February 22, 2018
Below is my TALKING STREETCAR blog, featured here from one of my previous CINEMA COFFEE pieces, with new updates. Grab some coffee or chai and enjoy!
And as a bonus … One of my video edits (labor of love, just for fun) on Marlon Brando in "Streetcar" (both play, 1947, and film adaptation, 1951).
"Tennessee Williams’ exciting Broadway stage play – winner of the Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics award during the 1947-48 season – has been screenplayed into an even more absorbing drama of frustration and stark tragedy. With Marlon Brando essaying the part he created for the Broadway stage, and Vivien Leigh as the morally disintegrated Blanche DuBois (originated on Broadway by Jessica Tandy). “A Streetcar Named Desire” is thoroughly adult drama, excellently produced and imparting a keen insight into a drama whose scope was, of necessity, limited by its stage setting."
—1951 June 20th Variety Review
But to do as brief of a discussion as I can on the topic of "Streetcar" (A challenge. A challenge) I'll start with things most known ... or rather, "the basics."
First: The Impact. Not only in context to the place the film holds in the history of cinema—post Pre-Code days—on the topic of rape, abuse, mental health, sex, and sexuality, but the unofficial, official introduction to the force that would be known to the world as—though he would hate to be acknowledged as such, I'm sure--MARLON. BRANDO. (His official introduction on screen the year before as a paraplegic in THE MEN), who acted in the Broadway production of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE from its opening night on December 3rd, 1947, to its closing night on December 17, 1949. The play itself would earn its playwright, Tennessee Williams, a Pulitzer Prize in 1948.
Acting comes easily to everybody. All I've done is just simply—through the extraordinary talent of Stella Adler—who is my teacher and mentor, was to learn how to be aware of this process and how to access my own feeling. |
—Marlon Brando
(via Larry King Live on CNN, 1994)
Stella was a force. When Stella liked you, she liked you, and if she didn't, she didn't. But she recognized in Marlon an innate theatricality that wasn't conventional. He was theatrical without being theatrical. It came out of an honesty, but because of its size and scope, it had style. And she was smart enough to see that. No wonder he gives her credit. —Martin Landau
(brando., 2007 TCM documentary) |
Something it seemed for a time, Brando was annoyed with personally, surrounding the monumental success not only of the play but of the film as well, particularly his character in it--"People invariably associated me with the part I played, so that it was difficult to believe that I didn't eat off the floor, or that I, you know, didn't run up the street with my shoes off, and so it's been a hard thing sort of living that down." (Marlon Brando, PERSON TO PERSON, 1955)—With his newfound success, this outpouring of crowds following him, prejudging him from a character that was unlike him as a person he found troubling--"There is nothing about me that is like Stanley Kowalski. I hate that kinda guy. I absolutely hate that person and I couldn't identify with it. The brute, dark character that represented the beasts and the animals. They sent me to a psychiatrist. They thought I was going nuts, losing my mind." (Marlon Brando)—Amongst talking with his older sister Jocelyn about it, he talked to friend and fellow actor, Maureen Stapleton about his fear of hurting someone when he went into a rage: "Marlon had no idea where his rage was coming from, but he was very frightened of it." —Maureen Stapleton.
Finding it frustrating people had an image of him as a person who was not who he was as a human being, to try and divide this image people had put in their minds was a task, as he mentions in a 1955 interview with Edward R. Murrow in PERSON TO PERSON. (See my intro piece to Marlon in Hello. I'm Marlon Brando for more).
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As Brando mentions in his biography, SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME, the repetition of "being Stanley Kowalski" for a period of time, drew a restlessness after about a year that he thought to "ease" during one of the productions' live performances with a stagehand backstage before he was to come out for his scene.
The stagehand, an amateur boxer, was coaxed into a sparring match by Brando (between Marlon's scenes), who told the stagehand not to take it easy on him, to give him all he got—sensing the reluctant way the stagehand boxed. It was through Brando's insistence not to take it easy that landed him with a punch in the face: |
I don't remember exactly what happened next, but I felt his fist smash into my nose like a sledgehammer, and the next instant blood poured out of it in a crimson deluge. Until then I'd never been hurt while boxing, but now I was really in pain. I went upstairs to my dressing room, looked in the mirror and saw my face covered with blood. As I tried to wipe it away I took a drag on a cigarette and saw something startling: the smoke from my cigarette was billowing out of my forehead in a big white cloud. —Marlon Brando
Songs My Mother Taught Me |
Only 23 years old when the play opened, in a part written for a man in his late 20's to early 30's, Brando packed a punch in his performance, unseen by theater audiences up to that night. After the closing curtain during its debut performance, the audience was in complete silence. What does one think of the subject of sexuality, rape, and the "roar" of Brando? The subject/storyline that cast such "horror" in the viewing eyes, the Catholic Legions anger over the rape scene put a threat on the making of the film if it was not removed. Not willing or wanting to comply with these demands, Tennessee Williams refused. Instead "settling" on a change with the end of the film, where Stella leaves Stanley, as opposed to the original ending in the play.
In which the last line reads in the play, comes from on Stanley's poker buddies ...
STEVE:
This game is seven-card stud.
As the boys continue their poker game, while Stanley has once again dropped to a kneel before Stella in that "Now, honey" way of his, luring her back to him after all have just witnessed her sister Blanche being taken away by "Whoever you are - I have always depended on the kindness of strangers," doctor.
... The audience on opening night however, too drawn in emotionally and visually had one reaction ... applause. An applause that would ring through The Ethel Barrymore Theater for 30 minutes after.
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"You must be Stanley. I'm Blanche."
I think Jessica could have made Blanche a truly pathetic person, but she was too shrill to elicit the sympathy and pity that the woman deserved. This threw the play out of balance because the audience was not able to realize the potential of her character, and as a result my character got a more sympathetic reaction than Tennessee intended. Because it was out of balance, people laughed at me several points in the play, turning Blanche into a foolish character, which was never Tennessee's intention. I didn't try to make Stanley funny.
—Marlon Brando
Songs My Mother Taught Me (autobiography)
However, after the play closed in 1949 and two years passed, a new Blanche to take the role for the screen, Marlon was up against a different acting partner ... the classically trained and veteran of the profession, I give you ... Vivien Leigh.
Thanks to the photography of Harry Stradling, adding the grim and dark side to Blanche's insecurities, accompanied with the music by Alex North in each scene where enters Blanche DuBois, we seem to get a different vulnerable true Blanche indeed. One whose own personal life reflected too much of a mirroring image to the Southern Bell. Leigh herself suffering from a bipolar disorder. |
... in the movie version of Streetcar, the English actress Vivien Leigh took Streetcar back from Brando's Stanley in a performance of harrowing power and beauty. Brando was the first to admit that.
--Patricia Bosworth
Marlon Brando
As the character "Blanche" mentions in the Play and Film, so did Tennessee live and hear the streetcar named "Desire," making its way along Royal, with another streetcar named "Cemeteries," that ran Canal Street. It is in New Orleans where 'Tennessee Williams Walking Tours' are given by Dr. Kenneth Holditch about Tennessee Williams and the filming of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE.
Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan marking a collaboration that may have never been. More on that another time.
A thrilling performance all the way around, from all actors, lines, direction, writing, production, performance that is and always will be A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE.
Now, take a sip of your favorite Coffee beverage and drink to that ... Caramel Macchiato, I'm looking at you. #ForMyMom.
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See you early next week for my 5th blog in my series with ON THE WATERFRONT (airing on TCM Tuesday at 7PM CT).
Or to follow along in my series, visit my Twitter account @DominiqueRevue
#ForMyMom Cinema Coffee ... | COFFEE CINEMA: Talking Streetcar | CINEMA COFFEE: "Et tu, Brute?" | CINEMA COFFEE: "La Chocolaterie" | CINEMA COFFEE: "Milk? I loathe milk!" | CINEMA COFFEE: "Elderberry Wine ..." | CINEMA COFFEE: "The choice I never had ..." | CINEMA COFFEE: "The smell of Mimosa" | CINEMA COFFEE: "Mighty like a Rose" | CINEMA COFFEE: "Don't cry on the rolls" | CINEMA COFFEE: "You're the first Kansas I ever met" | CINEMA COFFEE: "Everybody calls me Gracie" | CINEMA COFFEE: "What the devil are Belinskis?!" | CINEMA COFFEE: "Hello friends and enemies." | CINEMA COFFEE: "Stop remindin' me of heaven." | CINEMA COFFEE: "Even Gatsby could happen" | CINEMA COFFEE: "I made a wish" | CINEMA COFFEE: Audie Murphy | CINEMA COFFEE: Put The Blame on Mame | CINEMA COFFEE: "Just Singleton." | CINEMA COFFEE: "Where I Come From, Nobody Knows" | Film Therapy: Coping through Cinema | CINEMA COFFEE: Socks fall down | CINEMA COFFEE: "The moon's reaching for me" | CINEMA COFFEE: The Horne: Luso World Cinema Blogathon | CINEMA COFFEE: Aunt Bettye Lightsy | CINEMA COFFEE: I never lose | CINEMA COFFEE: "I have a mother!" | CINEMA COFFEE: THE SIGN OF GEMINI | CINEMA COFFEE: Venus Rising | CINEMA COFFEE: Stan vs Geek | CINEMA COFFEE: "Positively the same dame"| CINEMA COFFEE: I would rather lose ma whip than lose ma Daisy! | CINEMA COFFEE: "D'ENTRE LES MORTS goes VERTIGO"