Vivian Leigh
Marlon Brando
Kim Hunter
Karl Malden
Directed by Elia Kazan
Blanche DuBois (Leigh) plays an aging schoolteacher who leaves her hometown under mysterious circumstances to stay with her pregnant sister, Stella in New Orleans.
Stanley Kowalski (Brando) Stella's brutish husband, resents Blanche's presence and sets about tearing down the world of illusion that Blanche attempts to surround herself.
Although The Glass Menagerie (1950) was William's first commercial success, A Streetcar Named Desire became his signature play, full of unnerving tragic realism. It earned Williams his first Pulitzer Prize.
In the stage version directed by Elia Kazan, Jessica Tandy played Blanche DuBois, Kim Hunter was Stella, and Marlon Brando Broadway’s favourite for his performance as the primal Stanley Kowalski. The major principals and the same director were also recruited for the movie version.
The filming of “A Streetcar Named Desire” was thwart with problems. Vivien Leigh clashed with Elia Kazan over her interpretation of Blanche and had problems connecting with her fellow cast members who were all ‘Method’ trained actors
At the time, Leigh's relationship with her husband was also starting to unravel and her immersion into the role of Blanche only accented her current manic-depressive state.
"In many ways she was Blanche," Brando said in his autobiography: Songs My Mother Taught Me "….She [Leigh] was memorably beautiful, one of the great beauties of the screen, but she was also vulnerable, and her own life had been very much like that of Tennessee's wounded butterfly...Like Blanche, she slept with almost everybody and was beginning to dissolve mentally and to fray at the ends physically. I might have given her a tumble if it hadn't been for Larry Olivier."
While in production, Streetcar began to encounter resistance from the film industry's self-regulating production code office. References to the homosexuality of Blanche's deceased husband were removed and the harsh original ending was altered, with Stella rejecting her husband rather than remaining by his side.
Still, the film encountered controversy during its release and Warner Brothers deleted an additional five minutes of material (it was later added back in a 1993 restoration) which included dialogue references to Blanche's past promiscuity and visual evidence of the lustful relationship between Stanley and Stella.
All the trouble was worth it in the end because A Streetcar Named Desire is now considered a landmark film in terms of the ensemble performances, Kazan's direction, and the evocative art direction by Richard Day.
The derelict New Orleans tenement is given a convincing presence through the accumulation of details such as crumbling stucco and bricks, peeling wallpaper, streaks of dirt on the walls and the dramatic courtyard staircase with wrought iron railings. Lets not forget the heat, both as part of the storyline and between the characters.
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