Marlon Poffo

It is 50 years gone, and we still feel Marlon Brando's bestial heat flare off that black and white celluloid like the flashpots from the third row of a KISS concert. It is obvious why his work in this movie has been lauded, critiqued, dissected, imitated, codified and ultimately iconicized - it's absolutely astounding! To this day, few have captured that feral rawness and "natural-ness" that he exuded; an actor boldly pioneering a new style, a bravura "Method." The movie becomes all too two-dimensional when he is not onscreen.

From Tennesse Williams' play, Elia Kazan directs this drama of a Mississippi school teacher, Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh), visiting her sister, Stella (Kim Hunter, long before her primo role as an ape) in New Orleans, married to the ape-like Stanley (Brando). She visits under false pretenses and her fantasy lies and faux upper class posturing pisses off Stanley no end.

I know how he feels. Vivien Leigh's acting style alone is enough to piss me off. Though lauded by film aficionados as a symbiotic, diametric marriage of intensity with Brando's, it is hard to watch and quite embarrassing. For modern viewers, she cannot seem to "convince" with her old-school Presentational/Theatrical style, clashing irreconcilably with Brando's Method.

The story is slowly exposed that Blanche was ostracised from her community for seducing a young boy and is on the lam at her sister's place. She thinks she can gold-dig her way into a life in New Orleans when one of Stanley's mates, Mitch (Karl Malden) irrationally goes ape for her. (Trust me, it was the blondeness - I feel your pain, Karl). But the icy romance between the two only serves to pound home the truth that sexual morés have moved too far from filmic 50s etiquette, to be in any way considered vital or even interesting to modern viewers, even though, for its day, much censorship was brought down upon STREETCAR. So in place of actual gold-digging sex and seduction, we are left with an inordinate amount of yapping that Blanche inflicts on Mitch; enough to make any man turn to drink, drugs, other women, other men, football, synchronized swimming or forsaking humanity and leaving for outer space like Chuck Heston in PLANET OF THE APES.

During Blanche's incessant rambles, strewn passim to illustrate her neuroticism, one continually wonders whether one is missing innuendo which was considered innuendo Back Then but which is now simply naiveté, or whether there was any innuendo courted at all and it was as innocent and puling as it sounded. Ultimately, it is too taxing to pretend filmic sophistication and dissect character motivation - on a pure enjoyment level, Leigh delivers only to historians and academics.

There is nothing "academic" about Brando's performance though. Whereas Mitch says everything unmanly to stay in Blanche's Pumping Paradigm, Stanley is pure Alpha Male id, scorching his way through uncovering her lies and scares her into acting even more melodramatic.

Surely, The Play's The Thing and the story is as vital now as it was then (that of the estranged sister - Leigh - with the profligate and promiscuous past attempting to excise her demons by immersing herself in a new life with her sister and brother-in-law), but the manner in which it is told has dated, the only remaining vital aspect being Brando.

Brando.

Brando.


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