Dir. Elia Kazan
Starring: Vivien Leigh, Marlon
Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden
Vivien Leigh won her first
Academy Award for Best Actress in 1939’s Gone
With the Wind playing Scarlett O’Hara, a spoiled Southern belle who,
through tragedy, discovers her own inner steel. She won her second Academy
Award for Best Actress for 1951’s A
Streetcar Named Desire playing another Southern belle, but this time one
whose emotional core is much more fragile.
Leigh’s Blanche DuBois alights
nervously in New Orleans.
She finds her sister Stella (Kim Hunter) living in a run-down apartment in the
seedy French Quarter. He home was a once-grand mansion, now compartmentalised
into separate small units, through the walls of which every argument, every
smash and every gurgling laugh can be heard. Like the house itself Blanche is a
stately reminder of long-gone glory. Her childhood home has been “lost” under generations of debts. Her
looks too are slipping away. Whereas once she was admired and courted she now
has nothing but a trunk full of fine dresses and a pile of yellowed love
letters. Yet despite her straightened circumstances she attempts to keep up the
illusion that she is still young, genteel and desirable. She is like her
rhinestone tiara – looks like diamonds, but in reality is “next door to glass”. In this charade her doting sister Stella connives.
The one variable is Stella’s
husband, Stanley Kowalski. Stanley
is the most alpha of alpha males – he’s played by a young actor by the name of
Marlon Brando, all bulging biceps and skin-tight t-shirts. Blanche cannot
pretend that she is still living in some courtly romance with Stanley filling up the space. He swaggers, he
drinks, he goes bowling and plays poker with his buddies, and he holds an
irresistible sexual power over Stella. He is wild and animalistic – Stella
giggles as she tells Blanche that “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…
I was sort of thrilled by it.” For her his earthy – “common” as Blanche has it – machismo is a potent turn on. In turn
he sees things very simply; those things that annoy his he lashes out at, be it
the light bulbs (smashed), the radio (thrown out the window) or people he
disagrees with (with whom he brawls). Blanche is the latest annoyance, but he
has to tread more warily than he is used to, because she is his wife’s sister.
He handles people by cowing them into submission, but Blanche refuses to be
cowed. Blanche handles people by casting a spell over them, but Stanley refuses to be
seduced. Events head towards another smash.
 |
Guess who's coming to dinner?
Stanley and Blanche head towards a smash |
This is a powerful, intense,
visceral drama. Stanley,
mumbling around a mouthful of cold salami, filling the doorways of his tiny
two-room apartment, is King Kong in his jungle. Blanche, wafting around in her
taffeta and lace and spraying on the last of her perfume, is Faye Wray. There
is a web of interdependencies. Blanche needs Stella to wait upon her and
protect her from reality; it is when Stella vacates the house to give birth
that things really start to go wrong. Despite their ups and downs Stanley and
Stella need each other. Whenever she leaves him he bellows her name like a
wounded bull: “Stella! Hey, Stella!”
She cannot break free from his orbit. Blanche classifies the pull between them
as ”just brutal desire”. Blanche
hesitantly starts to develop a relationship with Stanley’s pal Mitch (Karl Malden). She needs
to escape from her past, he needs to escape from his dying mother. They say
that they need somebody. Not necessarily the other person, just somebody. Mitch
is the best Blanche can get in the Quarter and she needs someone to worship
her; Blanche is fascinating to Mitch precisely because she is like nothing he
has ever met before. She has created “enchantment”.
Enchantment that Stanley
is only too happy to dispel. More than anything, in the film’s most famous
quote, Blanche has “always depended on
the kindness of strangers”.
The passing of former glories is
a major theme here; a passing of glories and death. Stella refuses to talk to
Blanche when she is being “morbid”.
But death plays a central role. Blanche talks about being trapped in Belle
Rive, the DuBois’s ancestral Mississippi
home, with an entire family of people dying. The cost of the funerals
contributed to the losing of the house. She is more haunted though by the
suicide of her husband. She mocked him at a dance and he went out and shot
himself. She still hears the polka and the gunshot in her head, no matter how
much she tries to pretend the event never happened (she largely convinces
herself that “deliberate cruelty… is the
one unforgivable thing, in my opinion, and the one thing of which I have never,
never been guilty”). Mitch has to escape from his house where his mother,
too, is dying. And Blanche’s increasing hysteria is reflected in the old
Spanish lady in the fogbound night-time streets selling flowers for the dead.
In contrast New Orleans
is fecund and fertile. It is hot and steamy, choked with sailors and drunks, a
bar on every corner. Its inhabitants fight and make up. Stella herself is
blooming with new life. To reach safety with Stella, bedazzled by the city,
Blanche has to “take a streetcar named
Desire and then transfer to one called Cemetery”. Passion and death are all
around.
The film comes across maybe a bit
too stagey at times. There are occasionally phrases used that could only be a
playwright’s words, phrases that would never be used in real life, not even by
someone like Blanche DuBois. The lighting could have been better; shadows fall
across faces. But it is stagey. It is an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’
play, and the actors are drawn from the casts of the stage productions. Elia
Kazan (who later directed Splendor in the
Grass) directed the play on Broadway. Its cast included Brando, Hunter and Malden. None of these
were Hollywood stars; that is why the British Leigh, star of the West End production, was brought in to provide a marquee
name. Leigh’s experience as an outsider, dropped into a cast that had already
gelled, must have reflected those of Blanche. But how often does a stage smash
transfer to the cinema these days? I can only think of War Horse as a modern-day comparison. But even then War Horse was recast. Streetcar sees the stage production
largely transferred wholesale to a larger set. The belief that there is a
difference between stage acting and film acting is exploded. Of the stage stars
Leigh, Hunter and Malden
won their respective Oscars; Brando was nominated by lost out to Humphrey
Bogart in The African Queen. Director
Elias Kazan was also nominated for his work here but missed out.
What have I learnt about Louisiana?
Now they got there in the state
of Louisiana
what’s known as the Napoleonic Code. Now according to that, what belongs to the
wife belongs to the husband, and vice versa… This partly explains Stanley’s antipathy
towards Blanche. If Belle Rive has, as he initially suspects, been sold, half
of the proceeds should come to Stella, and through her to him. He looks at
Blanche’s “solid gold” dresses and
ropes of pearls and asks himself where Stella’s dresses and pearls are. And
swindle perpetrated against Stella is a swindle against him too.
Stanley has no unctuous cringe towards the
landed gentry. That might be the case in other parts of the Old South, but not
in Louisiana.
He quotes approvingly the former state governor, Huey Long: “every man’s a king”. He may be working
class but he is the king of his own little domain. It would be interesting to
see further if this attitude is unique to Louisiana.
But mostly, from this film we see
New Orleans, not Louisiana. Nawlins is its own unique
location, full of decayed and crumbling mansions, drunken sailors stumbling out
of bars, crowds and taxis and bright lights. The city has a seedy, tawdry
glamour where couples quarrel openly, where people sit out in the open on sofas
on hot muggy nights, and where old ladies sell flowers for the dead. This noise
and urgency and life must be quite an assault on the senses of a delicate woman
down from the decaying plantations of old Mississippi.
Can we go there?
A Streetcar Named Desire is set in the decaying French Quarter of New Orleans, on Elysian
Fields Avenue. Only initial establishing shots of
Blanche’s arrival were actually filmed there, however; the remainder of the
movie was shot on set in Hollywood.
You will no longer arrive at the
same station as Blanche DuBois. Union Station was demolished in 1954 and
replaced by Union Passenger Terminal. In New
Orleans, the famous streetcars only run on a couple of lines these days. The St Charles line from the French Quarter is
composed of historic Perley Thomas rolling stock like that shown in the film.
In particular car #922 runs on this route, and is the one seen in the movie.
The Canal Street
and Riverfront lines use newer cars modelled on the Perley Thomases. No lines
run to Elysian Fields these days (in fact the Desire line converted from
streetcars to buses in 1948, prior to the film being released, and only a year
after Tennessee Williams’ original play opened).
Overall Rating: 4/5
