World Famous Comics: A Streetcar Named Desire (Signet)
A Streetcar Named Desire (Signet)
By: Tennessee Williams Publisher: Signet Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Format: Illustrated Label: Signet Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 144 Publication Date: August 13, 1986
Start of a new era This was a very passiont film from the south drenched with liquior, romance, and confrontation. By far the best actress in the movie was blanch. She showed every possible emotion a human can have while acting in this play. She sold the movie for me from the second she started speaking. She goes though her up and her downs throughout the whole play. She tries to keep cool and calm throught the whole fil but battles to be considered sane but stanley pushes her over the edge in many parts of this film. From what i have known about this culture and this time the play was played out just the way the times have been presented to me. The male domination with the drinking problem who hits his wife and she comes back and loves him every time. Then you have that one woman who defies everyone and acts like a male almost. This film was very well presented and blanch dubois sold me. This was the beginning of an era in film making.
no good choice The choice of copies of _The Streetcar Named Desire_ (required reading for high school academic English this summer) seemed to narrow down to ones with lurid covers or this plain one. Unfortunately, the text is almost like a typewritten script--small print and a little hard to read.
Superb Drama This classic play by Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) is relentless and compelling. Few readers are un-affected by these pages, even more so than with The Glass Menagerie. The story concerns a Blanche, a troubled former southern belle who moves in with her married sister Stella in New Orleans. Blanch lives off pretensions and delusions, and we quickly sense she's headed for a fall. Her sister Stella doesn't see Blanche clearly, and worries that Blanche's presence will cause trouble with her abusive-but-loving husband. That husband is Stanley, a loud brute who's dominating persona both attracts and repulses us. Stanley is also a realist, and he easily sees through Blanche's pretensions. Readers sense the two are headed for a collision, with little doubt as to who is likely to win. Perhaps Mitch, Stanley's kind-hearted friend who likes the still-pretty Blanche can save the day, but has he the strength?
This relentless drama carries quickly to the bitter conclusion from the strength of its characters. Some find this play depressing, but most find it fascinating. The superb 1951 film starring Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando is equally (some say more) compelling.
Squalor, Poetry, and Remarkable Insight: An American Classic Born in Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) endured a difficult childhood and adolescence before suddenly exploding to national and then international fame with the 1944 play THE GLASS MENAGERIE. He would go on to create a dozen or so more that were equally famous--but he is perhaps best recalled for the 1947 drama A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, which he drew from a number of personal sources and the time he spent in the New Orleans' French Quarter, in which the play is set.
Like many of Williams' plays, the story is remarkably sordid. Blanche DuBois is aging "Southern Belle" who arrives to visit her sister Stella and is shocked to find Stella married to a bruitish Stanley and living in squalid conditions. Her social pretensions anger Stanley, who chips away with them without remorse or pity until Blanche's facade begins to crack and an ugly series of truths about her past emerge: a scandalous suicide, an equally scandalous series of affairs. Blanche is unable to confront either past or present realities and so spins into psychosis while most of those around her remain largely indifferent to her plight.
But if the material is sordid, Williams juxtaposes it with tremendous delicacy, even poetry. Blanche acquires the tragedy of a frightened, hunted animal who has sought safety only to find herself inside the very trap she had sought to escape, increasingly fearful, increasingly alone, and ultimately pitable in her inability to fend off her tormentors. It is a vivid portrait, and many regard the role of Blanche as one of the tests of a great actress.
The original 1947 New York play starred Jessica Tandy as Blanche, Marlon Brando as Stanley, Kim Hunter as Stella, and Karl Malden as Blanche's would-be suitor Mitch. A slightly later English production starring Vivien Leigh, however, ran into significantly greater censorship issues in London--and when Leigh replaced Tandy to film STREETCAR with Brando, Hunter, and Malden the material ran afoul of movie censors, who forced numerous changes and cuts. Consequently, if your idea of STREETCAR arises from the celebrated film, you may be somewhat surprised: the play goes quite a bit further than the film ever dared.
Williams is frequently accused of being sordid for the sake of sordiness, and there is some truth to this accusation; as the years passed he was less and less able to balance the sexually charged nature of his stories with the same degree of insight he brought to his earlier works. But this not true of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, a remarkably complex piece with meticulously expressed ideas, images, and thematic choices. There is a reason it remains celebrated fifty years after it first appeared on the stage: it is indeed a masterwork, utterly unlike anything that had gone before and distinctly superior to everything which borrowed from it after it proved success. A great work by a great artist.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
The Glorious Bird's iconic melodrama This is probably the most famous piece of literature from the US that I hadn'd read yet, until now. Nor watched as a play or movie. And still I seemed to know everything about it. Having just read Gore Vidal's memoirs, where he calls TW the 'glorious bird', I was motivated to finally get acquainted with the streetcar. What fun. It is Gone with the Wind updated for the 20th century. It is the downsizing of rural gentry. It shows downward social mobility in a narrative framework of Southern Gothic. It is powerfully vulgar and perceptive. It is so politically not correct. ('Polacks are like Irish, only less highbrow.') But with all the mad fun, let's be clear about this: despite the popular use of the term 'tragic' for the descent of Ms. Blanche into madness, this is not really a tragedy in the full sense of the word. Being a piece of stage writing makes it one only in the sense of not being a comedy. What it is, it is a really great melodrama. A word about the genius casting for the movie: Marlon Brando dominated it more than the text justifies. Gore Vidal says in his memoirs that Kazan actually destroyed the play by pushing the Blanche character into 2nd row. He says that TW did not mind, since it made him famous.
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