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.

Quote of the Day (Tennessee Williams, on the Human Heart)

“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.” — Blanche DuBois to suitor Harold “Mitch” Mitchell in American playwright and fiction writer Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

The image accompanying this post comes from the 1951 film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by Tennessee Williams, with Vivien Leigh as Blanche and Karl Malden as Mitch. Both won Oscars for their performances.

Theater Review: Tennessee Williams’ ‘The Rose Tattoo,’ From the Roundabout Theatre Co.

At first glance, Marisa Tomei would not seem to be an ideal candidate to play the lead in Tennessee Williams’ 1950 play, The Rose Tattoo. After all, the playwright’s state directions refer to Serafina Delle Rose as “plump,” and the movie star, God bless her, is not yet at the stage where her figure would charitably be labeled zaftig.

But in other ways, the role clung as well to her as the clothes her widowed seamstress character knitted in the Roundabout Theatre Co. revival that closed last week at the American Airlines Theater. Like Serafina, Ms. Tomei is of Sicilian ancestry (even if she is not a native of Italy), unlike the Broadway originator of the role, Irish-American Maureen Stapleton. She is closer to the character’s age, too, than Ms. Stapleton (54 vs. 24). Her screen roles demonstrate her comfort in expressing this character’s erotic instincts. Most of all, she can segue expertly between tragic and comic modes, as Williams could write when inclined (which, more often than not, he wasn’t).

In a sense, it is surprising that Broadway had not gotten around to reviving The Rose Tattoo much sooner. Not only did the role of Serafina win Anna Magnani a Best Actress Oscar in 1955, but the play itself won Williams a Best Play Tony Award.

Yet it took the Roundabout a while to stage it—as the company’s ninth production of a Williams play, it had to wait its turn behind The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, written when the playwright was well into a creative and popular decline. It might not have made it this time either, except that Tomei and director Trip Cullman had proved that it remained a viable theatrical property with an acclaimed 2016 production at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

The Rose Tattoo, you see, may well be Williams’ most optimistic play. In Serafina’s hope for a second chance of love after the sudden death of both her husband and the unborn child she lost in shock afterward, the playwright gave dramatic life to his own giddy new lease on life at the start of his relationship with Frank Merlo, who became his most significant and long-lasting romantic partner. 

The Italian-American Merlo also sparked the slightly unusual milieu of this play. Like much of his work, it is set in the South, but the drawling denizens of the region take a back seat this time to Sicilian immigrants on the Gulf Coast. The women of the community, headed by matriarch Assunta (played by an affecting Carolyn Mignini), form a kind of chorus of deep concern surrounding Serafina.

Even with ths different setting and character types, Williams could not help returning to his traditional themes of illusion and constraint-overpowering passion. But this time, a wounded female protagonist realizes that the first must be rejected and the second welcomed in order for her to go on living. 

Serafina’s desperate prayer to the statue of the Madonna she keeps—“Oh, Lady, give me a sign!”—is answered in the most  unlikely way: in the arrival on her doorstep of Alvaro Mangiacavallo (a fine Emun Elliott), whose argument with a traveling salesman has left him with torn clothes. 

Agreeing to mend his company jacket, Serafina lends him her late husband’s rose shirt. Glimpsing his finely muscled torso in the sunlight for the first time, she can’t help gasping, “My husband's body, with the head of a clown!”

This scene, as much as any other in the play, revealed Tomei’s frankly physical approach to the role. She fairly staggered back at the sight of Elliott’s torso, creating raucous laughter. She produced the same effect in another scene in which Serafina struggles none too successfully to wiggle out of her girdle.

The conflicts in Williams’ best-known plays are normally battlefields of the mind, but Serafina, a Sicilian earth mother, wages hers in the here and now: with neighbors who regard the widow as disorderly, with a prospective new lover she is trying to understand, and with a teenage daughter who provokes all her overprotective instincts.

Cullman masterfully used contributions from set designer Mark Wendland to create this community swayed as much by sensuality as by swaying coastal breezes. But his best work was drawing such a funny-sad, vibrant performance from Tomei. 

In the process, the actress not only made an implicit argument for allowing future theatergoers to see Serafina more often onstage, but also for her own return—hopefully soon—to Broadway.

Quote of the Day (Jean Shepherd, on Real-Life vs. Theatrical Marital Strife)

“Real-life man and wife, mother and father battles rarely even remotely resemble the Theatrical or Fictional version of the Struggle between the Sexes. Homes have been wracked by strife and dissension because of a basic difference of opinion over where to go on a vacation, or what kind of car to buy, or a toaster that made funny noises, or a sister-in-law’s false teeth, not to mention who is going to take out the garbage. And why.

“In all my experience I have never known homes that had the kind of fights that appear in plays by Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams. It would never have occurred to my father to bellow dramatically in the living room, after twenty-seven Scotches: ‘You bitch! You’re not going to emasculate me!’

“The Old Man would not have even known what the word ‘emasculate’ meant, much less figure that that’s what my mother was up to.”—American humorist, radio and TV personality, and writer and actor Jean Shepherd (1921-1999), “My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art,” in In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash (1966)

Quote of the Day (Tennessee Williams, on ‘All Cruel People’)

"All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness." –Playwright Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963)

Quote of the Day (Laurence Olivier, on Vivien Leigh)

“I started to rehearse Streetcar on 29 August 1949. I think I can say that I was helpful to Vivien’s performance of Blanche; I hit on the practical notion that as by changing one feature one can create a whole new face, so by the alteration of one major characteristic, not hitherto associated with you, you can become another person with a different personality. I noticed at the first rehearsals, by the reactions among the company, that Vivien's unexpected, much deeper, much rougher voice had impressed them. I watched, fascinated, the strange new person that grew from this one dominant change of key. I thought, if her critics had one grain of fairness, they will give her credit for being an actress and not go on forever letting their judgment be distorted by her great beauty and Hollywood stardom. As it turned out, they were not so bad as usual, but clearly reluctant in their approval. Her colleagues and the public were unanimously eulogistic in their praises.”—Laurence Olivier, describing directing wife Vivien Leigh in a London production of A Streetcar Named Desire, in Confessions of an Actor: An Autobiography (1982)

This passage speaks volumes about the relationship between Sir Laurence Olivier and the second and most famous of his three wives, Vivien Leigh, born on this date 100 years ago in India. You see the loving protectiveness that sustained him through two decades of marriage to a woman he correctly described to later lover Sarah Miles as “a manic depressive, schizophrenic, nymphomaniac”; admiration for a fellow actor’s skill; an emphasis on how external characteristics, rather than the dredging up of personal experience, informs a role; and, perhaps, at least some competiveness between the two (he was “helpful” to the performance of an actress who, he also told Miles, “wasn’t good enough in the theatre [to be designated by the queen as ‘Dame’]. She would never even bother turning up for her voice production classes.”).

Streetcar came halfway through one of the most storied—and sad—marriages in film history. (For the denouement, see my prior post on the making of The Prince and the Showgirl, set against the background of their crumbling relationship.)

The “Hollywood stardom” to which Olivier referred came to Leigh as a result, of course, of Gone With the Wind. She wasn’t exactly right for the role of the Southern belle to beat all Southern belles (the novel’s first sentence, after all, is, “Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were"). But with her kind of looks onscreen (in the words of friend Jesse L. Lasky Jr., “hair stirred by the breeze, eyes like fire opals beneath the circle of her wide-brimmed black hat”), who would dare quibble? So she won the role, after the most publicized talent search in movie history, along with her first Oscar.

The dominant characteristic of Scarlett is her indomitability in the face of catastrophes that crush nearly everyone else near and dear to her. Leigh made only nine more feature films after Gone With the Wind and, with the exception of the younger, spirited half of Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), none of the roles reflect Scarlett’s strength.

Her London triumph as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, along with her central part in the greatest Hollywood blockbuster of them all in GWTW, gave her the leverage to win the role in the film adaptation from the actress who originated Blanche on Broadway, Jessica Tandy, and to take home her second Oscar in 1951. 

But this film, like others in these years, mirrored her offscreen stormy love life and fragile mental condition. (Like Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning stint as the Joker in The Dark Knight, it raises the issue of how far an actor with mental-health issues can go in exploring a dark role.)

The role of Blanche--fearful of losing youth and beauty--has to be among the most harrowing an actress can play. Ten years later, another Tennessee Williams property would expose, even more pitilessly, Leigh’s insecurity: The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, about an aging actress who takes up with a young Italian gigolo.(Again, art seemed to mirror life: Leigh had an affair with her miscast co-star: Warren Beatty, already establishing a reputation as a lothario.)

A couple of years later, Miles, who had some unhappy experiences with Leigh during the shooting of the film, met the actress again. It soon became apparent that Leigh did not have a clue about her misbehavior to the younger woman, and she apologized. At that point, Miles notes with pity, in a recent article in The Daily Mail, she glimpsed a “ravishing beauty now ravaged by life.”