The 2022-2023 Film Journal Entry #21: "A Streetcar Named Desire"

2022-2023 Film Journal Entry #21

by Xavier E. Palacios

"A Streetcar Named Desire"

3.5 out of 5

Directed by Elia Kazan

Rated "PG"

Adapting Tennessee Williams' titular stage play, the secretive Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) moves to the shady and unhappy city of New Orleans to live in an apartment with her sister, Stella (Kim Hunter), and her abusive, distrusting, brutish, and attractive husband, Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando). As Blanche tries fitting into her new, hostile surroundings, the berating Stanley consistently confers with Stella that they should be investigating his suspicions as to why his sister-in-law really left her teaching position to reside with them. Blanche also befriends Stanley's friend, Mitch (Karl Malden), a single, older man who instantly desires her. As she grows closer to Mitch and the unhealthy atmosphere in the apartment worsens, particularly with Stella and Stanley's child on the way, the husband's antics exacerbates Blanche's troubled mental state. When the dark truth about why she came to New Orleans is brought to the light, disaster envelopes the last of Blanche's mind.

While at university, I saw my campus' fair production of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. I did not understand the play, thinking the story was just about a bunch of jerks doing jerky things to each other with Romantic language only professors and drama queens could like. Later, I studied Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (which is not about a feline on some blazing rooftop) (but there is a fiddler on a roof in Fiddler on the Roof; go figure). Though having more or less the same aesthetics as Menagerie, I had changed since I saw that production. I was more receptive to the playwright's work. Sure, his stories and writing, from one of many perspectives, may be just what many stage plays are, a cast of unlikeable losers in a confined space poetically whining about their problems both real and imagined until the story stops. Yet there was a bite to his stories I now enjoyed.

Firstly, Williams' dialogue is really special. For an actor, his words are like a seven-course meal of the finest spices, fruits, and meats. The fact that ordinary, screwed-up, problematic, and interesting American chums are the ones speaking such dialogue makes for a compelling point about the inherit drama within the common person. The lofty language of Shakespeare is returned to those watching, reading, and being forced to study his plays. Secondly, Williams' stories somewhat frighten me. There is a claustrophobia to the domestic, relationship, and mental issues these characters face that, beneath the artsy dialogue, are all too real. Everything poor Laura Wingfield is trapped by in Menagerie. The difficult secrets the football star, Brick, bears in Hot Tin Roof. The long list of demons within Blanche in Streetcar. Though I first approached Williams, and similar plays, with a youthful ignorance about what counted as great drama, the more time passed, I realized that his writing is a grammatical rollercoaster of thrills, and his characters were a touch more relatable than I liked to admit.

A Streetcar Named Desire is a very fine film; one of the better crafted and performed entries of this cinematic year. The black-and-white production design is deliciously shadowy and painterly. The first-rate actors are outstanding. Also, I did not know until after the film that Kim Hunter, who plays Stella, is the same Kim Hunter who plays Zira in the original Planet of the Apes movies. Talk about range! I always feel the humidity of New Orleans; the tension in the air around Stanley; and the sensation that everything in Blanche and Stella's lives is spinning out of control. I was never bored, uninterested, or confused by the tale's telling. Instead, trapped in the apartment and New Orleans with these poor ladies and Stanley, whose unborn child I fear so much for, I felt like I was watching an emotional car crash in slow motion. Or, as the band, Panic at the Disco!, sings in their song, "Memories": And it was beautifully depressing like A Streetcar Named Desire. Though I do not find anything in this narrative "beautiful" one bit.