A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

I wandered down to the Bloor Cinema a couple of nights ago to see A Streetcar Named Desire. I was by myself, and there’s no better cinema than the Bloor for solo movie watching. It’s perfect.

This film was built for the big screen. It’s one of those black and white movies that fit the genre so well you forget there’s no colour. Dark, smouldering and moody. It’s genuine.
Starring Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh and Kim Hunter, it’s a story about Blanche DuBois (Vivian Leigh), a southern belle who looks up her sister in the big city after years apart.
DuBois is a fragile and sensitive creature who’s hiding something, and we later discover she’s left an unsavoury trail of men behind her, along with her innocence.
Her sister Stella (Kim Hunter) is a rough around the edges, but very lovable city girl who left home and never looked back.
The lightning rod in this story though is Stella’s husband, Stanley Kowalski, played superbly by Brando. He’s raw and intense, rough and intimidating, and completely unapologetic about it. He reminds the sisters “I’m king around here,” and from the very beginning he has it in for Blanche who has come to stay in their tiny apartment, disrupting his life.

Roger Ebert says Brando’s portrayal of this character changed the concept of the male lead in Hollywood. Before Streetcar, says Ebert, men, even villains, almost always had a gentle, polished undertone that was always just barely visible, like Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen (a performance that beat Brando for the Oscar that year) — he just wasn’t totally despicable, there was something refined about him that was never too far below the surface.
Brando has none of that. He’s malicious and mean, stalking around his home like he’s ready to pounce at any time. And yet, there’s something redeeming about him. You know he loves his wife desperately, and he needs her, and though there is intense friction, there’s also intense loyalty and love between them.
Some of their most tender moments come immediately after their ugliest clashes. After the most violent episode Stella runs out of the apartment, and you know she’s hurt badly and may never return. She escapes to the neighbours upstairs, seeking shelter from the storm that’s raging downstairs. In a legendary scene, Brando, desperate and empty without her, stands out in the street screaming “Stella! Stella!” in a heart wrenching show of vulnerability that underscores the codependency between them.

And in this way also, the film is real, showing that in everyday life, love, by necessity, can learn to deal with all sorts of very ugly things.

There’s no happy ending here. Blanche tries to hide what she’s left behind, but we still see traces of it. Her secrets, one by one, come out, and we learn of her mistakes and her steady descent to the final rock bottom landing.
There’s a shocking scene where she is confronted by a man who has proposed to her. He’s been told about her loose past, and he forces her into the light, exposing the imperfections she has tried so hard to hide. It’s hard to watch, but follows on this movie’s great strength – honesty.

Her secrets all come out and she comes unglued, finally facing up to her past and admitting everything boldly, almost proudly, but without trying to jstify anything.

He leaves her, and when everything seems at its bleakest, in comes Brando. And he makes things worse in the swaggering, bullying language he speaks for most of this film.
He takes her one peg lower, and in the famous scene that marks the climax of the story he assaults her – his hatred simply palpable. She never recovers from it, and the story ends with her heartbreaking departure, probably forever, from their lives.
You’re left with the feeling that all Blanche had left in the world was the hope she had hung on her sister – and when that falls apart, she does too.

There's no happy solution to tie this movie up in a nice package, but there’s something honest about this sad story that makes it beautiful, and well worth $5 at the Bloor Cinema.