A Streetcar Named Desire | Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando

A Streetcar Named Desire | Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando | Funny, heartbreaking and moving -- "Streetcar" is a classic.

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A Streetcar Named ...

	A Streetcar Named Desire Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando Warner Home Video, 1996 average customer review:based on 121 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Looking for a benchmark in movie acting? Breakthrough performances don't come much more electrifying than Marlon Brando's animalistic turn as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Sweaty, brutish, mumbling, yet with the balanced grace of a prizefighter, Brando storms through the role--a role he had originated in the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams's celebrated play. Stanley and his wife, Stella (as in Brando's oft-mimicked line, "Hey, Stellaaaaaa!"), are the earthy couple in New Orleans's French Quarter whose lives are upended by the arrival of Stella's sister, Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh). Blanche, a disturbed, lyrical, faded Southern belle, is immediately drawn into a battle of wills with Stanley, beautifully captured in the differing styles of the two actors. This extraordinarily fine adaptation won acting Oscars for Leigh, Kim Hunter (as Stella), and Karl Malden (as Blanche's clueless suitor), but not for Brando. Although it had already been considerably cleaned up from the daringly adult stage play, director Elia Kazan was forced to trim a few of the franker scenes he had shot. In 1993, Streetcar was rereleased in a "director's cut" that restored these moments, deepening a film that had already secured its place as an essential American work. --Robert Horton

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A Streetcar Named Desire

One of the best movies ever made, great performances all around, especially Brando, even though he was the only main actor in the movie that didn't win an Oscar. DVD quality superb.

Funny, heartbreaking and moving -- "Streetcar" is a classic.

After seeing a performance of Tennessee Williams' gripping play "A Streetcar Named Desire" at a local event, I immediately bought the award-winning film. I was unsure how a brutally powerful story about the demise of one woman's reputation could be translated into a film, but I was not disappointed. This two-disc set restores some of the "objectionable content" that almost derailed the film's production, and the movie is as enjoyable and thrilling as the play itself, with the exception of an ending that was tweaked to appease 1950s sensibilities.

The performances are simply stellar. Brando is both hilarious and frightening in his breakout role as Stanley Kowalski, and Vivien Leigh turns in a graceful and haunting performance as Blanche DuBois, the Southern belle whose attempts to right her world when she moves in with her sister Stella and sister's husband Stanley go hopelessly awry.

Funny, heartbreaking and moving "Streetcar" is a classic.

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Magnificent Interpretation

Elia Kazan's "Streetcar Named Desire" is a wonderful interpretation of William's classic play. Like many of Tennessee William's plays "Streetcar" depicts the moral ruination of the post-civil war South. Blanche Dubois, in particular, is tragic and represents a "belle idee" gone hopelessly wrong. We learn how she has tried but failed to hold the old family home and honor intact. As a school teacher in Oriole, Mississippi she has failed in the most terrible way possible. She has not only prostituted herself but has seduced young school-age boys. As a consequence, despite her faded aristocracy, she has been run out of town and wound up on the doorstep of her sister, a woman quite content to reach for the gutter.

Her Pollack brother-in-law, played by Marlon Brando, is so miserable that he's great. He takes every opportunity to insult his freeloading sister-in-law and--with his wife in the hospital having a baby--he plumbs the depths of his own depravity and rapes the frightened and increasingly confused Blanche.

Blanche, who had a fleeting opportunity to marry the naive Karl Maldon, sees her opportunity torn away from her when Maldon learns the black truth of her Oriole history. Blanche retreats into madness. She finally meets her aristocratic savior in the form of an elderly physician who arrives to take her to a mental institution. "No one", as Ray Charles sang, "is saved." The film is beautiful in its horror.

Ron Braithwaite author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico

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Stunning

I continue to be impressed by young Brando. I grew up hearing how much an acting genius Brando was in his hey day and I thought for the most part he was over-rated. Course, I was coming from the angle of the older Brando. Now after watching On the Waterfront and now Streetcar, I've been more than blown away. Brando absolutely deserves his accolades. In streetcar, he plays Stanley to the tee. You don't catch him acting at all. You whole heartedly believe him as this animal of a husband and you despise him for what he's doing to an obvious delusional woman. I even feel for Stella being caught between two different people she loved. I agree the material is stunning for its time and I continue to be impressed with Kazan's direction. This movie deserved all its accolades. If you haven't seen it, you're doing yourself a disserve.

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A classic worty of the title.

Elia Kazan's 1951 classic captures the liquor drenched ambience of post-war New Orleans and inserts the beauty of Williams's characters as they live out their lives of "quiet desperation." Vivien Leigh's Academy Award winning performance as Blanch Dubois strained the limits of her emotional stability; according to her husband Laurence Olivier. Her commitment is evident in this complex portrayal of a southern belle who looses the battle for sanity. Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden all turn in deeply personal performances making this film ahead of its time. Their work in Streetcar is a rare window into the development of American film acting at a time when this unique, highly naturalistic style, popularized by the Actors Studio, revolutionized cinema.

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