A Streetcar Named Desire

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE              A-              
USA  (122 mi)  1951  d:  Elia Kazan 

While Marlon Brando introduces theatrical realism with his intense, in-your-face demeanor, Vivien Leigh, in contrast, seems rather pathetic in her exaggerated, near silent era performance.  The character of Blanche DuBois is supposedly based on Tennessee Williams’s sister Rose who had lifelong mental health problems until a lobotomy left her completely unreachable.  While the story is steamy and sensual, featuring the physicality of Brando’s Stanley Kowalski, and his adoring, yet physically and emotionally abused wife Stella (Kim Hunter), their lives are interrupted by a mysterious visit from Blanche, Stella’s sister, who moves into their tawdry flat in New Orleans but immediately finds Stanley “a survivor from the Stone Age.”  While she thinks she’s got him all figured out and immediately urges her sister to come away with her, Stella reminds her that she’s wildly in love with the man.  While Brando exhibits an ease and naturalness in front of the camera, where his every gesture suggests a sexual swagger, Blanche is a repressed grand dame from the old South who is used to being waited on hand and foot, who’s mind is forever focused on herself, and who embellishes everything about herself to make herself more attractive to the people around her, never believing any of it is a lie, but that it’s all part of female guile.  When Stanley soon discovers a friend from her past that reveals she’s a fraud, Blanche begins her retreat into the safe world of her memories.  When a gentleman caller, one of Stanley’s card playing friends, Mitch (Karl Malden), sees through her, she’s fully on her descent of losing all contact with the present, which is made complete by a suggested (not shown) rape scene from Stanley. 

Brando is so interesting with his low class accent and his swagger that he’s a motivation all by himself to take up the craft of acting, as movies had never seen anything like this before, ravishingly good looking, completely masculine, yet also troubled, tender, even fragile, a guy who wears his vulnerability on his sleeve.  But he’s also a bully, pitifully inept at expressing himself, yet stridently confident, so he tends to throw things against the wall and yell at high registers to intimidate Stella, always apologizing afterwards and burying his head in her chest.  In contrast, Vivien Leigh’s character is pretending all the time, and her fall from grace is immediate and decisive, as without the façade of deception, she can’t fool anyone anymore, leaving her helplessly isolated and alone.  Her face is filmed in shadows, where she always darkens the room to better make her retreat, while taking several steaming hot baths every day.  Unfortunately, Blanche has become somewhat laughable in her fragility, a woman caught in the cobwebs of time, a bundle of nerves where it’s as if she continues to use Southern Gothic dialogue written by Truman Capote, the kind that bears no resemblance to real conversation, but instead floats into the air with a kind of ancient poetic resonance.  She is at her most manipulative best in a scene with an innocent young boy who knocks on the door to ask for charitable contributions, but ends up being the victim of a pathetic, older woman who wants to relive her youth with a kiss, leaving the poor kid wondering what the hell has happened.  Blanche was fired from her job as a schoolteacher for sleeping with a 17-year old student, but her real travesty was her marriage, where her descent from reality began when she discovered her husband having homosexual sex with another man (conveniently left out of the film) before committing suicide.  That kind of trauma never disappears, and Blanche has been building walls to hide behind ever since.  But Stanley crudely smashes all of the walls of resistance, exposing her for the helpless creature she is, expressed in her final words, “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”    

The film began the casting of leads as anti-heroes, as Stanley is hardly a gentleman or a noble character, instead he’s a brute that Blanche compares to the animal kingdom.  Also the sound design feels configured by Alfred Hitchcock, as the loud noise of a passing train leaves Blanche emotionally shattered, where she completely loses her sanity, growing near hysterical each time while crumbling to the floor.  Overall, as a movie or a play, the problem is Blanche has more screen time than Stanley and she simply can’t hold her own against his physical presence, forcing the audience to endure the rhapsodic overtures of a weak and feeble mind spouting off on another rambling alcoholic soliloquy.  More than 50 years post production, audiences will tend to laugh at her utter ridiculousness, where every outfit she wears looks like it’s been stored in mothballs for decades while everyone else around her wears casual, comfortable clothing.  The play itself, while earth shattering to the senses, one that easily qualifies as a landmark, dwells in the minds of just a few central characters, and despite having a raw, sexual presence, censors cut out much of this subject matter from the film.  But it certainly features peak moments of intensity, not to mention a brawling spontaneity, before Blanche goes off on another one of her all-too descriptive recollections from her past that just takes all the air out of the room.  The balance of power shifts with Blanche’s arrival, where Stella may eventually develop new understandings in how to deal with a man like Stanley, but in this play, in this era, he’s calling all the shots. 

Raintree County

RAINTREE COUNTY                        C-                   

USA  (168 mi)  1957  ‘Scope  d:  Edward Dmytryk 

I have no idea what attracted the studio or the big name stars to this wretched material, adapted from a Ross Lockridge Jr. novel, an author who at age 33 committed suicide after long term bouts with chronic depression, but the barely tolerable writing is horrendous throughout, making this a perfect example of the extravagance and over indulgence of the Hollywood studio system, costing $5 million dollars for MGM, much of it on the lavish costumes, holding the dubious honor of being the most expensive movie ever made at the time of its release.  The film is memorable more for its folly than anything else, as even the performances of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift seem mysteriously disconnected.  Clift was drinking heavily at the time, arousing red flags from all who knew him, eventually suffering a tragic auto accident halfway through the production which was shut down for more than two months waiting for him to recover, leaving his face disfigured, not to mention a resultant addiction to alcohol and pain killers for the rest of his life.  This off-screen tragedy, not the film itself, led to a box office success, as viewers were curious to pick out the scenes shot before and after the accident.  In addition, this is the first film to ever shoot Montgomery Clift in color.  Shot by Robert Surtees, the last of the Hollywood films to use a super large ‘Scope aspect ratio of 2:55:1, it was meant to be screened on 65 mm film, giving the film an especially luminous quality, but since so few theaters could accommodate this change, it was instead released in traditional CinemaScope.  Following their brilliant work together in A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951), making them, according to Clift’s biographer Patricia Bosworth, “the most beautiful Hollywood movie couple of all time,” this is the second film where Taylor and Clift, extremely close lifelong friends, worked together, while the truly bizarre film SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1959) would be their last.

Set in a small town in rural Indiana before, during, and after the Civil War, the studio felt this could rival GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) in its epic historical scope, but don’t even think about it.  The only similarity is the histrionic over-acting of both Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor, with Leigh winning and Taylor nominated for a Best Actress Award, and the politically incorrect depiction of slavery, which is a little disconcerting in both films.  After a 5-minute orchestral prelude, the film opens in an idyllic setting, where star students Johnny (Clift) and his sweetheart Nell (Eva Marie Saint) meet in the forest at a local creek exchanging graduation gifts.  Their open minded professor (Nigel Patrick), however, makes no bones about his attraction to a young chestnut haired student (Myrna Hansen) and is eventually run out of town on a rail at the discovery of his attempted indiscretions. Clift is the school valedictorian and his family and the town have high hopes for his future.  Elizabeth Taylor arrives a half hour into the film and catches Johnny’s eye as Susanna, a wealthy Southern belle from New Orleans, an aristocrat with slaves and property, whose purring, still girlish voice and heavy accent feel forced and completely unnatural, initially filmed in a heavily stylized and dreamy setting, as if the angels are singing in the background.  Lee Marvin makes an appearance as Orville “Flash” Perkins, a loudmouthed braggart and a drinker who challenges Johnny to a race, both thinking they are the fastest runners in the territory, which leads to a 4th of July fiasco, where they both amusingly get intoxicated before the race.  Afterwards, Johnny and Susanna have a picnic in the woods where they go swimming together in the creek, leading her to return several weeks later announcing she’s pregnant. 

Johnny, of course, does the honorable thing and agrees to marry her, taking a riverboat journey south to meet her relatives in New Orleans, discovering their views favoring slavery as well as their belief that Abraham Lincoln was tainted with Negro blood.  Perhaps the most despicable scene is Johnny’s insistence that Susanna free her slaves, which she announces at a party in front of her relatives, one of whom dons a blackface and prances around as the stereotypical yet horribly demeaning depiction of a darky.  At this point, Taylor’s exaggerated over-the-top drama kicks in, revealing she’s a deeply troubled woman hiding family secrets, as her mother slowly went insane, causing her father to bring back a Negro women from Cuba to take her place in the home raising the children, but the two of them were apparently shot in a fire that destroyed her family’s plantation, a traumatic incident from childhood that continues to haunt her.  Johnny remains reassuringly supportive, even after Susanna admits she was never pregnant, but desperately wanted his love, but she is possessed by visions, like a dark curse, eventually disappearing without a trace with their son, apparently gone to Georgia following the outbreak of the Civil War, which leads to an intermission at the 2-hour mark. 

The final section drags on with the least impact and is not really necessary other than to exploit the war, becoming ludicrous at times, especially when Johnny joins the Northern army largely in a desperate attempt to seek out his missing family in the South.  Johnny joins up with an Indiana regiment that includes “Flash” Perkins and his old professor, now a war correspondent, and follows the track of Sherman’s march to Atlanta.  Surprisingly, along the way, they run into the home of the Cuban woman that helped raise Susanna, where friendly family slaves have his son safely hidden away.  It’s here that Johnny learns Susanna had a breakdown and has been admitted to an insane asylum.  Carrying his son on his shoulders, Johnny fends off Rebel soldiers, which even for a soap opera is just beyond belief, as is the rescue scene in the asylum.  Unfortunately, in order to bring in the Civil War and tie up loose ends, they extended an already overlong film an extra hour without ever offering a truly gripping scene.  In my view, this is one of Taylor’s worst performances, as she’s completely on a different wavelength than everyone else in the film, allowed to over act while embellishing narcissism and nonstop hysteria on camera.  This simply doesn’t suit her since she’s such an adult, naturalistic force onscreen, but not here, as she’s continually portrayed as damaged goods.  Clift, on the other hand, has much greater screen chemistry with Eva Marie Saint, something that Susanna eventually realizes before bringing the curtain down in dramatic fashion.  The director never gets a grip on the material and allows the film to continually meander, presented almost as a fairy tale, never for a moment sensing any urgency or real life emotion.