A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, M)

Dir: Elia Kazan, USA, 122mins, 35mm

So much in American stage and screen art and culture changed with the collaboration of Kazan, Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando, first on the stage in 1947 and then to Hollywood in ‘51. Broadway discovered a new star, a vulgar vitality, and what David Thomson called 'the greatest American play written in the age of the movies’. Hollywood got all that and more. A letting loose of ‘the Method’ and Brando’s raw force that’s both mesmerising but close to a criminal violation – on the Hollywood censorship code, on the delicacy of one of the Hollywood establishment’s leading ladies (Vivian Leigh – who’d been in the London production, but not up against Brando) and for its hint of William’s original subtexts of homosexual passion. A new, ambiguous but roaring, kind of on-scene sensuality in Brando’s pairing with Kim Hunter, unseen since the late silent era. And a film that warned of the coming end of the studio system and the possibility of New Hollywood.

From the collection of the NFSA.

Presented with the support of the Embassy of the United States.