Tennessee Williams, easily one of the most remembered American playwrights of his generation, would be celebrating his 102nd birthday on March 26. At the age of 36 in 1947, his most famous play premiered on Broadway, the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire. That first production was directed by Elia Kazan and introduced the world to Marlon Brando. A few years later, the idea was hatched to turn it into a film, but you could do a lot more on the Broadway stage than you could on the big screen at the time. But Williams and Kazan managed to bring it to the screen without losing the soul of the story.
Like most Williams stories, the soul of Streetcar is a tortured, fading Southern belle named Blanche DuBois. She arrives in New Orleans after losing her family plantation, Belle Reve in Mississippi and stays at her sister Stella's place. Stella lives with her husband, Stanley Kowalski, in a run-down, bleak part of the French Quarter. This trio cannot sustain being together long as both the temperature and their personalities heat up. Williams' story is hardly in the traditional sense, with a beginning, middle, climax and an end. Instead, his focuses is on the characters and only he could create such three-dimensional, complex characters in the Southern Gothic style.
In the structure of Streetcar, the focus is Blanche. She's a woman who hasn't come to terms with her age and it doesn't help that so much has happened to derail her life. Most of this is her own fault, of course – from her infatuation with a young student that lead to her losing her job to how Belle Reve fell apart – but she has also been shunned by others. She had always “depended on the kindness of strangers,” but she so rarely received that until it was too late.
Blanche comes to New Orleans expecting Stella to welcome her with open arms, but Stanley is skeptical of Blanche's intentions, making any happy sister reunion impossible. The two constantly butt heads, with Blanche believing that Stella is too good for Stanley. For him, he's tired of putting up with Blanche's insults and put-downs. His life with Stella, a woman who could handle his aggression, was fine by him until Blanche came along, with her tales of Belle Reve's glory days.
The original production of Streetcar featured Jessica Tandy as Blanche and a young Marlon Brando as Stanley. Kim Hunter played Stella and rounding out the main four was Karl Malden, playing the sympathetic Mitch. Tandy, whose name was hardly recognizable outside of Broadway, was replaced by Vivien Leigh, whose star power made it possible for Kazan and Williams to keep the other three in the film. But Leigh also knew Blanche forwards and backwards, having played the character in the first London production. Only the people who saw the legendary Tandy perform can really tell if Kazan and Williams made the right move, but Leigh brings a kind frailty and delicacy that no other actress could bring.
Kazan might have been the greatest actor's director who ever lived, but that takes away from his visual genius. His best films are the ones about run-down, average people on the end of their ropes, whether it be his other film with Tennessee Williams (Baby Doll) or his other work. The clear sense of claustrophobia in the film version of Streetcar makes you feel the sweat coming off these characters, similarly, the visible breath of the actors in On The Waterfront makes you feel the cool air of New Jersey. It's that gritty sense of realism that makes it easy for an audience to connect with the story on screen, which Kazan pulled off so masterfully in Streetcar.
A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the classics in American drama, just as the film is a classic of cinema. It introduced the world to Brando and a realistic approach to acting that has rarely been on screen since. But even if Brando's acting is fantastic, it really means nothing unless you've got a genius like Williams crafting this story and Kazan directing him.
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