****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I have seen this movie over the decades of my life as I grew from a naive and innocent teenager to a blossoming twenty something, then a mature thirtyish, the wisdom of my forties and now an aging baby boomer. In each part of my life I saw this movie through different eyes. Now I have come back to it once more, with much life experience, heartache and losse and have an even deeper appreciation for this brilliant movie.Elia Kazan manages to make the transition from the stage play that he directed to this scintillating movie version with almost all of the original cast intact. The casting of Vivien Leigh as Blanche Dubois was the only change, due to the necessity of having a marquee name to get the movie made. Karl Malden and Kim Hunter were Broadway stage actors and unknowns in Hollywood. Marlon Brando had only made one previous film, "The Men", but was also still unknown to movie audiences. Of course, all that would change after the world saw his mesmerizing, fiery, sexually raw, intense portrayal of Stanley Kowalski. In the hands of a lesser actor, Stanley Kowalski could have come off as a two-dimensional, cardboard cartoonish caricature of a neanderthal brute. However, in Brando's hands, he comes across as a multi-layered, complex, ambivalent, mercurial man who can change in a heartbeat from a wife-beating drunken brute to a lost, needy, vulnerable, childlike man who has a surprising tenderness at the most unexpected times. This is the genius of Brando. One never knows quite what to expect from one scene to the next and this adds to the already tense, tightly wound, emotionally charged atmosphere.Vivien Leigh's Blanche Dubois is a faded southern belle, desperately clinging to a lost past, an aristocratic upbringing on the family estate Belle Rive, a life that is dead and gone forever. Blanche has created an artificial world of fantasy and illusion to hide how lonely and desolate her reality has become. She has never gotten over the trauma of falling in love with a young man who betrayed her love. She turned on him cruelly and he killed himself. Blanche is still haunted by this tragedy and has never really been able to get beyond it. She seems to be a woman incapable of coping with life's tragedies and losses, the setbacks and difficulties that one encounters along the way. She must pretend to be that ageless southern belle, but in reality she has stooped so low as to seduce a seventeen year old student, causing her to be fired from her job as an english teacher. After the loss of Belle Rive she took up residence at a second rate hotel and essentially prostitued herself with a long line of strange men, until finally she was asked to leave. She has fallen a long way, but is determined to keep up the fragile facade of her past, holding a tenuous grip on reality.Stanley is Blanche's nemesis, the one who discovers the truth about her past. It's interesting how my view of Stanley and Blanche has changed over the years. I can now understand why Stanley unmasked Blanche and ended her chance of marrying his best friend Mitch. After the scene in which Stanley beats Stella in a drunken tirade and causes her to run to the upstairs neighbor, but finally come back home, the next morning he overhears a conversation between Blanche and Stella. He hears Blanche describe him as "common", a "survivor of the stone age" and say that she has a plan to get them both out of there. Once Stanley realizes that Blanche is a threat to his very survival, to his territory, his family, then there is no question that he will do whatever he must to destroy her. The battle lines are drawn between Stanley and Blanche and Stella and her conflicting loyalties are caught right in the middle. However, as I watch this movie today, I see that it is inevitable that Blanche will lose this epic battle. She is no match for Stanley, who is tough, uncompromising, strong, determined and outraged at this woman who he sees as a two-faced, pretentious hypocrite without a job, money and totally destitute. I also believe that Stanley is aware enough to realize Blanche's precarious mental state. He senses that she is on the edge, a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. All he has to do is help it along.I no longer see Blanche as a victim. I feel empathy for her plight and her slow descent into madness. It's not a pretty site. However, I can also see that her lies, constructed out of her own necessity to keep up this sham existence, have also caused pain and hurt to others. I can understand Stanley telling his friend Mitch the truth, rather than stand by and watch him make a fool of himself. I don't believe that Mitch or anyone else can ever save Blanche from her fate. At one point in the movie, after the birthday party for Blanche in which Mitch has failed to show up because of what Stanley told him, we see Stanley and Stella arguing heatedly. Stella asks what will Blanche do now if Mitch won't marry her. Stanley utters a line which seems to be a precursor of Blanche's fate. He says - "Oh, her future is all mapped out for her". He gives her a ticket back to Oriole and Blanche is devastated and Stella is angered at this callous gesture.When I watched this movie earlier in my life, I actually felt as someone else did here in their review. I wasn't sure if Stanley raped Blanche or not. That scene that passed for a rape back in 1951, seems somewhat ambiguous now. I never read the play and now I wish that I had done so a long time ago. It would have cleared up a good deal of my confusion. I totally understand the constraints in which the creators of this movie were working back in the days of strict censorship. There are controversial and taboo subjects in this story and some of it had to be removed or at least watered down. I have researched the play online and know the actual story as Williams originally wrote it. Stanley does rape Blanche in a final act of domination and control. In doing so, he pushes her over the edge and the last vestiges of her sanity are destroyed.What I have also come to understand, is that Tennessee Williams didn't write a story about good versus evil, right versus wrong. This is not a morality tale. This is reality versus illusion. Stanley represents the modern world in all its raw coarseness, survival of the fittest. Blanche represents a bygone world, a halcyon existence that has faded into the past, a world of frivolity, elegance, gentility and grace. She cannot adapt to this new world and retreats into a world of make-believe. After the scene in which Mitch angrily confronts Blanche and leaves, having found out the truth for himself, we see Blanche alone in the darkened apartment. She has gotten all dressed up with a tiara and ballgown and is conversing with imaginary guests, retreating into a long ago night of partying at Belle Rive. She is once more the southern belle, humming along to imaginary music. Her reverie is interrupted by Stanley arriving home from the hospital. The two of them will spend the night alone there together. The final confrontation will inevitably take place in the ugliest possible way. Their destinies will collide one last time and, when it is over, Blanche will have gone completely out of her mind.The original ending was changed at the insistence of the censors, but I believe that they didn't achieve what they intended. Somehow Kazan filmed the ending in such an ambiguous way with Stella running upstairs to the neighbor vowing that this time she won't ever go back. It isn't convincing, not with what we know of her relationship with Stanley. I always felt that she never really left for good. Now that I know the real ending, it's almost as though I knew what Tennessee Williams had in mind without ever reading the play. The censors just succeeded in muddying everything, clouding it with doubt. That's why the ending never really made sense to me. I think that people will come away with their own ideas about the ending. The triumph is that this movie got made at all. The basic story is still intact, the actors stayed faithful to their characters and Kazan's brilliant direction made it all come together in the end.Truth has a way of coming through even when some are determined to try to cover it up. The censors didn't really change the ending. They didn't take away a powerful story of passion, betrayal, deceit, lust, brutal truth and a climactic battle that ended inevitably. This movie has stood the test of time and is as powerful and unsettling and relevant today as it was sixty years ago. Everyone owes it to themselves to watch true greatness.
