Finally watched Tennessee Williams’s opus A Streetcar Named Desire. Highly affecting film. I’m calloused to drama these days: It takes an amazing story and great acting to hold my interest for long, because dramas are so darn depressing. I can make an exception.
“Streetcar” was spellbinding. Brando is sheer masculinity, and Vivien Leigh embodies insanity. The movie’s not easy to watch, dealing as it does with rough people, obsession, prostitution, insanity, and rape, but it did hold me locked in place, awaiting Blanche’s next broken soliloquy and fearing Stanley’s next violent act.
There’s no one here to root for, except possibly the concept of love itself: Stanley is an ape. He’s every legers, brawn-over-brains stereotype of man. Stella is held in his thrall, weak and fleeting. Blanche is a deplorable person–liar, parasite, prostitute–but her wistful paeans to love still pluck that human string that resonates in us all. Still, her mad, twittering nature make us all sigh relief when she eventually leaves.
Even well meaning Harold adds further support to my theory that anyone named ‘Harold’ in a film must be, at best, a dupe, and at worst, a complete idiot. He wavers between the two.
The real star here is TW’s dialog and characterization. You can’t get much more unreal than some of these characters (How many mill-workers do you know that go quoting the Napoleanic Code?), but throughout the whole travail, it seems real right down to the SMELL of the place