A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951)

Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire

Cast: Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden, Rudy Bond, Nick Dennis, Peg Hillias, Wright King, Richard Garrick, Ann Dere, Edna Thomas, Mickey Kuhn. Screenplay: Tennessee Williams, Oscar Saul. Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: Richard Day, Bertram Tuttle. Film editing: David Weisbart. Music: Alex North.

A great American play with a great mostly American cast. Well, three quarters American isn't bad, if the British fourth quarter of the cast is Vivien Leigh, who gives one of the great screen performances, turning Blanche Dubois into a brilliant sparring partner for Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski. But each time I watch the film, I am drawn more and more to Kim Hunter's Stella, who has the difficult role of mediator between Blanche and Stanley. Hunter also superbly captures why Stella is so doggedly faithful to the brutal Stanley, a matter that may trouble us more in an age of heightened consciousness of domestic violence. Stella is deeply, carnally in love with the brute, but also aware of the tormented boy within him. There's no more telling scene than the morning after Stanley, in the notorious torn T-shirt, stands at the foot of the stairs bellowing "Stella!" and bringing her down from her retreat. Hunter demonstrates a full measure of post-coital bliss, looking as rumpled as the bed in which she's lying when Blanche arrives to waken her and is shocked by Stella's about-face. That's why, although the censors tried to eliminate any sense that Stella had forgiven Stanley at the end of the film, we know full well that she'll return to him. For the most part, the avoidance of the censors' strictures is deft, but they do eliminate some of the meaning of the rape scene -- that Stanley's only way to get the upper hand in the power struggle with Blanche is purely physical -- and they turn the ending of the film into somewhat of a dramatic muddle. If it's not a great movie, it's because the play, like most plays, was never intended to be a film. But it's still a great pleasure to hear these actors speaking some of the most potent lines ever written for the theater.

Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1960)

Suddenly, Last Summer is a film with a rare distinction: Both Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor received Oscar nominations as best actress for their performances in it. Only two other movies have that distinction: Bette Davis and Anne Baxter were nominated as best actress for All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) and Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine for The Turning Point (Herbert Ross, 1977). That none of the six won may suggest that they split the votes: In the case of Hepburn and Taylor, the winner was Simone Signoret for Room at the Top (Jack Clayton). Pardon this excursion into Oscar trivia, but I think it says something about the film that these two performances are the most memorable thing about it -- and not always for the right reasons. The only other nomination it received was for the art direction and set decoration of Oliver Messel, William Kellner, and Scott Slimon. There were none for Joseph L. Mankiewicz's direction or for the screenplay credited to Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams. In fact, Williams had nothing to do with the film, and according to John Lahr's fine biography, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, he later called it "an abortion." It was Vidal, then, who accomplished the task of expanding Williams's one-act play into a two-hour film. What Vidal and Mankiewicz actually accomplish is a kind of parody of Williams's style at its most florid. They take the film beyond the play's single setting in the jungle-like hothouse and dilute and dissipate the intensity of the play's great scenes for Catherine and Mrs. Venable (Hepburn). Vidal himself regretted the decision to film the attack on Sebastian, which in the play is only described by Catherine, but it's likely that producer Sam Spiegel insisted on showing Taylor in her revealing white bathing suit.  Hepburn at this point in her career couldn't help being a collection of familiar mannerisms -- the haughty head-tilt, the reedy vocal production -- but she holds the screen like no other actress. Taylor, however, fails to evoke Catherine's vulnerability and she begins her great final narrative on too high a pitch, then has to sustain it to the point of shrillness. Montgomery Clift, as the doctor who tries to resist Mrs. Venable's attempt to eradicate Catherine's memories with a lobotomy, is clearly a damaged man, suffering the effects of alcohol and drugs after his near-fatal car crash in 1956, but Taylor was insistent on casting him, over Mankiewicz's objections, which continued well into filming. Taylor and Hepburn both mothered him, and they resented Mankiewicz's sometimes harsh treatment, to the point that, according to several accounts, when Hepburn finished her final scene she spat at the director. For a glimpse at what Suddenly, Last Summer can be in other hands, check out the 1993 BBC version of the play with Maggie Smith (an actress with her own distinct mannerisms who knows how to use them in service of the character) and an astonishing performance by Natasha Richardson.