United States, 1951
Directed by Elia Kazan
With Vivien Leigh (Blanche DuBois), Marlon Brando (Stanley Kowalski), Kim Hunter (Stella Kowalski), Karl Malden (Harold Mitchell), Peg Hillias (Eunice Hull), Rudy Bond (Steve Hull), Wright King (the newspaper rep)
She stands on the left of the shot composition, looking for her way in the New Orleans streets, her worried face turned to the left, unaware of a mirror next to her, on the right part of the image, reflecting her clearly.
Later, she is again on the left on the shot composition, trying to resist the man who is holding her tightly around his strong arms, her panicked face turned upwards, unaware of a mirror standing behind them, taking up the right part of the image, even as it is out of the blue cracking up, the reflected image becoming shattered beyond recognition.
These two partly identical, partly diverging shots are the milestones of the sojourn of Blanche DuBois in the biggest town of Louisiana and in the first floor apartment of her sister Stella and Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski. It was supposed to last some weeks, the time for Blanche to recover for the loss of the family property near the town of Auriol, but it turned into months without good reasons, except, later, the strange courtship a friend of Stanley’s, Harold Mitchell, makes to Blanche. It has always been filled with tension but it eventually ends up in bursts of rage that even leads to rape. In the final analysis, it is the drawn-out fall of Blanche from a strange state of despair, delusion, and yet grace to complete insanity, necessitating the coming of a doctor and a nurse and another trip to an even less welcoming place.
“I don’t want realism. I want magic!”, she yells at a bemused Harold as the gentle, candid, hopeful guy attempts to get the truth from Blanche after his brawl with long-time pal, fellow veteran, and co-worker Stanley caused by what the Polish American claims to know about his sister-in-law. Blanche herself seems to come from another world: she is first an apparition slowly walking out of thick clouds of smoke on the railway station’s platform. Details keep stoking this ethereal image: she enjoys spending time in hot baths, filling the bathroom with steam – steam that wafts away as she opens the door in her first appearance the morning after her arrival; and when she tells Harold of her past affair with a man, they stand on the outside floor of a restaurant advancing in the harbor and fog is shrouding the water surface. She is cast as an evanescent presence, barely solid but brittle: her thin body and delicate features, fumbling gestures and cocked head make her a porcelain in a place stuffed with elephants – the sturdy, alpha males living around.
She is a living contrast to her new environment: the reaction of the first woman looking at her as she steps in the property where most of her story would take place is telling. Often clad in dresses of a very old-fashioned elegance and weird refinement, Blanche speaks too precious a language to feel like natural, spontaneous, a tongue that relies too self-evidently on her scholar, if antiquated, command of that English language she has spent years to teach. And she likes to emphasize how different she is, or rather how the people around her are compared to her. She would often asks Stella how she can put up with this kind of life, and more pointedly, that kind of husband, obviously proud of the distinguished past of their family.
Blanche looks like the ghost of a Southern belle straight from Antebellum past wandering in the present, standing next to reality but not really cut off from it (she does not pay attention to the mirror but it can still reflect her). She manages to get by in the cramped place of the Kowalskis and flirts with Harold. She readily sees in Stanley a nemesis and is quite frank in her dealings with him. Actually, when Stanley and Harold confront her, she quickly acknowledges the embarrassing truth: she just wanted to forget about it, as if it was that easy. Maybe it is not a talk with Stanley that is a turning point in her fall but the few minutes spent chatting with a young man selling subscriptions to the local paper. A remarkable ballet of bodies shot in glaring light or against the light and a feat of creeping torment and confusion (on both sides), it signals how Blanche would be unable to break the bond with the most dreadful and disappointing event of her life, the suicide of her fiancé. She may be a ghost, but then a haunted ghost, a soul wandering for elusive solace.
It is hard to find more vital, obvious, concrete, realistic presence, and antagonist, than Stanley Kowalski. Abrupt, callous, and wild: the words may sound right given his behaviors and attitudes. But Stanley is first and foremost a strong male, a fully sexual individual. His very tight, very fitting T-shirts (which are standard in the early 21st century but unknown of in the department stores of the 1940s) that could be easily ripped off advertise the attractive strength of the modern worker and his manly assertiveness in a changing society. His moves are as supple and confident as those of a feline while his frequent outbursts of anger stun and scare folks as strongly as if a real wild animal had jumped on them. That intensely physical performance, impressive show of the power of acting methods promoted by Elia Kazan, reaches a vicious climax at the end, after Harold abandoned Blanche and truth about her debauchery is out: he plays with her words and lies even as it is clear she is losing her mind and then moves to attack her, verbally and then physically.
He prides himself as never being duped by her airs – unsophisticated and rough he is, anyway, but not dumb: and tragedy shows his instincts were correct. Blanche’s ultimate failure to live on a mendacious but appeasing world crashes against the wall of practical certainty, tainted with suspicion and selfishness, that Stanley is. As the mirror breaks to smithereens it is his brutal but effective force that carries the day and his male desire that humbles the female fantasy, which is also about integrity and survival. Shocking as it is, the rape fits with a wider pattern, the rough treatment of women who must accept male superiority at home as the trade-off of any feeling – and it cannot be denied that Stanley’s are strong: his yell and tears when Stella leaves him, with Blanche, after a bitter quarrel are as intense and passionate than his other outbursts and his willingness to reconcile with her yields touching anecdotes. He is not cast as entirely bad – but he is doomed to be the polar opposite of Stella’s sister and cannot find peace in his home as long as Blanche sticks around. She does not fit in his world and he cannot reconcile himself with her presence. The opposite is not quite true: her delusions are painful and troublesome but they help her face the situation – until contradictions and clashes get impossible to manage, that is.
The final scene of “A Streetcar Named Desire” brings even more complexity to the tale imagined by Tennessee Williams (the playwright also wrote the screenplay): Stella, with her newborn baby in her arms, has ascended once again the outside stairs leading to the other apartment and her best friend Eunice. Stanley is once again crying and yelling, beseeching her to come down. But she does not want and nothing indicates she would ever do that. The fall of Blanche, humiliated, raped, and sent to an institution, is such a shock that Stella stands ready to resist the men’s worst instinct. Resilience is nothing new in the film: the tiffs between Eunice and her hubby pointed to a fierce female character willing to punish her man, any man if he moved beyond the red lines she drew; but they always reconciled and the couple was like a comic relief to the increasingly tense home tragedy occurring downstairs. But after the departure of Blanche, it seems it can no longer be business as usual. The ghost is gone but Stanley is going to be haunted by her in the shape of the revenge and the will of a woman to assert herself. Maybe the mirror got broken in time: for would he ever be able to look at himself proudly?