A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
Blanche DuBois goes to live with her sister STELLLLLA, but STELLLLLA’s husband is determined to expose Blanche’s dark past.
I thought I knew what this one was about. In 8th grade, I had to give a presentation on the play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” so I rented the movie and…well, I thought I watched it. I clearly didn’t, though, since here’s what I thought the plot was: Blanche (Vivien Leigh) and Stella (Kim Hunter) are sisters, one of them is married to Stanley (Marlon Brando), the other one falls in love with Stanley, yadda yadda yadda, everyone lives happily ever after. Well, that’s not the plot.
The plot is that Blanche comes to New Orleans from Mississippi to stay with her sister because of a dark secret: that she slept with her 17-year old student1 and lost her teaching position. Blanche starts a relationship with Stanley’s friend Mitch (Karl Malden), but once Stanley discovers what happened in Mississippi, he tells Mitch and Mitch ends it with Blanche. Then, while Stella is in labor in the hospital, Stanley rapes Blanche2 and Blanche ends up committed to a mental institution.
Rating: 8/10, why did my 8th grade teacher even let me do a project on Streetcar?3
Cast and Crew
Let’s talk Marlon Brando. While he was on Broadway starring across from Tallulah Bankhead, Bankhead recommended him to Tennessee Williams for the role of Stanley with this quote:
I do have one suggestion for casting. I know of an actor who can appear as this brutish Stanley Kowalski character. I mean, a total pig of a man without sensitivity or grace of any kind. Marlon Brando would be perfect as Stanley.
Brando’s the quintessential Method actor, having studied with Stella Adler.4 A big part of Method acting is the focus on the internal—Adler said 50% of acting is external and 50% is internal.5 When Brando walks, slouches, or punches a wall, he’s showing you both the inside and the outside.
This is Brando’s second movie role after 1950’s The Men (about paraplegics in a VA hospital) but we’ll be seeing plenty more of his mumbling-YELLING-mumbling style soon enough.
Vivien Leigh gives one of the all-time great performances in Streetcar, but you have to know a few other things about this screen legend. She got the lead in Gone with the Wind (1939) after a two-year search for an actress that ruled out every big name in Hollywood. From there, every film in her filmography is noteworthy.
Waterloo Bridge, 1940, about a ballerina-turned-prostitute
That Hamilton Woman, 1941, about Emma, Lady Hamilton, mistress of Horatio Nelson
Caesar and Cleopatra, 1945, about, yeah, Caesar and Cleopatra
Anna Karenina, 1948, about, mhm, that titular Tolstoy lady
Important for trivia is that Vivien Leigh was married to actor Laurence Olivier and performed with him in That Hamilton Woman and in a stage production of “Romeo and Juliet.” We’ll see Vivien Leigh again in her final film appearance, so we’ll cover the end of her relationship with Olivier, “Tovarich,” Ship of Fools, and her mental illness then.
Streetcar is based on a play and, just like the deep dive we did on Arthur Miller in the Death of a Salesman post, today we have to get into Great American Playwright Tennessee Williams. That means, yep, more bullets.
“The Glass Menagerie,” from 1944, is a “memory play” (meaning its narrator is recalling the action) about the Wingfield family—Tom (a stand-in for Williams), histrionic mother Amanda, and Tom’s sister Laura, who escapes into a fantasy world of glass figurines
“A Streetcar Named Desire,” from 1947
“The Rose Tattoo,” from 1951, about the lusty Sicilian Serafina Delle Rose, who becomes a recluse after the death of her husband
Williams has some major plays post-1951, but we’ll discuss them in 1958 when we hit another one of his works that was turned into a movie.
Streetcar was directed by the legendary Elia Kazan. We’re going to push off telling the story of Elia Kazan, but once we’re to On the Waterfront, get ready for a doozy.
The Trivia
Blanche, as a woman pretending to be refined, makes a steady stream of classic references. Let’s hit a few of them.
Blanche refers to Mitch as her “Rosenkavalier.” Der Rosenkavalier, literally “knight of the rose,” is a comic opera by Richard Strauss set in Vienna. It's about a love quadrilateral between the Marshallin6, her younger lover Octavian, and the beautiful Sophie von Faninal, who herself is engaged to the boorish Baron Ochs.7 Ochs gets the young, hot Octavian to be his “rosenkavalier” and deliver the traditional silver engagement rose to Sophie. That does not work out for the Baron as Sophie quickly falls in love with Octavian. Like any good comic opera, there’s misunderstandings, cross-dressing, and an ending where the cute protagonists wind up together.
Blanche mentions that the mailman she randomly kisses8 looks like the prince from Arabian Nights. “Arabian Nights,” also called “1,001 Nights,” is a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales. The tales are told by Scheherazade, the new wife of Shahryar. Shahryar has been marrying women to sleep with them and then executing them in the morning.9 When he marries Scheherazade, she decides to tell him a long story that has stories inside of it, Inception-style, so that he’ll have to stay married to her. Some of the famous stories included in this collection are “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.”10
Mitch’s cigarette case is inscribed with the words, “and, if God choose / I shall but love thee better after death.” These are the final words from the 43rd sonnet of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese”; its first words, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” may be more familiar. The sonnets are not actually from the Portuguese; EBB felt the poems were too personal so she instead pretended they were translations of foreign sonnets. She originally was going to say they were Bosnian but her husband, the poet Robert Browning, advocated for Portuguese as a play on his nickname for Elizabeth, “my little Portuguese.” That story is so sweet it makes your teeth hurt.
Odds and Ends
Belle Reve, the name of the house Blanche lost, is French for “sweet dream,” while “DuBois” means “one in the woods”…Blanche sings “It’s Only A Paper Moon” (sailing over a cardboard sea), a song from 1933 with music from Harold Arlen and lyrics from Yip Harburg; the two of them also did the songs from The Wizard of Oz (1939).
SYMBOLISM ALERT: desire.
SYMBOLISM ALERT: desire.
As for that presentation? I just played, like, ten minutes of the movie and then twenty minutes of the Simpsons episode “A Streetcar Named Marge.” I did not get a good grade for it.
Adler herself had studied under Konstantin Stanislavski, who wrote “An Actor Prepares,” a seminal Method acting text. Don’t get these folks mixed up with Lee Strasberg, who is known as the Father of American Method acting (meaning he's a man, unlike Adler, and American, unlike Stanislavski).
Jared Leto, on the other hand, thinks the Method is 100% sending live rats to your co-stars.
“Marshallin” is the title for a wife of a field marshal. A field marshal, by the way, is the highest rank in many countries' armies, equal to a five-star general in the United States. Field marshals have ceremonial batons; when Erwin Rommel committed suicide, he was holding his.
“Ochse” is German for “ox.”
SYMBOLISM ALERT: desire.
Some Muslims have a practice called “Nikah mut’ah,” or “temporary marriage,” used for circumstances just like this. Clearly saves a lot of bloodshed.
Though note that all three of those were not in the original Arabic version and were instead added later.