Elia Kazan (1951)

Elia Kazan had directed Streetcar on Broadway and he handles the screen adaptation – with a screenplay by Tennessee Williams himself – with confidence.  Kazan strikes the right balance between opening out and closing in the material.  He places the Kowalskis’ shabby dwelling in a larger physical context then keeps much of the main action in the cramped apartment so as to maximise the impact of the collision between the desperate sensibilities of Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois.  (We see Blanche’s arrival at New Orleans train station, then in the street where her sister Stella and her husband Stanley live, as well as hearing about her journey to Elysian Fields via the eponymous streetcar.)   Of the ones I know, this is Williams’s best play by some distance:  the writing is both imaginative and precise, the lines always convincingly belong to, and deepen our understanding of, the characters.  When Blanche is about to leave the apartment for the mental institution that is her eventual destination, Stella and her neighbour Eunice admire her going away outfit:   Eunice says ‘What a pretty blue jacket’ and Stella that ‘It’s lilac-coloured’.  Blanche corrects them:  ‘You’re both mistaken.  It’s Dellarobbia blue’.   (Seeing the film again really brought home how many famous lines Streetcar contains:  ‘I don’t want realism … I’ll tell you what I want.  Magic!’; ‘Sometimes – there’s God – so quickly’; ‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers’.)

Stanley – the inarticulate ‘Polack’ brute – is one of the few major figures in the Williams canon not to have a surfeit of lines.  Because of his creator’s irrepressible love of words, however, even an inarticulate brute, in Williams’s world, has more to say than the conception of the character might suggest.  Stanley has a pungent, slangy wit which at first gets under Blanche’s skin – as her fancy, fanciful talk gets under his – then becomes a bludgeon.  (This development adumbrates the later shift from verbal to sexual aggression towards Blanche.)  The relatively laconic writing of the role – combined with the quality of what lines there are – gives Marlon Brando his opportunity and his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski is deservedly legendary.  Of course we can’t get a sense of how excitingly original Brando’s playing must have felt at the time (perhaps even to those who had seen him in the role on stage).  I was anxious that it would be difficult to detach the performance from knowledge of its seminal influence on screen acting (or even from the many parodies of the performance) but I needn’t have worried.   Brando is truly spellbinding (and both those words are the mots justes). I’d seen the film in its entirety only once before (over 20 years ago) but I’ve often seen excerpts of the most famous moments.  When Stanley imitates a yowling alley cat it never fails to startle me, as well as Blanche.  We can see and hear that Stanley isn’t dumb in either sense of the word and Brando makes his powerful presence unsettlingly ambiguous:  we’re never quite sure how much Stanley is shaped by his social background, or by his lack of education, or whether he’s inherently morally defective.   In any case, Brando gets us to believe that Stanley believes he’s an emotionally honest man – just as he believes that Blanche is a fraud.

There’s a gripping convergence between this element of the story and the styles of the two leads.  Brando came to loathe Stanley Kowalski – perhaps as an epitome of what went wrong with his Hollywood career – but he was kidding himself if he refused to accept how innovatively truthful his playing of the role was.   Vivien Leigh, from the moment we first see Blanche arriving at the station, is acting – and we can see that she’s acting, whereas we can’t see how Brando achieves his effects.   His art here conceals art and Leigh’s displays artfulness.  I first saw the film with a friend who, when there’s a commotion at the Kowalskis’ home and people in the street wonder what’s going on, said, ‘It’s that woman upstairs trying to win an Oscar’.  It’s this quality in Leigh’s performance that prevents me from admiring it in the way I admire Brando’s; but because pretence and illusion are essential to Blanche and because Leigh’s artificiality is so brilliantly sustained, I realised, seeing the film again, that her acting develops its own truth – it’s mannered but the mannerisms acquire depth.  And the fact that Leigh is acting in a style different from the styles of the other actors resonates strongly with Blanche’s increasing disorientation.

Leigh was the only one of the main players who’d not been in the Broadway cast.   She and Brando get great support from Karl Malden and Kim Hunter.   As Mitch, the awkward bachelor who doesn’t fit with the other members of Stanley’s poker game and who courts Blanche admiringly, unseeingly, Malden uses his physical solidity and lack of grace to express Mitch’s potential for devotion and the emotional obtuseness which are two sides of the same coin.  Hunter, although she enjoyed much less success than the other three in her subsequent screen career, has an emotional candour and fluidity as Stella which seem remarkably modern.   The film won four Academy Awards, including three acting awards – for Malden, Hunter and the woman upstairs.  (It also won for black-and-white art direction.)   Brando, famously, didn’t get the Oscar.  It was a very strong field and Montgomery Clift’s performance in A Place In the Sun would have been a deserving winner in most years.  The Academy, in one of its most notorious spasms of sentimental belated recognition, gave the award to Humphrey Bogart for The African Queen.

18 November 2008