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The online film magazine Combustible Celluloid offers new movie reviews, DVD reviews, film reviews, actor interviews, actress interviews, director interviews, film books and all things cinema related for the thoughtful and passionate. Online for ten years! Over 3000 reviews!

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A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

Rating: 3 Stars (out of 4)

Yelling Stella

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy A Streetcar Named Desire on DVD

It must have been something to see the Broadway production of this Tennessee Williams play, with a young and virile Marlon Brando exploding onto the stage in waves of heat. Unfortunately, Elia Kazan's movie only captures a small hint of that. Like most other play adaptations, it's often too reverential to the material -- too hysterical for the camera's subtle, minute gaze -- to really break away from the stagebound into cinema. (Howard Hawks complained that all his years of working, getting actors to play smaller for the screen, had been shot to hell.) Still, Brando pulls off astonishing things as Stanley Kowalski, and Vivien Leigh gives a performance that must have taken everything she had as Blanche DuBois. Kim Hunter and Karl Malden co-starred, and both took home Oscars, in addition to Leigh. Williams adapted his own screenplay.

Starring: Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden, Kim Hunter
Written by: Tennessee Williams, based on his own play
Directed by: Elia Kazan
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Running Time: 122 minutes
Date: June 29, 2005