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.
