474 - A Streetcar Named Desire, United States, 1951. Dir. Elia Kazan.
Blanche Dubois emerges, like Anna Karenina, from the steam in the train station.
The bad news is that she will not be returning. The good news is that she will not be throwing herself in front of a train. The bad news is that her fate will not prove to be too much better.
Belle Reve is lost.
Not sold. Lost.
And there is nothing worse in a great civilization than losing the land. It represents everything that ties a family together.
The old ideals. Culture. Manners. A way of life.
Plus all those secrets concealed by that way of life.
We do not wish to lose those either.
Blanche walks through the throng.
Blanche answers. "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields."
They are real names of real streetcars that really rode past Tennessee Williams' home on Royal Street. Having stopped at Desire Street, it returned down Royal from France Street to Canal Street.
The Desire streetcar line began in 1920. The play was published in 1947. And the bureaucrats in all their wisdom discontinued the line in 1948, one year after it became famous, so that tourists for decades to come would look for the streetcar named Desire and not find it.
Blanche's opening line sums up the struggle going on inside her.
Take Desire. Transfer to Cemeteries. Get off at Elysian Fields.
Later she will connect desire and cemeteries again when she states, "Death. The opposite of desire."
She is travelling to New Orleans to visit her sister Stella. Stella Kowalski. Stella left Belle Reve to make her own way in the world. And to marry that man Stanley. That man who seems to Blanche to be more of an animal.
Blanche stayed behind when her sister left. When she moved to New Orleans. To the French Quarter. The Elysian Fields.
The Elysian Fields is the section where Stella lives in the French Quarter. But the Elysian Fields is the place in mythology where the blessed go after death.
Might it at least give Blanche some comfort that they are blessed? No. No, that death thing spooks her. She has some memory of death that still haunts her. That sends her off into another place. A place of dread. A place of regret. So that when the flower woman stops by to offer her flowers for the dead, it triggers something in the depths of Blanche's psyche, that rewires the synapses in her cerebrum.
As far as Blanche is concerned, Stella may have already gone to the Elysian Fields. It is death to her.
But while Stella married and moved, Blanche stayed behind and fought to keep the land.
"I stayed and struggled. You came to New Orleans and looked out for yourself. I stayed at Belle Reve and tried to hold it together. . . . The burden fell on my shoulders."
The burden that was too hard to bear. How are you going to maintain once wealthy estate on a schoolteacher's salary?
Especially when you are a schoolteacher with . . . secrets.
After Blanche arrives and Stanley picks up her trunk, he goes through her things while she is taking a bath. A hot bath. A scalding bath. The kind of bath after which she feels so good and cool and rested.
He refers to something called the Napoleonic Law. Which means, he says, that what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband. And apparently, according to his logic, what belongs to the wife's sister therefore belongs to the husband. So he plunges into her faux fox furs and her rhinestone costume jewelry looking for something to pawn.
And the deeds to her land. If she really lost it, he wants her to prove it. She has the papers, all right, and she gladly gives them to him. All of them. What good are they to her?
"There are thousands of papers stretching back over hundreds of years affecting Belle Reve, as piece by piece our improvident grandfathers exchanged the land for the epic debauches. To put it mildly."
Well, at least they had a good time.
One of Blanche's secrets is that she is not coming from Belle Reve. She does not live there. It has already been lost, before now. She is coming from Auriol. A town that exists in real life in France, and exists in the play in Louisiana.
A town where more secrets were made.
And Stanley is determined to find out what they are.
His workmate, bowling buddy, poker buddy Mitch has a thing for Blanche, but Stanley will be sure to ruin that by making insinuations.
The apartment is cramped. Barely big enough for two people. It makes the perfect cage for the animal Stanley. Yet somehow they squeeze as many as nine people in there at one time.
Although it is even more crowded when Blanche is alone with Mitch. Or alone with Stanley.
When you think of A Streetcar Named Desire, you may think of Marlon Brando screaming from the pavement up to the second floor, "Stella!" But this is Blanche's story. It is told through the eyes of Vivien Leigh.
Vivien Leigh. The British actress who won two Oscars for playing Southern belles.
One for Scarlett O'Hara. The brunette. At age 25.
One for Blanche DuBois. The blonde. At age 38.
As if losing Tara twelve years ago was not bad enough, it is now time to lose Belle Reve.
Fiddle-dee-dee.
Oh, Stella, for star.
After all, tomorrow is another day.
I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
It is also an ensemble piece. Vivien Leigh is fantastic. Kim Hunter is fantastic. Marlon Brando is fantastic. Karl Malden is fantastic. Peg Hillias is fantastic. Wright King is fantastic.
Marlon Brando, from this film and the stage play that came before it, changed the vision of what acting could be for generations of actors to come.
The film begins in the script. This is one of the finest plays ever written in English. In fact, one could make the case that Tennessee Williams' best play is better than some of William Shakespeare's worst.
As Karl Malden himself observed, it tells the truth about the human condition but does so poetically.
Then the film is so incredibly shot. It is a Warner Bros. picture and follows the house style. With cinematography by Harry Stradlin. On a beautiful set with sophisticated lighting and shadows.
Quite sophisticated.
With fine direction by the great director Elia Kazan.
And like other great art, it stays with you.
* * * * *
I'm terrified.
Nothing to be scared of. They're crazy about each other.
He's common. . . . Surely you can't have forgotten that much of our upbringing, Stella, that you just suppose there's any part of a gentleman and his nature
He's like an animal. Has an animal's habits. There's even something subhuman about him. 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. And you, you here waiting for him. Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you. That's if kisses have been discovered yet.
His "poker night," as you call it. His party of apes. Maybe we are a long way from being made in God's image, but Stella, my sister, there's been some progress since then. Such things as art, as poetry, as music. In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning that we have got make grow and to cling to, as our flag in this dark march towards whatever it is we're approaching.
Don't hang back. Don't hang back with the brutes.
Soft people have got to court the favor of hard ones.
I'm fading now.
Honey, a shot never did a Coke any harm.
I have to admit, I love to be waited on.
I can go away from here and not be anyone's problem.
Look who's here.
My Rosenkavalier.
I'm looking for the Pleiades. The Seven Sisters.
A single girl, a girl alone in the world, has got to keep a firm hold on her emotions, or she'll be lost.
I guess I have old-fashioned ideals.
Such as a lady with old-fashioned values who has privately worked
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