Elia Kazan/USA/1951; R4, 2-disc SE
Warner Bros, NZ$19.95 | Reviewed by David Levinson

THE LEGACY of New Orleans seems doomed to rest along its faultlines: Just fifty-four years before the levees broke, sending the city caterwauling into a watery inferno, Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski was making life a living hell for wife Stella (Kim Hunter) and her sister Blanche (Vivien Leigh). Set alongside the stately wail of of-the-era blues, as an expression of white-man soul-torment A Streetcar Named Desire is genuinely hysterical, its crested plea of “Steeeeellllaaaa” shadowing guitar-slung muddy-waters like a Zeppelin. Yet, the hot-hot-heat of emotion soaked thick through shirt fibre should hardly come as a surprise: For Tennessee Williams, desire has always been a stock market of human ruin, and, Norma Desmond notwithstanding, Blanche may be one of the most desperate visions of self-idolatry in movie memory; like a crippled spider, she spins words into broken webs of resistance, and while merely ostentatious at first, her powdered Southern-belle act soon takes on a masochistic fixation.

Despite their continuing clashes, though, any attempt to stake a divide between Blanche’s psychological upset and the animal ineffability of Stan would be futile. As it stands, they’re both very much a part of the same whiskey-soaked continuum – the only difference lying in how they express their suffering. In regards to Blanche, her subscription to a life of “magic” (“I tell what oughta be truth”) stems from the trauma of inadvertantly driving her first love to suicide, at the age of sixteen. The emblems of its aftermath are a case’s worth of rhinestone tiaras, dubious furs, and cheap dresses, which she flaunts shamefully, rarely emerging from the careful chiaroscuro of night. Meanwhile, Kazan finds a natural counterpart to her pathology in the set design: a junkshop mirage of drapes that suggest Cleopatra fallen. In comparison, Stan’s affliction may not seem as elaborate, but there’s a calculation to his smug reproaches that move beyond the primitivist tagline. When he pursues Stella in the renowned staircase scene, an upstairs neighbour urges Blanche not to “mix in this,” as if their love bore all the cosmic intensity of a molten comet. But Kazan spends the film undoing Stan’s sanctioned irrationality, and in the end he arrives at the final destination he fears most, one he must share with Blanche: abandonment.


THE FILM is presented in a new 1.33:1 fullscreen transfer that beautifully captures the thunderclaps of black and white that chorus the players’ world. Meanwhile, Alex North’s reinstated score floats along in Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono, a sound channel that also miraculously manages to wrench clarity from Brando’s piecemeal delivery. As far as extras go, the pièce de résistance is the 75-minute documentary, Elia Kazan: A Director’s Journey, which generally elides the HUAC scandal in favour of a trophy portrait of the man. A Streetcar on Broadway and A Streetcard in Hollywood provide an interesting look at the discrepancies between the two productions, most notably the omission of Jessica Tandy from the screen version. Censorship and Desire anatomises the plugged ass of Hollywood’s censorship programme, while Alex North and the Music of the South translates the particulars of North’s jazz-classical fusion into terms easy enough for Brandon Flowers to understand. Rounding off the package is the expectedly hagiographic An Actor Named Brando, while the man’s take on a scene from Rebel Without a Cause will burn holes through your TV screen.