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.

This Day in Film History (Hollywood Censorship Tightens)

June 13, 1934—Censorship in American movies, long honored more in the breach than in fact, took hold for real with the establishment of the Production Code Administration to oversee what was morally acceptable for the public. For the next generation, film studios would struggle over how to get their products past this unit.

American film, born as a medium in the Progressive Era, often implicitly dealt with matters that obsessed the larger national culture—sources of crime, the role of women, political corruption, divorce. At the same time, they reflected the most popular extant form of American entertainment—vaudeville—with often bawdy humor and risqué sexual situations. Many reformers, terrified by the ills brought by immigrants, believed nickelodeons were breeding grounds for vice, and sought to shut them down.

By the early 1920s, Hollywood hired Will Hays, former postmaster-general in the Harding Administration, to ward office the rising ride of complaints and earn good will with a GOP-controlled administration and Congress. Hays was, in fact, an amiable fellow who, moguls discovered, could be influenced many times to see things their way.

The early years of the talkies exerted new pressure on the Hays Office. The country was living through turbulent social change: a Prohibition regime increasingly defined, a financial system rocked to its foundations, and—as a byproduct of this—the rise of tough, sexually liberated young women who dared to live independently.

By 1934, things came to a head. FDR’s activist Democratic administration was considering regulating movies, as part of the amusement trades, under the National Industrial Recovery Act. In addition to fearing interference with their business practices, film industry moguls also worried that the government would regulate content.

At the same time, the Roman Catholic Church in America was raising the alarm about morality in film. American film was witnessing legal authority disrespected (I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang), violence perpetrated (upteen mobster movies from Cagney and Edward G. Robinson), and sex (Hedy Lamarr’s notorious Ecstasy). The Legion of Decency, formed in that year, threatened a boycott of Hollywood.

Though the Legion was led by Catholics, its petitions were open to Protestants and Jews, and enough of the latter two groups had joined by mid-year that the Legion could claim two million members. On June 13, the Board of Directors of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association met in New York and unanimously passed a resolution setting up the Production Code Administration.

For the next 20 years, until his retirement, the PCA was headed by Joseph Breen, a former journalist and publicity director. It was his duty to enforce a strict code that outlawed depictions of profanity, excessive violence, illegal drugs, and risqué sexual elements on screen.

During this time, Breen—a prototypical Irish Puritan—blue-penciled films of all kinds, from big to low budget. His regime gave producers, directors, and screenwriters hives. Saying no is never popular, and there is no doubt that the code in place during those years made some content so watered-down that audiences had serious problems figuring out characters’ motivations.

(For examples of these, see A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which past histories of Tennessee Williams’ protagonists can’t be understood without realizing that homosexuality is being alluded to). It created a black-and-white moral universe that simply doesn’t exist in the real world.

And yet, I can only manage two cheers for the end of Breen’s undoubted moral hectoring. The need to pass muster with his office induced filmmakers to employ elaborate visual metaphors that served as highly creative means of conveying the idea that sex and violence were taking place.

In A Place in the Sun, for instance, George Stevens hints unmistakably at what is going on with Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters with a gramophone that continues playing…and playing…and playing, as the camera moves away from the two in a clinch. In Oliver Twist, David Lean does not show the final moments of Bill Sykes murdering Nancy, but conveys the terror through the dog desperately whining and scratching to get in the room where the murder is taking place.

The end of the production code in the 1960s—not long after Breen’s own demise, in 1965—also meant that Hollywood starlets would be increasingly objectified. When women had to keep their clothes on, they needed to be something other than sex objects—given dialogue that stressed their other roles in life. It became harder and harder to imagine them in these roles with the rise of more sexually explicit movies. With desirability an increasing job requirement for leading ladies, many felt no choice but to submit to plastic surgery.