Customer Reviews

A Streetcar Named Desire [1951] [DVD]

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought this DVD as we are studying the play by Tennessee Williams in our A Level English Literature class, in order to better understand the play. I thoroughly recommend this DVD as it is the original film first starring Vivian Leigh (the woman who played Blanche during the play's first theatre production), and an excellent performance from Marlon Brando as Stanley. As a recreational DVD, the scenes are a little slow and can take time to understand - especially without first reading the play, but as an educational DVD, the content is brilliant and definitely helped me in my course! I would thoroughly recommend this classic film to anyone with particular interest in deep-south American culture - a brilliant buy!

Tennessee Williams based his screenplay on Oscar Saul's adaptation of Williams' own Pulitzer Prize-winning play set in a grimy New Orleans project. The story of the fragile sentimentalism of a woman who visits her sister only to be taunted mercilessly by her childish brother-in-law. This classic film garnered 12 Academy Award Nominations (including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Marlon Brando), and Best Screeplay), winning 4 including Best Actress (Vivien Leigh), Best Supporting Actress (Kim Hunter), and Best Supporting Actor (Karl Malden). what can I say?
Tennessee Williams himself wrote of Vivien Leigh"s performance in "Streetcar Named Desire": "She brought everything I intended to the role and even much more than I had dared dream of". Brando is wonderful as Stanley Kowalski,he is equally impressive in a role that made him a star. He gives a different dimension to Stanley and introduces method acting to Hollywood. This role that deserved an Oscar is maybe the best of his career. but the new viewers to the film seem to come away with the haunting greatness of Vivien Leigh in what is one of the most harrowing and shattering pieces of acting ever committed to film.also This inner and complete understanding is what Brando praises Leigh for in his autobiography. He agrees that she plays this Hamlet of female roles better than anyone because he felt she was quite like the character.this film is a must for any one who like the art of acting .The performances of Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh alone will be an educational study for you.They were both masters of getting so deep in character that you had to remind yourself that they were acting
they make us feel all the intimacy and claustrophobia ..
all Loyalties will be questioned, and all honesty will be tested
we even gets more and more exhaust as our viewing flirts almost as voyeurism.
they really make us live and feel the power of human attractions ..
this is as good as it get in acting ...
not only Streetcar Named Desire is a powerful and compelling picture
its real class-act from beginning to end;
its sexy,
its brutal,
its endlessly fascinating.
its excellent in the way it depicts life and people's grim secrets and desires.
its A true milestone in cinema history
it's a classic and memorable movie experience.

'Streetcar Named Desire' is very interesting as it is set in such a different period to our own, but I am not a Tennessee Williams fan - I find his plays rather odd and this film is no exception. I actually think that Vivian Leigh steals the show, not Marlon Brando, (though I know the experts disagree)! I think that Marlon Brando is better in the two later films that he did win Oscars for, and also in Julius Caesar and probably even in Last Tango in Paris. For me this film is worth watching to see Vivian Leigh's performance and for that reason I would recommend it. It is perhaps unfair to compare it to 'On the Waterfront' as the two are from very different genres, but in my opinion Waterfront is a class above Streetcar.

Good film, the few seconds of which were previously removed to comply with censor guidance and are now in place work. Recommended as both a period piece and to provide a perspective on the play for any students with it on their curriculum. Black and white with no special effects it's a bit of a step away from modern film styles...

Absolutely fabulous film, a real classic. Excellent value for money, a film you can watch time and time again. I would recommend this film highly. Delivery was prompt.

We watched this film in class while studying the play, so I was initially encouraged to view it critically. I adored Brando's portrayal of Stanley: very true to the character and with the raw, animal magnitism the part needs.

Leigh, I felt (at the risk of angering traditionalists) over acted Blanche, an easy trap of the part. Although she performed admirably, somehow I just didn't believe Blanche's emotions. I felt Leigh's portrayal lacked substance. But then, she was one of the first to play Blanche, and certainly the most famous to first portray her.

Hunter tries her best as the upstaged Stella, a part frequently underplayed and overlooked. In my opinion Stella is perhaps the most interesting role, and the one with the most freedom for interpretation. I felt Hunter could have done better: she seems to allow herself (and Stella) to shrink into the background when she could have used the intruiging aspects of her part to pull herself to centre stage.

However, for me, the talent of the actors cannot redeem this rendition of Streetcar. Perhaps it was the victim of censorship at the time, but I find it hard to believe that ALL the changes were due to that. For one thing, at the end Stella is NOT supposed to leave Stanley - Blanche is taken away, Stella stays and it is then implied that she goes on to have sex with Stanley (again!). Why was this taken out of the film? As we do not see the inevitable sex scene (Williams ends the play with Stella sobbing "luxuriously" and Stanley undoing her blouse) why did they change the end? Was it impossible at that time to imagine that a woman might stay with such a husband simply because of desire? That was one of the points of the play.

And of course there's the fact that the film slides subltely over the fact that Blanche's late husband was gay and she caught him with another man (the reason they substitute for his suicide is frankly ridiculus). And who can forget the glaring absence of the rape? This is what pushes Blance over the edge: it is a vital part of the play. Yes, I can understand that this was a victim of censorship, but they could still have made it obvious with Stanley pushing Blanche onto the bed, the camera panning away and her screaming or perhaps, (to be more tame), sobbing. Therefore nothing explicit.

These discrepancies sadden me, mostly because this version was built up to be the best representation of Williams' play. But apart from that, this is a good version, and I would recommend it, as long as the viewer doesn't expect accuracy.

Originally a play by Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire follows Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) as she is shunned off of the family plantation after sleeping with one of her students. She goes to New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella (Kim Hunter). Stella is married to the working class Stanley Kowalski (Brando). He is a passionate, violent, self-conscious mess of contradictions. A rivalry ensues between Blanche and Stanley that ultimately ends her.

What is interesting about this film is its place in film history. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which Will Hays created in 1929, monitored and censored the content of films closely during its reigning years. However following the Supreme Court's decision in the 1950s, (where they conceded that film should be protected under the First Amendment) it was decided that the Hays Office's demands were not legally obligatory. As a result of this the MPPDA ultimately transformed into the more relaxed MPAA, or Motion Picture Association of America..

A Streetcar Named Desire was made at a time when the MPPDA still had some power in Hollywood, thus enabling them to influence and force director Elia Kazan to cut "unacceptable" scenes from the film. For instance, scenes about Blanche's late husband's homosexuality and her continual desire to have sex had to be eliminated. Likewise the end of the movie, which is more vague than it is explicit, originally showed the event that is, in the final version, only implied. Because of the struggle with the ratings board, even to just allow the implied rape, A Streetcar Named Desire is an important film because it diminished the iron grip the MPPDA's had on cinema and helped in destroying film censorship. So the film deserves plenty of credit for helping end Hollywood censorship, which prevented creative freedom and burdened the movie industry for decades.

Also of note, Brando's performance was revolutionary in 1951. Elia Kazan is credited for inventing method acting. Marlon Brando put this new form into good use as his performance was passionate, animalistic and brutally realistic. Brando’s representation of Stanley Kowalski marked a change in masculine depiction in the 50s. Although previous actors had shown anger and violent predispositions, they never quite mastered Brando's passion and realism.

This is a film that is worthy of remembrance, not only because it is credit with being the reason method acting started but also because it is an interesting psychological examination of the characters within it.

I enjoyed it, although it may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

As a playwright, Tennessee Williams was to the South what William Faulkner was as a fiction writer: a creative genius who revolutionized not only the region's arts scene and literature but that of 20th century America as a whole, bringing a Southern voice to the forefront while addressing universally important themes, and influencing and inspiring generations of later writers.

Pulitzer-Prize-winning "A Streetcar Named Desire" dates from the peak of Williams's creativity, the period between 1944 ("A Glass Menagerie") and 1955 ("Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," his second Pulitzer-winner). After its successful 1947 run on Broadway, "Streetcar" was adapted into a screenplay by Williams himself for this movie produced and directed by Elia Kazan, starring the entire Broadway cast except Jessica Tandy, who was replaced by the star of the play's London production, Vivien Leigh. The piece takes its title from one of the New Orleans streetcar lines that protagonist Blanche DuBois (Leigh) rides on her way to the apartment of her sister Stella (Kim Hunter), foreshadowing her later path, from (ever-unfulfilled) Desire to Cemetery (death, or the loss of reality) and a street called Elysian Fields, like the ancient mythological land of the dead.

Although Blanche is the person most visibly engaging in deception (of herself and others), almost everyone of the characters suffers loss after a brutal reality check: Stella, who hasn't been back home for years, first learns from Blanche that their genteel home Belle Reve (literally: "beautiful dream") is "lost" - although in what manner precisely Blanche doesn't specify, which immediately raises the suspicion of Stella's husband Stanley (Marlon Brando) - only to later hear from Stanley that under the veneer of Blanche's appearance as a delicate Southern lady lies a promiscuous past, and the true circumstances of her ouster from her job and ultimately from their home town were not as Blanche would have Stella believe. Stanley's friend Mitch (Karl Malden), who despite their disparate social backgrounds intends to marry Blanche after they are drawn to each other by their mutual need for "somebody" in their life, is similarly disillusioned by Stanley, and subsequently by Blanche herself when he insists on seeing her in bright light instead of the dim light of dancehalls and of the paper lamp she has insisted on hanging over Stella and Stanley's living room lamp, neither able to face the effects of age and a profligate lifestyle herself nor willing to reveal them to others. And Blanche's own loss of innocence, finally, set in years earlier, when she found her young husband in bed with another man and he committed suicide after she publicly reproached him. "Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life," Tennessee Williams says about "A Streetcar Named Desire" in Kazan's 1988 autobiography "A Life;" and in a letter opposing the movie's censoring before its release he described the story as being about "ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal forces of modern society."

The brute, of course, is Stanley, who not only becomes the catalyst of Blanche's fate and the destroyer of Stella's, Mitch's and Blanche's own illusions, but is her antagonist in everything from background to personality: Where she is a fading belle dreaming of days gone by he is all youthful virility, a working-class man living in the here and now; where she is refined he is crude, and where she engages in pretense, he tears down the facade behind which she is hiding. The conversation during which Stanley tells Stella about Blanche's past is pointedly set against Blanche's humming the Arlen/Harburg tune "It's Only a Paper Moon," which sees love transforming life into a fantasy world, which in turn however "wouldn't be make-believe if you believed in me." Yet, as portrayed by Marlon Brando, who with this movie stormed into public awareness with his unique and volcanic approach to acting, Stanley is no mere vulgar beast but a complex, often controversial character, despite his brutal streak almost childishly dependant on his wife and frequently hiding his own insecurities under his raw appearance (thus putting up a certain front as well, but unlike Blanche's, a socially acceptable, even common one). Ever the method actor, Brando reportedly stayed in character even during filming breaks; much to the disgust of Vivien Leigh, for whom lines like "[h]e's like an animal. ... Thousands of years have passed him right by and there he is: Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the stone-age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle" must consequently have come from the bottom of her heart.

In early 1950s' society, "Streetcar" was considered way too risque - even downright sordid - to be presented to moviegoing audiences without severe censorship, which Williams and Kazan were only partly able to fight. One of the most substantial changes made in the adaptation was that at the end of the movie Stanley is punished for his brutality towards Blanche, whereas in the play's cynical original ending he is the only character experiencing no loss at all; indeed seeing his world restored after Blanche's exit. Since Kazan's suggestion to produce two alternate versions (one to please the censors, one in conformity with Williams's play) was rejected, even the 1993 "Original Director's Version" retains its altered, censorship-induced ending. Therefore, the play will forever constitute the last word on Williams's intentions. But even in its censored version this movie was a deserved quadruple Oscar- and multiple other award-winner (albeit undeservedly not for Brando). It has long-since become a true classic: a cinematic gem of first-rate direction and superlative performances throughout.

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

Hart Crane, "The Broken Tower"
(Preface to the published version of Tennessee Williams's play.)

As classic movies go, this one really deserves the tag. Marlon Brando gives the performance of a lifetime as meat-headed Stanley Kowalski, while Vivien Leigh is also superbly cast as the emotionally damaged Blanche Dubois. The steaming New Orleans setting, and the gradual build up of tension as Stanley begins to investigate Blanche's past, are simply great; rarely has a movie done its source novel so much justice as here. Director Elia Kazan milks every last drop of emotion out of the script, and the climactic scene is every bit as brutal and as shocking as Tennessee Williams meant it to be. If you haven't seen this before then I urge you to do so; it's a decent price here too.

Subtitles in English.
Sound and vision good.
Wonderful to own this classic film-of-the-play.
Great to have the 2 disc version as the additional information adds to the enjoyment of the film.
Brando is knockout but our Viv really gives as good as she gets and both performances are worth seeing again and again.
Really recommend this!!