A Streetcar Named Desire(1951)
Warner Bros Pictures- 2h 2m
Sep 18, 1951 | Limited
Disturbed Blanche DuBois moves in with her sister in New Orleans and is tormented by her brutish brother-in-law while her reality crumbles around her.
Note:
Releases
Original Release | Sep 18, 1951
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- Fri Jun 5
- Sat Jun 6
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Director & Top Cast
Technical Specifications
Aspect Ratio: 1.37 : 1
Other Details
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English,Spanish
Summaries
Plot Summary
- Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh), a middle-aged high school English teacher from Mississippi, arrives in New Orleans. She takes a streetcar named "Desire" and then transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields. This brings Blanche to the French Quarter, where her 25-year-old sister, Stella (Kim Hunter), and Stella's husband, Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando), live in a dilapidated tenement apartment. She is horrified at the condition of the neighborhood that Stella lives in. From the moment she enters the home, Blanche is in a perpetual state of shock at her sister's livelihood. Unlike the well to do childhood, they both had, this environment feels on the brink of poverty.Blanche claims to be on leave from her teaching job due to her nerves and wants to stay with Stella and Stanley. Blanche is a fading beauty in her thirties. She still abides by the ideal of a Southern Belle. Blanche's demure, refined manner is a stark contrast to Stanley's crude, brutish behavior, making them mutually wary and antagonistic. Stella welcomes having her sister as a guest, but Blanche often patronizes and criticizes her. Stella left Blanche 10 years ago, just after their dad died. The house has only 2 rooms, with a collapsible bed, no door between the rooms. Blanche is out of place in the harsh world into which she just stepped, with one foot in fantasy.Blanche is clearly deeply and clinically unwell, not a tragic figure making meaningful choices. She doesn't descend into madness, but she arrives already totally Unmoored, in desperate need of medical treatment and pharmaceuticals. There's no agency, no real self-awareness, no actual struggle, just a slow, inevitable decline while the people around her either abuse, dismiss, or misunderstand her. It's not that Blanche is mentally ill. It's that she lives in a culture in which her sexuality is deemed mad.Blanche reveals that the family estate, Belle Reve, was lost to creditors. She claims all the money was spent on treating the illness of their parents. Stella was only around for the funerals and not the illness. Blanche is broke and had nowhere to go, since she was widowed at a young age after her closeted husband's suicide.Stanley suspects Blanche may be hiding an inheritance as she had not shown any proof of the sale of property. She claims it was taken by creditors but has very fine clothes & Jewels in her luggage which is out of sync with her meager teacher's salary. Blanche shows him proof of the foreclosure. Stanley, looking for further proof, knocks some of Blanche's private papers to the floor. Weeping, she gathers them, saying they are poems from her dead husband. Stanley explains he was only looking out for his family, then announces Stella is pregnant.Blanche meets Stanley's friend, Harold "Mitch" Mitchell (Karl Malden), whose courteous manner is a contrast to Stanley's other pals. Mitch is attracted to Blanche's flirtatious charm, and a romance blossoms. During a poker night with his friends, Stanley explodes in a drunken rage after he throws out Stella's radio as Blanche won't shut it despite repeated threats from Stanley. This prompts Stella to disrupt the game, and she tries to throw Stanley's friends out. Stanley strikes Stella thereby ending the game.Blanche and Stella flee upstairs to neighbor Eunice's (Peg Hillias) apartment. After his anger subsides, Stanley remorsefully bellows for Stella from the courtyard below. Irresistibly drawn by her physical passion for him, she goes to Stanley, who carries her off to bed. Stella is so enthralled by Stanley's sexual prowess that she condones his physically abusive behavior. The next morning, Blanche urges Stella to leave Stanley, calling him a sub-human animal. Stella disagrees and wants to stay.As weeks pass into months, tension mounts between Blanche and Stanley. Blanche is hopeful about Mitch as she continues her light flirting with him while repelling him when he craves physical contact with her. Blanche deceives Mitch by pretending to be a virginal woman. Blanche yearns for more than a factory worker, unlike her sister.But anxiety and alcoholism have her teetering on mental collapse while anticipating a marriage proposal. Finally, Mitch says they should be together.Meanwhile, Stanley uncovers Blanche's hidden history of mental instability, promiscuity, and being fired for sleeping with an underage student. He had spoken to one of his sales colleagues, who covers the town where Blanche lives and he knew all the stories about her, which circulated the local rumor mill. Blanche was a prostitute at the Hotel Flamingo back at her hometown. She was fired from her job as teacher for sleeping with a 17-year-old boy. Stanley then passes this news on to Mitch; in full knowledge this will end Blanche's marriage prospects and leave her with no future. Stella angrily blames Stanley for the catastrophic revelation, but their fight is interrupted when Stella goes into labor.Later, Mitch arrives and confronts Blanche about Stanley's claims. She initially denies everything, then breaks down confessing. She pleads for forgiveness, but Mitch, hurt and humiliated, roughly ends the relationship. Later that night, while Stella's labor continues, Stanley returns from the hospital to get some sleep. Blanche, dressed in a tattered old gown, pretends she is departing on a trip with an old admirer. She spins tale after tale about her fictitious future plans, and he pitilessly destroys her illusions. They engage in a struggle, and Stanley sexually assaults her. Now on perilous mental ground, Blanche tries to tell Stella what Stanley had done. Stella refuses to believe Blanche, causing her to have a mental breakdown.Weeks later, during another poker game at the Kowalski apartment, doctors arrive to take Blanche to a mental hospital. On seeing the doctor and nurse, Blanche resists at first, but the doctor talks to her gently and she goes with them willingly, saying that she has "always depended on the kindness of strangers". As Blanche is led away, Mitch tries to attack Stanley but is pulled away by the other poker players. Realizing that Blanche had told her the truth, Stella takes her baby upstairs to the Hubbells' apartment, determined to leave Stanley.
Storyline
- Blanche DuBois, a high school English teacher with an aristocratic background from Auriol, Mississippi, decides to move to live with her sister and brother-in-law, Stella and Stanley Kowalski, in New Orleans after creditors take over the family property, Belle Reve. Blanche has also decided to take a break from teaching as she states the situation has frayed her nerves. Knowing nothing about Stanley or the Kowalskis' lives, Blanche is shocked to find that they live in a cramped and run down ground floor apartment - which she proceeds to beautify by putting shades over the open light bulbs to soften the lighting - and that Stanley is not the gentleman that she is used to in men. As such, Blanche and Stanley have an antagonistic relationship from the start. Blanche finds that Stanley's hyper-masculinity, which often displays itself in physical outbursts, is common, coarse and vulgar, being common which in turn is what attracted Stella to him. Beyond finding Blanche's delicate hoidy-toidy act as putting on airs, Stanley, a plant worker, believes she may really have sold Belle Reve and is withholding Stella's fair share of the proceeds from them. What further affects the relationship between the three is that Stella is in the early stage of pregnancy with her and Stanley's first child. Soon after her arrival at the Kowalskis, Blanche starts to date Mitch, one of Stanley's friends and coworkers who is a little softer around the edges than most of Stanley's friends. Mitch does not hide the fact that he is looking in general to get married because of a personal issue, he wanting Blanche ultimately to be his wife. Mitch is somewhat unaware that Blanche has somewhat controlled their courtship to put herself in the best possible light, both figuratively and literally. But in Stanley's quest to find out the truth about Belle Reve and Blanche's life in Auriol, the interrelationships between Stanley, Blanche, Stella and Mitch may be irrevocably affected, with any revelation about that life which may further destroy what's left of Blanche's already damaged mental state. — Huggo Troubled former schoolteacher Blanche DuBois as she leaves small-town Mississippi and moves in with her sister, Stella Kowalski and her husband, Stanley, in New Orleans. Blanche's flirtatious Southern-belle presence causes problems for Stella and Stanley, who already have a volatile relationship, leading to even greater conflict in the Kowalski household. — Jwelch5742 Blanche is in real need of a protector at this stage in her life when circumstances lead her into paying a visit to her younger sister Stella in New Orleans. She doesn't understand how Stella, who is expecting her first child, could have picked a husband so lacking in refinement. Stanley Kowalski's buddies come over to the house to play cards and one of them, Mitch, finds Blanche attractive until Stanley tells him about what kind of a woman Blanche really is. What will happen when Stella goes to the hospital to have her baby and just Blanche and her brother-in-law are in the house? — Dale O'Connor <daleoc@interaccess.com> Set in the French Quarter of New Orleans during the restless years following World War Two, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE is the story of Blanche DuBois, a fragile and neurotic woman on a desperate prowl for someplace in the world to call her own. After being exiled from her hometown of Laurel, Mississippi, for seducing a seventeen-year-old boy at the school where she taught English, Blanche explains her unexpected appearance on Stanley and Stella's (Blanche's sister) doorstep as nervous exhaustion. This, she claims, is the result of a series of financial calamities which have recently claimed the family plantation, Belle Reve. Suspicious, Stanley points out that "under Louisiana's Napoleonic code what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband." Stanley, a sinewy and brutish man, is as territorial as a panther. He tells Blanche he doesn't like to be swindled and demands to see the bill of sale. This encounter defines Stanley and Blanche's relationship. They are opposing camps and Stella is caught in no-man's-land. But Stanley and Stella are deeply in love. Blanche's efforts to impose herself between them only enrages the animal inside Stanley. When Mitch -- a card-playing buddy of Stanley's -- arrives on the scene, Blanche begins to see a way out of her predicament. Mitch, himself alone in the world, reveres Blanche as a beautiful and refined woman. Yet, as rumors of Blanche's past in Auriol begin to catch up to her, her circumstances become unbearable. — Mark Fleetwood <mfleetwo@mail.coin.missouri.edu> 1 more See all
