Cinema: The New Pictures, Sep. 17, 1951

A Streetcar Named Desire (Charles K. Feldman; Warner) is an impressive adaptation of Tennessee Williams' prize-winning 1947 Broadway hit about a fate-battered Southern belle in the last agonies of degradation. Though the movie has its flaws, it can claim a merit rare in Hollywood films: it is a grownup, gloves-off drama of real human beings.

The cinema version reunites the play's author, who worked on the script, its director, Elia Kazan, and most of the original principals, including Marlon (The Men) Brando as the tormented heroine's brutish brother-in-law, Kim Hunter as her well-balanced sister and Karl Maiden as her mama's-boy suitor. Even in casting Vivien Leigh in the leading role, thus brightening the marquee with a star more familiar to moviegoers than Broadway's Jessica Tandy, Director Kazan has chosen an actress who grew into the part in the London production of the play.

Within the limits of Hollywood's self-censoring Production Code, the movie follows the play's story faithfully. Again Blanche Du Bois moves into her sister's squalid New Orleans flat, the last stop on her alcoholic, nymphomaniac flight from a tide of troubles: a long siege of family deaths, the withering away of family fortune, the suicide of her young husband, the loss of her home, her job, her reputation. She still clings to a pretense of genteel propriety. But when she crosses Stanley Kowalski, her roughneck brother-in-law, he drags out her past, and thus strips the illusion from the gullible suitor she has all but hooked. Finally, while his wife is in the hospital having a baby, Kowalski brutally ravishes Blanche and pushes her completely over the edge of sanity.

To get the rape episode by the censors, Director Kazan had to agree to change the play's ending to punish Kowalski, though the "punishment"—his wife's refusal to have anything more to do with him—seems not only mild but temporary. Elsewhere the movie's changes are more subtle. The play took no sides between Blanche and Kowalski; the film softens her into a more sympathetic figure, turns him into more of a loudmouthed heel. The new script also muffles the undertone of sex that accompanied the hostility between the two characters in the play.

At its high points, Streetcar is observant, moving and exciting. Unhappily, despite Director Kazan's efforts to get movement inside the cramped settings, the movie too often seems stagebound and slow. It also has stretches of talk that go better in the theater than on the screen.

In her first movie in four years, and her first in Hollywood since 1941's That Hamilton Woman, Vivien Leigh seems overshadowed by the skilled actors around her. Among her handicaps: a somewhat watered-down characterization, and most of the movie's talkiest passages. The brilliantly lifelike playing of Actor Maiden and Actress Hunter is even better than it was on the stage. As the hulking, animalistic Kowalski, Marlon Brando fills his scenes with a virile power that gives Streetcar its highest voltage.

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