A Streetcar Named Desire is a film adaptation of the
play of the same name by
Tennessee Williams. It was directed by
Elia Kazan, who had also directed the original stage production, and stars
Marlon Brando,
Vivien Leigh,
Kim Hunter and
Karl Malden; all but Leigh were chosen from the
Broadway cast of the play, while Leigh had starred in the London
West End production. It was produced by
talent agent and
lawyer Charles K. Feldman, and released by
Warner Bros. The screenplay was written by Williams himself, but had many revisions to remove references to
homosexuality, among other things.
Plot
As in the
play, the film presents Blanche DuBois (Leigh), a fading but nevertheless attractive Southern belle whose pretensions to virtue and culture only thinly mask delusions of grandeur and alcoholism. Her poise is an illusion she presents to shield others, and most of all herself, from her reality, in an attempt to make herself still attractive to new male suitors. Blanche arrives from her hometown of Auriol,
Mississippi (Laurel, Mississippi in the play) at the apartment of her sister, Stella Kowalski (Hunter), in the Faubourg Marigny of
New Orleans, on Elysian Fields Avenue; the local transportation she takes to arrive there includes a streetcar route named "Desire." The steamy, urban ambiance is a shock to Blanche's nerves.
Explaining that her ancestral southern plantation, Belle Reve in Auriol, Mississippi, has been "lost" due to the "epic fornications" of her ancestors, Blanche is welcomed with some trepidation by Stella, who fears the reaction of her husband Stanley (Brando). Blanche says her supervisor gave her time off her job as an English teacher because of her upset nerves. The truth was, she was fired for having an affair with a 17-year-old male student. This turns out not to be the only seduction she had engaged in — and these problems led Blanche to run away from Auriol. A brief marriage scarred by the suicide of her spouse, Allen Grey, has led Blanche to live in a world in which her fantasies and illusions are seamlessly mixed with her reality.
