User reviews

A deluded Southern belle goes to stay with her pregnant sister and her swaggering brute of a brother-in-law in their tacky New Orleans flat, but his pent-up passion and the belle's fluttery innocence/insanity clash in dramatic and sexual ways. Vivien Leigh is exceptional as quixotic, somewhat irritating Blanche DuBois, and this highly-theatrical material only comes to life cinematically when she is on the screen. Talk-heavy Tennessee Williams play seems a bit smoothed over, with the breathy lines of unreal dialogue occasionally landing with a literate clatter. Personal taste will have to decide whether the writer's penchant for melodramatic speeches and irrational behaviors are touching, theatrically-charged, or just perverse (sometimes they are all three). It's a beautifully filmed piece, and with Oscar-winner Leigh as Blanche it is nearly a success. Kim Hunter and Karl Malden (as a milquetoast friend of the husband's) won Supporting Oscars. Marlon Brando (as tortured Stanley Kowolski) works and works at carving out his character with such angst that he may leave some viewers cold. Arduous, occasionally intriguing and involving but also extremely heavy-going. Remade twice for television, in 1984 and 1995. **1/2 from ****

The most impressive thing in A Streetcar Named Desire is the sets, because I have no idea how they held up with all of the actors chewing on the scenery. To be honest, I'm having a hard time understanding how this film became a classic. Maybe Marlon Brando's performance was groundbreaking then, but it's been mimicked so many times since that it doesn't hold the same power. I don't know, this film just wasn't as Stella-r as I expected.

Tennessee Williams' soap adapted for cinema in 1951 is famous for Brando's pungently subversive method performance - albeit with all the usual slightly contrived and intensely narcissistic 'Brandon-ian' hallmarks- as Stanley Kowalski in what NME's Chris Bohn described as -'Brando's brilliant bursting out of Stanley Kowalski....' back in 1983 when it was aired by the Beeb. A teen-idol in the '50s along with Elvis Presley and James Dean- that handsome face with its sharp aquiline profile, chiselled features and Dionysian somatic qualities is given prominence - a 'man of marble'. His Polish-American butterball Stanley Kowalski character sports a tight t-shirt, a distinctive wristwatch with square matchbox-like face and chunky leather strap, a steel US Army military i.d.bracelet etc. Although not Brando's most flairful performance - that honour goes to his fairhaired bearded adventurer William Walker in Burn! (1968-1971) - it made his name. Some of the anti-Polish remarks are very spicy and the 'Brandon-ian' responses seem nationalistic in an aggrieved Polish sense.