Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61821 in DVD
• Released on: 1997-03-26
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, HiFi Sound, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 125 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
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 prize-fighter, 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 re-released 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

Customer Reviews

Paper Moon.
As a playwright, Tennessee Williams was to the South what William Faulkner was as a fiction writer: a creative genius who revolutionized not only the region's arts scene and literature but that of 20th century America as a whole, bringing a Southern voice to the forefront while addressing universally important themes, and influencing and inspiring generations of later writers.

Pulitzer-Prize-winning "A Streetcar Named Desire" dates from the peak of Williams's creativity, the period between 1944 ("A Glass Menagerie") and 1955 ("Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," his second Pulitzer-winner). After its successful 1947 run on Broadway, "Streetcar" was adapted into a screenplay by Williams himself for this movie produced and directed by Elia Kazan, starring the entire Broadway cast except Jessica Tandy, who was replaced by the star of the play's London production, Vivien Leigh. The piece takes its title from one of the New Orleans streetcar lines that protagonist Blanche DuBois (Leigh) rides on her way to the apartment of her sister Stella (Kim Hunter), foreshadowing her later path, from (ever-unfulfilled) Desire to Cemetery (death, or the loss of reality) and a street called Elysian Fields, like the ancient mythological land of the dead.

Although Blanche is the person most visibly engaging in deception (of herself and others), almost everyone of the characters suffers loss after a brutal reality check: Stella, who hasn't been back home for years, first learns from Blanche that their genteel home Belle Reve (literally: "beautiful dream") is "lost" - although in what manner precisely Blanche doesn't specify, which immediately raises the suspicion of Stella's husband Stanley (Marlon Brando) - only to later hear from Stanley that under the veneer of Blanche's appearance as a delicate Southern lady lies a promiscuous past, and the true circumstances of her ouster from her job and ultimately from their home town were not as Blanche would have Stella believe. Stanley's friend Mitch (Karl Malden), who despite their disparate social backgrounds intends to marry Blanche after they are drawn to each other by their mutual need for "somebody" in their life, is similarly disillusioned by Stanley, and subsequently by Blanche herself when he insists on seeing her in bright light instead of the dim light of dancehalls and of the paper lamp she has insisted on hanging over Stella and Stanley's living room lamp, neither able to face the effects of age and a profligate lifestyle herself nor willing to reveal them to others. And Blanche's own loss of innocence, finally, set in years earlier, when she found her young husband in bed with another man and he committed suicide after she publicly reproached him. "Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life," Tennessee Williams says about "A Streetcar Named Desire" in Kazan's 1988 autobiography "A Life;" and in a letter opposing the movie's censoring before its release he described the story as being about "ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal forces of modern society."

The brute, of course, is Stanley, who not only becomes the catalyst of Blanche's fate and the destroyer of Stella's, Mitch's and Blanche's own illusions, but is her antagonist in everything from background to personality: Where she is a fading belle dreaming of days gone by he is all youthful virility, a working-class man living in the here and now; where she is refined he is crude, and where she engages in pretense, he tears down the facade behind which she is hiding. The conversation during which Stanley tells Stella about Blanche's past is pointedly set against Blanche's humming the Arlen/Harburg tune "It's Only a Paper Moon," which sees love transforming life into a fantasy world, which in turn however "wouldn't be make-believe if you believed in me." Yet, as portrayed by Marlon Brando, who with this movie stormed into public awareness with his unique and volcanic approach to acting, Stanley is no mere vulgar beast but a complex, often controversial character, despite his brutal streak almost childishly dependant on his wife and frequently hiding his own insecurities under his raw appearance (thus putting up a certain front as well, but unlike Blanche's, a socially acceptable, even common one). Ever the method actor, Brando reportedly stayed in character even during filming breaks; much to the disgust of Vivien Leigh, for whom lines like "[h]e's like an animal. ... Thousands of years have passed him right by and there he is: Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the stone-age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle" must consequently have come from the bottom of her heart.

In early 1950s' society, "Streetcar" was considered way too risque - even downright sordid - to be presented to moviegoing audiences without severe censorship, which Williams and Kazan were only partly able to fight. One of the most substantial changes made in the adaptation was that at the end of the movie Stanley is punished for his brutality towards Blanche, whereas in the play's cynical original ending he is the only character experiencing no loss at all; indeed seeing his world restored after Blanche's exit. Since Kazan's suggestion to produce two alternate versions (one to please the censors, one in conformity with Williams's play) was rejected, even the 1993 "Original Director's Version" retains its altered, censorship-induced ending. Therefore, the play will forever constitute the last word on Williams's intentions. But even in its censored version this movie was a deserved quadruple Oscar- and multiple other award-winner (albeit undeservedly not for Brando). It has long-since become a true classic: a cinematic gem of first-rate direction and superlative performances throughout.

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

Hart Crane, "The Broken Tower"
(Preface to the published version of Tennessee Williams's play.)

The beginnings of method acting.
Originally a play by Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire follows Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) as she is shunned off of the family plantation after sleeping with one of her students. She goes to New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella (Kim Hunter). Stella is married to the working class Stanley Kowalski (Brando). He is a passionate, violent, self-conscious mess of contradictions. A rivalry ensues between Blanche and Stanley that ultimately ends her.

What is interesting about this film is its place in film history. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which Will Hays created in 1929, monitored and censored the content of films closely during its reigning years. However following the Supreme Court's decision in the 1950s, (where they conceded that film should be protected under the First Amendment) it was decided that the Hays Office's demands were not legally obligatory. As a result of this the MPPDA ultimately transformed into the more relaxed MPAA, or Motion Picture Association of America..

A Streetcar Named Desire was made at a time when the MPPDA still had some power in Hollywood, thus enabling them to influence and force director Elia Kazan to cut "unacceptable" scenes from the film. For instance, scenes about Blanche's late husband's homosexuality and her continual desire to have sex had to be eliminated. Likewise the end of the movie, which is more vague than it is explicit, originally showed the event that is, in the final version, only implied. Because of the struggle with the ratings board, even to just allow the implied rape, A Streetcar Named Desire is an important film because it diminished the iron grip the MPPDA's had on cinema and helped in destroying film censorship. So the film deserves plenty of credit for helping end Hollywood censorship, which prevented creative freedom and burdened the movie industry for decades.

Also of note, Brando's performance was revolutionary in 1951. Elia Kazan is credited for inventing method acting. Marlon Brando put this new form into good use as his performance was passionate, animalistic and brutally realistic. Brando’s representation of Stanley Kowalski marked a change in masculine depiction in the 50s. Although previous actors had shown anger and violent predispositions, they never quite mastered Brando's passion and realism.

This is a film that is worthy of remembrance, not only because it is credit with being the reason method acting started but also because it is an interesting psychological examination of the characters within it.

I enjoyed it, although it may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

A masterpiece
A streetcar named desire is a masterpeice. The conflict between Stanley's brutish and untamed masculinity and Blanche's once refined but manipulative sexuality is explosive. Blanche whom after a life of death and tragedy is mentally unfit, clings helplessly to her past beauty and upbringing which contribute to the only identity she has in the world. Now her life depends on the kindness of Stanley and his wife her sister Stella who is captivated in Stanley's sexuality and masculinity which the viewer will find both attractive and repulsive. The conflict between stanley whose masculinity makes him unable to control his behaviour, is onset by blanche's constant remindings of her past position in society makes the sexual anxiety run high in this movie.