Flashback, September 1951: ‘Streetcar’ Brings to Hollywood ‘The Method'—and Censorship Issues

A Streetcar Named Desire wasn’t the first Hollywood adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play when it was released in the U.S. 75 years ago this month, but it left the most lasting impact on the film industry. Unlike The Glass Menagerie the year before, it was perfectly cast and adeptly directed by Elia Kazan (as he had done on Broadway).

Moreover, with Marlon Brando repeating his sensational stage turn as brutish Stanley Kowalski only a few weeks after Montgomery Clift’s acclaimed performance in A Place in the Sun, it demonstrated the full power of the style that Kazan had been advancing at New York’s Actors Studio: “The Method,” with performers encouraged to use their memories of past emotional experiences to create a character.

Critics and audiences applauded how Kazan had translated the sweaty sensuality and tragic lyricism of Williams’ Pulitzer Prize winning drama from the stage to the screen.

But the source material’s frank depiction of an offscreen gay character, nymphomania, and sexual assault, among other issues, put Warner Brothers Studio on a collision course with the movie industry’s censorship arm, the Production Code Administration (PCA).

Much of this latter story is told in a long section of Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951), a volume of revealing letters, telegrams and memos edited by film scholar Rudy Behlmer. As much of a landmark as the film is considered in terms of its overall excellence (including, by Alex North, the first notable jazz score in a major Hollywood film, and Harry Stradling’s vivid cinematography), the pitched battle over its content represented a milestone of its own.

PCA executive Geoffrey Shurlock may have summed it up best: “For the first time we were confronted with a picture that was obviously not family entertainment. Before then we had considered Anna Karenina a big deal. Streetcar broke the barrier.”

Kazan and Williams presented a united front against the PCA. They grudgingly softened the treatment of the promiscuity of faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois and the intimate relationship between her dead husband and an older male friend. But they drew the line at the PCA’s suggestion that she could imagine her rape by Stanley because of her mental fragility.

Williams protested to PCA head Joseph Breen, vehemently and eloquently, that if the sexual assault were treated in this fashion, “the play loses its meaning, which is the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the safe and brutal forces in modern society. It is a positive plea for comprehension.” He vowed that if he and Kazan had “our backs against the wall…none of us is going to throw in the towel!”

Kazan and Williams won that round, though making one compromise (spoiler alert): Stanley would be punished by having wife Stella leave him. They were able to prevail again when Breen seemed ready to wobble about the rape scene.

What neither the director nor playwright could imagine was that the Catholic Legion of Decency would interfere just as the film was ready for release. Its threat to issue a “Condemned” rating—guaranteed box-office poison—led Warner Brothers to cancel the movie’s Radio City booking and call editor David Weisbart in, without Kazan’s knowledge, to make further excisions.

The studio refused to accede to Kazan’s plea that the film be released in two versions clearly labeled as being edited or not. In all, he estimated, the 12 cuts amounted to roughly five minutes—footage not seen until Warner Brothers restored it for the director’s version in 1993. (The deleted scenes are in this YouTube clip.)

Vivien Leigh, the only member of the central quartet at the heart of the drama who was not carried over from Broadway (producers thought she would provide a greater box-office boost than Jessica Tandy), was, unlike Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, classically trained rather than schooled in The Method.

But she had played Blanche in a London production directed by husband Laurence Olivier, and, as author and screenwriter Logan Kelly discussed in this 2023 post on the Collider blog, she threw herself so strongly into the role onscreen that it exacerbated the bipolar disorder that was already afflicting her.

Though Brando drew favorable notices with his film debut the prior year, The Men, it was Streetcar that stunned longtime Hollywood professionals. 

His transformation into Blanche’s loutish but sensual antagonist was revelatory, in the same manner described by Truman Capote watching him in rehearsal for Broadway: “with what chameleon ease Brando acquired the character’s cruel and gaudy colors, how superbly, like a guileful salamander, he slithered into the part, how his own persona evaporated.”

Ironically, despite the effect that Brando’s performance had on cinema acting, he did not join fellow nominated cast members Leigh, Hunter, and Malden in the winner’s circle. Best Actor that year went to industry veteran Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. Brando would have to wait another three years to collect his, for the equally electrifying On the Waterfront.