Date Seen: 5/15/17
Score: 4.5/5
DIRECTOR: Elia Kazan
PRODUCER: Charles K. Feldman
STUDIO: Warner Brothers
SCREENPLAY: Tennessee Williams
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Harry Stradling
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| STELLA!!!!!!!!!! |
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| I have been blessed |
Listen: I know that Marlon Brando was an asshole in real life, and I fully understand that his turn as Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is as chilling as it is disturbing, but I need to just say first and foremost that Brando has never looked better, and the fact that he was the only main character in the film who didn't win an Oscar is kind of ridiculous. I mean... not that he necessarily would have accepted it anyway. Truly, Brando's performance in Elia Kazan's film, an adaption of the role he originated on Broadway, is mesmerizing. While I firmly believe that every actor in the film delivers Oscar-calibar performances (except maybe Karl Malden, who looks like John C. Reilly and acts like any old character actor), Kazan truly matched up some different styles of acting in his film. Brando, a proud adopter of the Stanislavski method who studied under Stella Adler, is all realism. Vivien Leigh, wife of Laurence Olivier (dare I say more) and, let us not forget, the woman who gave us Scarlett O'Hara, is as flamboyantly dramatic and over the top as a buzzed homosexual peacock. Kim Hunter, who looks sort of like a thinned-out Lena Dunham, is somewhere in between; usually she just has the task of hugging either Vivien Leigh or collapsing into Marlon Brando's insane arms (which, let's be real, couldn't be that hard to act).
A Streetcar Named Desire really disturbed me. There's something about film adaptations of Broadway shows that really does something for me. There's a maturity there that's lacking in films simply designed as films. There's an entirely new dimension to broadcast, and with the powers of cinema there's more room to add onto the magic of the theatre. And of course it doesn't hurt that Tennessee Williams of all people wrote the screenplay. But there's just an added dimension of sophistication in the pure drama of a stage show seen onscreen. Although there are characters like Brando, who bring absolute realism to the film, there's a permeating feeling of unreality, of hypothetics, that surrounds the film. After all, isn't it Blanche herself who sums up that feeling?
Perhaps Hollywood wasn't ready for the Stanislavski method quite yet. In many ways, A Streetcar Named Desire serves as a great bridge between the mass-produced studio films of the Golden Era of Hollywood and the ushering in of the independent New Hollywood, which rose out of the ashes of the studio system in the 1960s. Brando would make that transition, not without some rough patches, but for the other leads, the end of the Hollywood studio system was the end of their careers and, sometimes, their lives. Both Kim Hunter and Karl Malden were pretty much done with film after winning their Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor for Streetcar; they both made a few more films before moving onto television and then retiring at a ripe old age and dying old and happy. Vivien Leigh died in 1967 from tuberculosis at age 53, just in time to see the birth of the New Hollywood movement with Bonnie and Clyde. But that wasn't for her. We all know that the kind of Hollywood that Leigh represented died following the collapse of the studio system, and by the time she played the desperate and sad Blanche DuBois in 1951, Leigh was no longer the 26-year-old first-time Oscar winner for Gone With The Wind. Though she still looked pretty damn good, the kind of beauty that Leigh and her generation represented was fading fast.
I know that A Streetcar Named Desire is not about the collapse of the Hollywood Golden Age. I know that as one of the greatest plays of all time it certainly deserves a more thorough interpretation. But listen: I'm not here to tell you what movies mean. You can do what I'm doing and go to film school for that if you care to, or just watch them a whole bunch and make up your own mind. I'm just here to judge.
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