| Overall Grade: |
A |
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| Story: |
A |
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| Acting: |
A+ |
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| Direction: |
A |
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| Visuals: |
A- |
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A Streetcar of Change
by Aaro (movies profile)
Dec 4, 2007
1
of
1 people found this review helpful
Throughout the course of cinema history, there are a few films that revolutionized movie-making unlike any other. The Jazz Singer was the first movie ever to have sound, Gone With the Wind was the first epic film to have technicolor, and films like Jaws and Star Wars began the blockbuster age. Yet A Streetcar Named Desire matches the impact of all these films because of two reasons: Tennessee Willliams' daring and controversial screenplay and Marlon Brando's volcanic performance as Stanley Kowalski.
Adapted from Williams own 1947 Pulitzer Prize winning play, A Streetcar Named Desire is as intense a psychological drama as any "hard-hitting" film released today. Blanche Dubois (Vivien Leigh) is a Mississippi girl who is moving to New Orleans to live with her sister. She has a swarm of inner demons, but holds on to the fascade that she is just a worn out high school English teacher afraid to kiss her new boyfriend Mitch (Karl Malden). Her sister Stella (Kim Hunter) believes her, but brother-in-law Stanley (Brando) is much more suspicious. After a little investigation he learns the truth about Blanche's shady past, and he hopes to use it to get her out of his house. He is an abusive, drunkard of a husband, and does not want his relationship with Kim to be ruined by her elitist sister.
Elia Kazan's 1993 director's cut only adds a few minutes of footage, but these few extra shots add extra dimensions of the film that the censory board was not willing to tolerate. In the famous scene where Stanley screams "Stella, Stella," the sexual desire in Hunter's eyes has been reinstated. Additionally, extra shots of the final confrontation between Brando and Leigh have been added. The 1951 censorship board did not feel that a rape scene should be so intense.
The acting in the film is uniformly magnificent. Karl Malden, Kim Hunter, and Vivien Leigh all took home Oscar's for their work, and deservedly so. Malden's Mitch plays as a counterpoint to Brando's Stanley; he is a gentle mama's boy willing to trust Blanche regardless of her eccentricities. Yet when Blanche needs him most, he leaves her. Hunter is the conscience of the film; the only character that is consistently likeable. She loves her sister and in many ways hates her husband, but he radiates a charisma that she cannot repel. To Kim, an angry Stanley is a sexy Stanley. Leigh turns in one of her two legendary performances as Blanche (the other being Gone With the Wind), as she perfectly plays a ragged, aging woman trying to hold onto her last shreds of dignity. Leigh is grandiose and operatic in the role, but her style of acting would soon go out of favor. As good as her performance is, Brando's new style of "method acting" forever changed cinema. At the time of A Streetcar Named Desire, Brando had only been in one other film although he had been playing Stanley on Broadway. Yet he became an instant sensation after the the film, and he earned an Oscar nomination for his role (although embarrasingly for the Academy he was the only one of his co-stars not to win). He would earn nominations the next three years, before finally winning for Kazan's On the Waterfront in 1954. But as spectacular as Brando is in "Waterfront" and several of his other roles, many still consider Streetcar to his crowning accomplishment. Never had such anger and passion been expressed on film before, and few have matched Brando's gut-wrenching turn since. Tenessee Williams has commented that all the performances were great, but they were performances. Brando, on the other hand, was real. Whether Stanley is walking, talking, chewing, shouting, or crying; it always seem real.
At the 1951 Academy Awards, A Streecar Named Desire was defeated by the lighthearted Gene Kelly musical An American in Paris, a win that many now consider laughable. A Streetcar Named Desire is a great film for the performances alone, but when coupled with Williams' incredible screenplay and Kazan's innovative direction, a masterpiece is born. And no other word can aptly describe this film. |
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