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The Broadway experience, with suggestive adjustments. (The symbolic trolley does materialize early, and "DESIRE" indeed shows on the destination sign as it curves toward the camera.) Tennessee Williams' Ophelia in diaphanous middle age, thus Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) out of a cloud of locomotive steam and into the Elysian Fields fleapit for a thorough spiral. The entire faded gentility of the classical era is packed in her trunk, still the dilapidated belle's poetry finds no favor with brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando), "survivor of the Stone Age." She has a death rattle in her brain and a reputation to outrun, the gentleman caller (Karl Malden) might be "a cleft in the rock of the world I could hide in." Her truculent foe enters in muscle shirt, smashing china yet boyishly lost at the bottom of the staircase, crying for his Stella (Kim Hunter). (Pregnant and lustful, Blanche's sister lolls in bed with the memory of Stanley's honeymoon demolition, "sort of thrilled by it.") The butterfly and the ape, Williams between Cocteau (L'Aigle à Deux Têtes) and Osborne (Look Back in Anger). Elia Kazan deals this out in fierce claustrophobic movements, a gauzy lyricism surrounded by clammy shadows—lantern filter and radio are just the mise en scène elements for the heroine, "we've made enchantment." Leigh's silent-film frailty cloaks avid carnal hunger, her best moment is a nervous brush with a wet-eyed youth ("like a prince out of the Arabian Nights") that trembles with desperate, illicit yearning. Brando by contrast is the sheer incarnation of brutish and tender physicality, a drenched, ithyphallic torso charging the air with danger. "Flores para los muertos" and kindness for the living, the shattered mirror and the hosed sidewalk, "fifty percent illusion" and wholly visceral. Fellini (La Strada) and Scorsese (Raging Bull) are chief among its heirs. Cinematography by Harry Stradling. With Rudy Bond, Nick Dennis, Peg Hillias, Wright King, Edna Thomas, and Richard Garrick. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |