Revolutionary new acting techniques and a sweltering New Orleans bring about volatile emotions in this seething psychological drama.
I have to say I went into this movie with an entirely wrong preconception. I thought it was some steamy romance movie - the only scene I knew of from it was sweaty, torn-shirted
Marlon Brando screaming “
STELLLAAAAAA,” and
Kim Hunter sultrily descending the stairs - only to find out it’s a deep, deep dive into a psychologically complex domestic drama full of highly flawed characters.
I can fully attribute my ignorance to my lack of familiarity with the
source material, as well as the works of
Tennessee Williams in general (he wrote the stage play the movie was based on, and co-wrote the screenplay). The story follows a mentally unstable, often delusional woman - Blanche DuBois - who moves into the small apartment of her working-class sister and brutally apathetic brother-in-law during the oppressive heat of a New Orleans summer, where emotions quickly come to a boil.
Apart from its subject matter,
A Streetcar Named Desire is notable for being one of the early iterations of
Method Acting. Brando, Hunter, and
Karl Malden were all part of the earliest troupe of performers to study and use Method Acting on stage and screen, and director
Elia Kazan used it to magnificent effect to contrast their characters with that of Blanche DuBois (played by
Vivien Leigh), and simultaneously critique the acting of Classic Hollywood.
In the film, Blanche seems cursed with a constant sense of self-aggrandizement, making her speech and actions unbearably hyper-dramatic; all of her emotions are sky high compared to that of the grounded, nuanced and realistic characters of Brando, Hunter and Malden.
Correspondingly, traditional styles of acting tended to be very theatrical and overly pronounced, with performers wearing their emotions on their sleeves, trying to represent each emotion to their fullest extent. The “method” concentrated on living the emotion rather than representing it. Rather than expressing every emotion, performers were instructed to suppress them, allowing them to roll around in the subconscious like a chewed-up piece of gum collecting dirt. Then, during climactic scenes, those pent-up emotions would explode forth like an erupting volcano, spewing out all the magmatic complexities of deep-level emotions, often unearthing the character’s hidden motivations or underlying neuroses, intricacies which may have originated from actual lived experiences of the performer: melding the actor with the character.
While Elia Kazan may be a bit of a rat - he named names in Hollywood during
Joseph McCarthy’s HUAC (
House Un-American Activities Committee) trials in the 1950s, directly resulting in the
blacklisting of many of his friends and colleagues - he was nearly unmatched in the U.S. in the art of directing during his time. He used the type of sweeping tracking shots usually reserved for Westerns, Musicals, Adventure and War films on an intimate scale, producing a type of fluidity in his films that was strikingly advanced; his graceful camera movements still hold up as some of the best today. Between the evolutionary performances of his actors, his subversive stories, and his own masterful directing skills, Kazan’s films were a driving force in the modernization of cinema as the
New Wave approached.
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