A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) Masterpiece Drama Noir

"Wasn't it all okay till she showed here? Huh? Wasn't we happy together? Wasn't it all okay till she showed here? Hoity-toity, describing me like a ape."

One of the Original New Orleans Noirs

Directed by Elia Kazan (Film Noir's Boomerang! (1947), and Panic in the Streets (1950), also Baby Doll (1956), and the Noir-ish A Face in the Crowd (1957)) The screenplay was written  by Tennessee Williams and adapted for the screen by Oscar Saul. It was based on William's Broadway play A Streetcar Named Desire which ran from 1947 to 1949 with a total of 855 Performances.  

Cinematography was by Harry Stradling (Edge of Doom (1950), Angel Face (1953), A Face in the Crowd (1957)), and the Music was by Alex North. 

Vivien Leigh as Blanche

The film stars Vivien Leigh (Brit Noir 21 Days Together (1940), and Waterloo Bridge (1940)) who played Blanche in the London production of the play. The rest of the cast was from the New York City production of the play. It was a breakout role for Marlon Brando (The Fugitive Kind (1960), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), The Godfather (1972), Last Tango in Paris (1972)) as Stanley, Kim Hunter (Noirs Deadline - U.S.A. (1952)) as Stella.

Original Broadway cast on New Haven Shubert Theater playbill

Marlon Brando as Stanley 

Kim Hunter as Stella

Karl Malden (five Classic Noir) as Mitch, Rudy Bond (Nightfall (1956)) as Steve, Nick Dennis (Noirs Man in the Dark (1953), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), The Big Knife (1955), Slaughter on 10th Avenue (1957)) as Pablo.

Karl Malden as Mitch

Nick Dennis as Pablo

Rudy Bond as Steve

The rest of the cast are Peg Hillias as Eunice, Wright King as A Collector, Ann Dere as The Matron, Edna Thomas as The Mexican Woman, Richard Garrick as A Doctor, and Mickey Kuhn as A sailor.

Peg Hillias as Eunice

(The London production was directed by Laurence Olivier, It opened at the Aldwych Theatre in October of 1949. It starred Bonar Colleano (Pool Of London (1951)) as Stanley, Vivien Leigh as Blanche, Renée Asherson as Stella and Bernard Braden as Mitch.)

The Big Easy - New Orleans

You watch enough Noirs and you literally get to the point where, I've heard it put this way, that "you know them when you see them." I'll go that one better. Noir, for me is a pan generic dark story told in a stylistic way that triggers a vibe that you tune to, almost akin to a drug/alcohol high. You get a Noir buzz. But its a strange type of high that is actually topsy-turvy to a drug/alcohol high in that it works like this. For Noir neophytes they will only get that high from the hard boiled hardcore Noirs with Detectives, Femme Fatales, and murder. They are the Noir junkies, the mainliners. But with the more Noirs you get exposed to you'll find that there is an endless variety of stories that shuffle and spiral away on different tendrils that provide enough of the elements that make a film a Noir. Your personal life experiences will also inform your affinity to the types of stories that will tip Noir for you. So your tolerance level to Noir goes down, you don't need the hardboiled, hard core stories to get the fix and you recognize the noir in all the various tragedies and picaresque situations that plague the human condition. Noir expands out to an ill delineated, fuzzy "on the cusp of Noir" point where a film can tip either way for an individual. A good example of this effect is the the film Somebody Up There Likes Me that has a few very noir-ish sequences sprinkled through out its length.

When I was a kid in the 1950s I was glued to the TV. Seeing the Hollywood Classic Films Murder My Sweet, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Out Of The Past, The Lost Weekend, Sweet Smell of Success, Cat People, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, The Thing From Outer Space, Blood On The Moon, Pursued, etc.. on the local and national channels as TV Premiers. But nobody was calling them Film Noir.  They were called Detective films, or Crime, Thrillers, SiFi, Suspense, Horror, Westerns and Dramas. At the same time TV Crime programs proliferated, with often noir-ish episodes of Peter Gunn, Mike Hammer, Naked City, and Johnny Staccato. Anthology series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents along with The Twilight Zone mixed dark stories in all genres with quite a few of their episodes being also quite Noir-ish. Also in the mix were TV produced drama series like CBSs Playhouse 90, Four Star Playhouse, General Electric Theater, with their often dark stories with noir-ish "stage play" stylistic lighting effects. 

So I got my pan generic "Noir-dar" turned on and tuned in long before I even knew what it was, and I've known them when I've watched them ever since. 

You almost can't help getting the "NOIR" vibe from anything written by Tennessee Williams. The streetcar named Film Noir went off the Crime Genre rails early, basically right at the onset of it's second coming. The Lost Weekend for example delved into addiction and human frailties, not crime, Noir in its original 1930's coinage by right wing and religious publications meant any films with subject matter considered immoral and demoralizing. 

We, the viewers/interpreters, of all these films based on these dark "noir" works of Williams, and fellow gay authors James Leo Herlihy and William Inge, are dealing with are at least three layers of obfuscation. The first is what the writer put in the original works, their stories or plays, these men are writing straight male and female characters through gay tinted glasses, or gay characters written as straight characters to pass stringent societal norms, so some of their protagonists and antagonists are in a way, seemingly to me anyway, either overly burlesqued, seriously twisted, or just a tad off base. The second are the changes made, by the film production screenwriters or the authors themselves, to their original works, i.e., expositional scenarios jettisoned, plot points cut or streamlined etc., etc., so the film scripts would be green lighted by the studios. The third layer would be the additional changes made during filming, or changes demanded so that the films would get the approval of the Motion Picture Production Code. The major difference between Streetcar the play and Streetcar the film is the ending.

The whole sleazy story in a nutshell. 

<definite spoilers below>

A few years before we pick up the tale in the film.

Once upon a time, in the bucolic old Southern town of L'Ariel, Mississippi the patriarch of the Du Bois family dies leaving the crumbling family estate Belle Reeve to his two daughters Blanche, a high school teacher and Stella. With the yoke of the old man gone, Stella five years younger than Blanche, lets her hair down and cuts loose from all the genteel hoity toity rhubarb to run off to "The Big Easy" New Orleans. There Stella falls into a lusty marriage with an earthy brute who loves her madly. They are happy and contented.

Meanwhile back in L'Ariel, Blanche continues to play her fantasy of "putting on airs," of being your stereotypical Southern Belle. But Blanche hasn't really been right in the head since since she was sixteen and madly in love with a young boy whom she ran away with and married. 

"There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn't like a man's, although he wasn't the least bit effeminate looking--still--that thing was there.... He came to me for help. I didn't know that." 

The honeymoon must have been a disaster. 

She found out why the day she discovered her husband  after "coming suddenly into a room that I thought was empty--which wasn't empty, but had two people in it... the boy I had married and an older man who had been his friend for years...." caught in flagrante delicto with an older southern gentleman. Now that is a good example of Classic Noir innuendo by Williams. You can let your wildest imagination fill in the blanks.

Like a bizarre ménage à trois the traumatized Blanche in the company of her husband and his older gentleman lover pretended that nothing had happened, and they all drunkenly drive out to Moon Lake Casino. A bit later while dancing with her husband Blanche suddenly comes out of her trance and blurts out "I saw! I know! You disgust me..." Her mortified husband runs outside and blows his brains out. 

So Blanche, like a broken record, has been drunkenly replaying her courtship and wedding night over and over with anything in pants. She looses Belle Reeve to creditors, and sets up shop in the Flamingo Hotel a residence flop house, and she moonlights after school as an alcoholic round-heels who not only screws everyone in town getting a reputation as the "town pump," but also fancies young high school boys, bordering on pedophilia. 

Let Stanley in his colorful way  tell us...

Stanley (to Stella): She moved to the hotel called Flamingo which is a second class hotel that has the advantages of not interfering with the private and social life of the personalities there. Now the Flamingo is used to all kinds of goings-on. But even the management of the Flamingo was impressed by Dame Blanche. And in fact, they were so impressed that they requested her to turn in her room-key for permanently. And this, this happened a couple of weeks before she showed here... The trouble with Dame Blanche was that she couldn't put on her act any more in L'Ariel because they got wised up. And after two or three dates, they quit and then she goes on to another one, the same old line, the same old act, and the same old hooey. And as time went by, she became the town character, regarded not just as different but downright loco and nuts. She didn't re. sign temporarily because of her nerves. She was kicked out before the spring term ended. And I hate to tell you the reason that step was taken. A seventeen-year-old kid she got mixed up with - and the boy's dad learned about it and he got in touch with the high-school superintendent. And there was practically a town ordinance passed against her.

Later, after Stanley warns Mitch, who by this time is practically jumping through flaming hoops for Blanche, about Blanche's true deviant nature, Mitch comes and confronts her with the details of her debaucheries at the Hotel Flamingo....

Blanche: Tarantula was the name of it. I stayed at a hotel called the Tarantula Arms.

Mitch: Tarantula Arms?

Blanche: Yes, a big spider. That's where I brought my victims. Yes, I've had many meetings with strangers.

Back to the set up of the film.

Wearing out her welcome in L'Ariel, Blanche scurries to New Orleans on the L&N Hummingbird name train. Her directions take her on a streetcar named "Desire" to transfer to one named "Cemeteries" to the The French Quarter and a two-story corner tenement building on a street named Elysian Fields. Elysian Fields runs between the L & N tracks and the river.  

Elysian Fields

Sister Stella, and her husband, Stanley Kowalski, live an easy come easy go life there. Blanche's arrival and her flirtatious behavior towards Stanley's best friend Mitch who falls hard for her sends everything careering down the tracks towards Noirsville.

Noirsville

In Streetcar its Stanley who is the homme fatale to Blanche.

Stanley:  I've been on to you from the start! Not once did you pull any wool over this boy's eyes! You come in here and sprinkle the place with powder and spray perfume and cover the light bulb witha paper lantern, and lo and behold the place has turned into Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile! Sitting on your throne and swilling down my liquor! I say--Ha!--Ha! Do you hear me? Ha--ha--ha!

The film is ultimately about Desire, and what drives people to achieve it. The Desire for Blanche to perpetuate her make-believe world, and the Desire of Stella to try and accommodate both her and Stanley. The Desire of Mitch to settle down with a woman before his other passes on, and the Desire of Stanley to get his life back to the way it was before Blanche disrupted everything.

Blanche: What you are talking about is desire - just brutal Desire. The name of that rattle-trap streetcar that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another.

A tour de force performance by both Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh makes this very entertaining and unforgettable. The rest of the cast are equally spot on. An easy 10/10. It could only have surpassed itself if it had more than just the few establishing shots of New Orleans and had all been shot on location.

The major difference between the play and the film is at the end. In the film a distressed Stella blames Stanley for Stella's decent into madness. She vows to leave him. In the play Stella allows Stanley to console her as she cries over her sisters fate.

 "Inner torments are seldom projected with such sensitivity and clarity on the screen" (The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther)

Williams' Suddenly Last Summer, The Fugitive Kind James Leo Herlihy's All Fall Down, and William Inge's Picnic have equally salacious undertones. All these shifts in perspective and obscuring of genders renders all these films into dark, sometimes creepy, and as sleazy as your imagination will take them, Noirs.

The original play changed American theater forever. A Streetcar Named Desire won four Academy Awards with three in acting categories.

Every year, the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival holds a “Stella!” contest, where fest-goers take their best shots at duplicating Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, yelling for Kim Hunter’s character in the iconic classic film,