Film: “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh

What kind of excitement must Brando have generated when he first appeared on screen in Tennessee Williams’s 1951 film”A Streetcar Named Desire?” The same reaction that occurred at yesterday’s acreening at Film Forum screening : the house growing strangely quiet until someone in the audience audibly gasps, “damn.

Full disclosure: that someone was me.

To my mind, “Streetcar” remains the third- greatest American play ever written (after “Our Town” and “Glass Menagerie.”) And part of what made the play and the subsequent movie so epic was the public’s introduction to Marlon Brando Jr., the 23-year-old moody son of an Omaha-based traveling salesman.

For those of you who’ve never heard of either the play or movie, here’s a quick plot summary: Blanche du Bois, a schoolteacher of a certain age (Vivien Leigh, who played Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind”) has arrived in a down-in-the-mouth section of the French Quarter in New Orleans. She has come to live with her sister Stella (Kim Hunter) and Stella’s blue-collar Polish husband (Brando) whom she has never met. Blanche, a delicate flower, has gone through some hard times in her hometown of Laurel, Mississippi. Stanley has a fiery temper, a low tolerance for BS, and a habit of smashing things when things don’t go his way. That does not bode well for their relationship, which goes from bad to worse quickly.

Blanche claims she has “lost” her family home “Bel Rive” and is in financial ruin. Stanley dredges up some “Napoleonic code” nonsense, demanding to know, as Stella’s husband, exactly what has happened. Stella tries to smooth the antagonistic relationship between the two, but is not successful, especially after Stanley begins to investigate Blanche’s past and discovers it isn’t as innocent as she makes it out to be.

Brando seemed perfect for the role in the stage version, according to Talulah Bankhead who had worked and clashed with him previously. Nevertheless she recommended him to Williams: “I know of an actor who can appear as this brutish Stanley Kowalski character. I mean, a total pig of a man without sensitivity or grace of any kind. Marlon Brando would be perfect as Stanley. I have just fired the cad from my play and I know for a fact that he is looking for work.”

As the neurotic Blanche, Vivian Leigh more than holds her own opposite Brando. As she tells him in one of the film’s many famous lines. “I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty percent illusion.” Stanley is not impressed.

Leigh felt a strong connection to the character of Blanche, and playing her in the film, she later acknowledged, “tipped me into madness,” a subject she knew all too well.

Williams collaborated with Oscar Saul and director Elia Kazan on the screenplay. Together they penned some of the greatest expressions spoken on a stage or in film: “della Robbia blue.” “I don’t want reality, I want magic” and of course “STELLA!” The film's almost claustrophobic sensibility is a credit to its Oscar-winning Art Direction-Set Design by Richard Day and George James Hopkins. They created one of the biggest sets ever built at Warners — 150 feet wide and 215 feet long — depicting Stella and Stanley’s New Orleans home, the courtyard outside her apartment and a section of the French Quarter.

The movie went on to win 10 Oscar nominations and brought Brando, previously unknown to the American public, to prominence as a major Hollywood film star. It earned him the first of four consecutive Academy Award nominations for Best Actor, but strangely no Oscar. Those went to the film’s costars: Leigh for Blanche, Kim Hunter for Stella and Karl Malden for Mitch, Blanche’s prospective beau.

Brando wouldn’t be an Oscar contender for another two years when he won his first Best Actor award for “On the Waterfront” then a second Oscar two decades after that for “The Godfather.”

We New Yorkers have had an entire two weeks to see the work of the man Woody Allen called a “living poem” and about whom John Huston said after seeing him on screen: "Christ! It was like a furnace door opening—the heat came off the screen. I don't know another actor who could do that." The films of Marlon Brando, an actor in a world of movie stars. At Film Forum NYC through December 26.

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