essential human conflict in visual terms. The last brave, defiant, hopeless struggle of the lonely and decaying Blanche du Bois to hold on to her faded gentility against the heartless badgering of her roughneck brother-in-law is a tangible cat-and-dog set-to, marked with manifold physical episodes as well as a wealth of fluctuations of verbally fashioned images and moods. And all of these graphic components have been fully preserved in Oscar Saul's script and availed of by Mr. Kazan in his cinematic mounting of same.

Mélees, titanic and degrading, within the filthy New Orleans slum where Blanche comes to live with her sister and her low-born brother-in-law have been staged by the prescient director with such tumultuous energy that the screen fairly throbs with angry violence, before settling sharply into spent and aching quiet. Hate-oozing personal encounters between the lost lady and the brutish man have been filmed with such shrewd manipulation of the close-up that one feels the heat of them. And with lights and the movement of his people and the conjunction of a brilliant musical score with dialogue of real poetic richness, Mr. Kazan has wrought heartache and despair.

In this dramatic illustration, which makes vivid, of course, a great deal more than a fundamental clash of natures between a woman and a man—which transmits, indeed, a comprehension of a whole society's slow decay and the pathos of vain escapism in a crude and dynamic world—we say, in this dramatic illustration, Miss Leigh accomplishes more than a worthy repeat of the performance which Jessica Tandy gave on the stage.

Blessed with a beautifully molded and fluently expressive face, a pair of eyes that can flood with emotion, and a body that moves with spirit and style, Miss Leigh has, indeed, created a new Blanche du Bois on the screen—a woman of even greater fullness, torment, and tragedy. Although Mr. Williams's writing never precisely makes clear the logic of her disintegration before the story begins—why anyone of her breeding would become an undisciplined tramp—Miss Leigh makes implicitly cogent every moment of the lady on the screen.

Her mental confusions, her self-deceptions, the agonies of her lacerated nerves, and her final, unbearable madness, brought on by a brutal act of rape, are clearly conveyed by the actress with a tremendous concentration and economy of power. Likewise, her fumblings for affections are beautifully and poignantly done. And since Miss Leigh is present in virtually every scene or sequence of the film, the demands upon her vitality and her flexibility are great.

No less brilliant, however, within his area is Marlon Brando in the role of the loud, lusty, brawling, brutal, amoral Polish brother-in-law. Mr. Brando created the role in the stage play and he carries over all the energy and the steel-spring characteristics that made him vivid on the stage. But here, where we're so much closer to him, he seems that much more highly charged, his despairs seem that much more pathetic, and his comic moments that much more slyly enjoyed.

Others from the cast of the stage play—Kim Hunter as the torn young sister and wife, Karl Malden as a timid, boorish suitor, Nick Dennis as a pal, and all the rest—fill out the human pattern within a sleazy environment that is so fitly and graphically created that you can almost sense its sweatiness and smells. Alex North's incidental music deserves prominent commendation, too, as do all of the technical aspects of this film which Charles K. Feldman has produced.

But comments cannot do justice to the substance and the artistry of this film. You must see it to appreciate it. And that we strongly urge you to do.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (MOVIE)

Directed by Elia Kazan; written by Tennessee Williams and Oscar Saul, based on the play by Mr. Williams; cinematographer, Harry Stradling; edited by David Weisbart; music by Alex North; art designer, Richard Day; produced by Charles K. Feldman; released by Warner Brothers. Black and white. Running time: 125 minutes.

With: Vivien Leigh (Blanche du Bois), Marlon Brando (Stanley Kowalski), Kim Hunter (Stella Kowalski), Karl Malden (Mitch), Rudy Bond (Steve), Nick Dennis (Pablo), and Peg Hillias (Eunice).

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dcohen

13 years ago

wait. it just occured to me:
elia kazan -> born in istanbul. istanbul is a city located in the islamic supremacist country, turkey. the man who shot the pope was turkish. this is all making sense now!
streetcar named desire is an ode to the prophet muhammad marrying a 9 year old virgin!!! elia kazan is calling for jihad against america! wake up, sheeple! 9/11, amerikuh. freedom! we will never forget – let’s make em pay.

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Madeleine

13 years ago

You have to wake up pretty early in the morning…
isn’t that how it goes????? Looks like that one
ain’t working for ya…time to go haunt somewhere
else…

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Pamela Geller

13 years ago

Rent or buy the movie America, America. That film is the most poignant and realistic portrayal ever by Hollywood of the dhimmi condition. Bat Ye’or recommends it as an introduction to the study of dhimmitude for the masses….
Elia Kazan made the film based on his family’s experience under the dhimma of the Muslim Turks in interior Anatolia. His family left before the massive ethnic cleansing took place. The Byzantine Greeks fought the Muslims since they reared their ugly head in the 7th century. Sadly, the fight was lost in 1453 when Constantinople, the richest, most prosperous European city, was taken by the Muslim Turk savages.
I ran the movie here but Google has since taken it down. Rent or buy it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056825/

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John K

13 years ago

Thanks for sharing A Steetcar Named Desire.
It’s good to be reminded what culture we are fighting to defend.
Since learning about Islam, I find myself knowing far more than I ever wanted to know about Arab culture, and it is a heavy and unwelcome intrusion and burden.

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AuntieMadder

13 years ago

I love this movie.
Useless trivia: Nine members of the original Broadway cast (Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden, Rudy Bond, Nick Dennis, Peg Hillias, Richard Garrick, Ann Dere and Edna Thomas) repeated their roles in the film, a highly unusual decision at the time and even today, when original casts of plays are often completely replaced for the film versions. However, Vivien Leigh, who had played Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939), was selected to play Blanche du Bois over Jessica Tandy to add “star power” to the picture (Marlon Brando had not yet achieved full stardom in films; he would be billed under Leigh in the film’s credits). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044081/trivia?tr0794352
I wish I could remember who it was that said that Tandy was more believable as a retired school teacher but not so much as a nimphomaniac, while Leigh was believable as a nimphomaniac but not so much as a retired school teacher. Perhaps it was Elia Kazan. Whoever it was, I find that to be an interesting observation.

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AuntieMadder

13 years ago

Ate up with stupid.

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dee dee

13 years ago

I watched America, America for the first time here at Atlas.
I remember the old mom or grandma complained about her dhimmi
husband, saying when he gets spit at he says its raining!
She was encouraging the boy to go to America

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Laura L

13 years ago

He’s attempting to make fun of us.

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