Rating: 
Summary: THE MEETING OF THE BEST OF ACTORS
Review: In 1950, producer Charles Feldman brought Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando together in order to repeat their theatre-success(she in London - he on Broadway) of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski.With the help of director Elia Kazan and supporting cast headed by Kim Hunter and Karl Malden the filmversion became a landmark film. It is a fascinating study of old-timer classical actress Leigh - against the mothod prince Brando. THEY ARE DYNAMITE together and the film remains as powerful as when it was released in 1951. Elia Kazan claimed Vivien had a small talent but that she would have walked on broken glass if she thought if would have helped her performance. He liked her in WATERLOO BRIDGE(1940) though - not in GONE WITH THE WIND(1939) which he considered not an acting film at all... However; VIVIEN LEIGH has graced my life with her perfomances and contunually moves me....
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Summary: Leigh is brilliant!
Review: At the outset, I have to say that I never had a particular interest in reading or seeing this play. Sadly this is due to the various interpretations I have heard or read over the years concerning the Blanche DuBois character. For me, the interpretations formed preconceived notions which encouraged me to avoid this play like a plague. The idea of encountering another frail, southern belle, losing her mind and descending into madness, simply did not intrigue me. Hearing Lange's own commentary on the mindset of Blanche DuBois, sadly made me even less inclined to explore this story. Consequently, upon watching this film, I cannot adequately express my shock at what a brilliant piece of theater this play is. Let's be honest, Vivien Leigh? Marlon Brando? does it get better? Please! How anyone can even attempt to criticize is beyond me. In my mind Jessica Lange and Jessica Tandy are lacking in that they do not have Leigh's extraordinary beauty, a quality which I felt essential to the story. Since I see that everyone else offers an interpretation, I'll offer mine too....Although this may differ with some other interpretations,I consider Blanche to be the strongest character in the play, as opposed to being the weakest. She has the purest understanding of reality, as happiness and love being elusive and abstract thus making them eternal and true. We are only happy when we are wanting and striving for the ideal. Blanche is fully aware of the illusion and of the necessity of illusion as the means to greater realization. Blanche, as her name suggests, embodies a medieval concept of the chase and the search, the white hind in the forest which tempts the knight as he is described in the "Lais of Marie de France" or the novels of Chretien de Troyes. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Stanley, who, in my view, is ironically not the strongest character in the piece. He merely serves to challenge Blanche, thus creating a modern manifestation of the biblical battle between good and evil. He is drawn to her due to her purity of purpose and understanding, her goodness. He knows how strong she is, and he is relentless. He plays on his own wife, challenging what is "real," and she succumbs to his tyranny, whereas he knows that Blanche will not. He, as in the biblical "Fall," cannot undermine her strength, her vision. The fight between Stanley and Blanche is electrifying. I felt that they were two powerful gods at war. (When Leigh smashes that bottle and stares Brando down, you will have chills. Come hell or high water, he is not going to defeat her, and he knows it. He is the veritable moth to the flame.) There is a lot of talk that Stanley shatters Blanche's frail world in the classic rape scene. In accordance, with my own humble interpretation :) he does no such thing. Desire is merely human, and for that matter, it is common. It's the opposite of death and it is, again, human. It is tangible, and it is an essential component of love. Nevertheless, love cannot be defined only by the tangible, and those who can only believe what they can see or touch are lost. Love, in its highest sense, is not tangible; faith is not tangible. Consequently, Blanche has no fear of sexuality or sensuality. They are necessary. She merely feels that we are weighted down by the flesh and that it is incumbent upon the soul to find a higher level, to transcend in order to complete the circle. We need the physical to live, but we also need the spiritual to endure, to remain eternally beautiful. Purity is internal, and it is only achieved on another more abstract plane. Therefore, ironically, in my mind, Blanche wins in the end. Being led to the institution, on her doctor's gallant arm, she leaves the rabble to play in the dirt, the weak to wail and cry and die in degenration, never knowing true love, never "seeing God" (for lack of a better phrase.) Stanley and the others are ultimately lost. Ultimately (if you have made it though my long windedness) watch the Brando and Leigh version of Streetcar. They are magnificent, and you will not be disappointed!
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Summary: Not a Heroine But Tragic Nonetheless
Review: For various reasons, I have never liked either the play or the film on which it is based but remain fascinated with the human experiences which Tennessee Williams examines. The character of Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando) dominates the narrative but his wife Stella (Kim Hunter) really is the stronger person. Pregnant, she is visited by her sister Blanche Dubois (Vivien Leigh) who arrives with enough emotional baggage to keep a regiment of psychotherapists busy. She and Stanley have an immediate and ambivalant chemical reaction to each other. To her, he is a lower animal, unworthy of her sister; to him, she is a posturing, pretentious bitch. Under the brilliant direction of Elia Kazan, Leigh's performance suggests how fragile, vulnerable, and desperate Blanche really is. As for Stanley, to invoke a weary aphorism, what we see is what we get...except that he seems vulnerable without his wife's love and support. Both on stage and in the film, there is no doubt of the powerful sexual attraction between Stella and Stanley. Williams invests the character of Blanche with ephemeral qualities. In some respects, she is an elderly Scarlett O'Hara who reluctantly endures her sister's boorish husband because she has nowhere else to go. Her personal "streetcar" has reached the end of the line. The acting is consistently outstanding. Of course, we know early on that there will be a major confrontation between Blanche and Stanley. Oscar Saul collaborated with Williams on the screenplay which carefully prepares us for it. When it finally occurs, we feel sympathy (if not pity) for Blanche and her relocation to a new home in which, perhaps, she will receive the kindness she so obviously craves. There is great emotional power in this film. Also, I think, sadness with regard to the resolution of Blanche's association with the Kowalskis. With all due respect to Leigh (who received an Academy Award for her performance, as did Hunter and Karl Malden for theirs), I would have preferred Jessica Tandy whom I was privileged to see in the Broadway production. Tandy captured -- in ways and to an extent which Leigh does not -- certain nuances of Blanche's illusions and delusions which are indelibly poignant.
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Summary: From Sensuality to Neurosis
Review: The fim version of the play is absolutely outstanding. It completely and fullheartedly deserves the Awards it got, and by far. Marlon Brandon is fascinating as an animal of violence and desire, and Vivien Leigh is an astonishing embodiment of a fallen southern belle who tries to escape her lost past and cannot, turning her obsession about her past of failure into an absolute neurotic inability to accept change in the world. The use of music is quite convincing to signal the shifts from the present experience to the recollections of the past mistakes and guilt. The violence and the sensuality of the present are always striking and powerful. It is moving and cruel, emotional and mind-raking, sensual and frightening. Desire, the desire to be in complete osmosis with another human being, is beautifully depicted and enacted by the dialogue, the acting and the physical rendering of the feelings, the fears, the hopes, the deceptions of the characters. But the ending is changed and the meaning of the film is different from that of the book. From the triumph of sensual and sexual desire, from the necessary destruction and institutionalization of Blanche in order for life and its desires to survive and live on, like a show that has to go on, we shift to an opening in Stella that could lead to more independance and autonomy for her, for women. But this opening is ambiguous since it can only come from a distanciation from desire in the objective realization of it, that is to say the baby. When the baby is born, when desire has produced its fruit, women can move on to a higher level and men can be pushed back into a more refrained and cultured attitude. Can they? Maybe. At least they may, in a long process that is foretold in this ending, at the end of this film. We can wonder whether it is a way to satisfy the demands of Hollywood for a film that can reach the wide public (and the three odd minutes that were cut off in 1951 go that way), or it is a sign in Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan that new social evolutions were entering the wider social picture. That we cannot know for sure. But this film shows how a ten or twenty second change at the end can change the meaning of the play and can open completely different vistas in our consciousness. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Perpignan
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Summary: Brando needs an Oscar for this role
Review: Altough I've heard ASCND was a classic before I saw it, I truely believe it now that I finally have. As an afficionado of acting, I was blown away by Leigh and Brando's protrale of Stanley and Blanch. I think this is one of Marlon Brando's best acting jobs every. It is such a shame that this style of acting is so rare. Sadly he did not win an Oscar for this role, which I believe was well deserved.
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Summary: Essential Classic
Review: Despite the fact that I have fallen in love with the young Marlon Brando, this is an excellent movie. Too often in today's movies the acting is so-so; it passes for okay, but it really doesn't rivet you. When I saw this movie, I was in awe of the raw emotion that comes out of this film. Tennessee Williams' story of a delusional Southern belle staying at her sister's house, with Brando as the rough but sensual brother-in-law, is simply captivating.
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Summary: One of the best films ever!
Review: The writing makes this truly stand out, make sthis a marvel to behld. Teh actors are completely immersed in their roles, vanishing into not wholely likeable characters. In a time when people are worried about thei rpublic image, its nice to have this as a reference to when actors didn't care about what you thought of them as people because they separated their identities from their roles. Now, it's a star with a movie around them. But at this point and time, it was all about the craft of doing something that would shock and amaze and be critically examined.
Rating: 
Summary: Marlon's accent????? What happened?????
Review: As a southern girl I love all movies made about the South but this is supposed to be New Orleans and everybody sounds like they are from New Jersey. Marlon Brando doesn't even attempt an accent. Which annoyed me!Vivian's performance is very convincing and you will want to slap her throughout the movie for being such a weakling. At the time she was mentally ill which probably adds to her performance . Her husband thought playing Blanche onstage for 8 months would help her illness..... I know it's funny.
Rating:
Summary: As close to perfection as you could ever expect
Review: In this consensual screen classic, Marlon Brando is electrifying as working-class hunk Stanley Kowalski, reprising his Broadway role in Tennessee Williams's most famous play. Elia Kazan, who directed the play in New York, made the trek west for the film, joined by Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden, Rudy Bond, Nick Dennis, Peg Hillias, and Edna Thomas from the stage version. Only Jessica Tandy, who had been a smash as Blanche DuBois on Broadway, was replaced--studio chiefs felt that she wasn't well-known enough for the movie. The role went to Vivien Leigh, who had been starring in a London presentation of the play directed by her husband, Laurence Olivier. The resulting film is an actors' showcase and a flamboyant, sometimes uneasy admixture of Manhattan and Hollywood sensibilitites. The film opens with Blanche (Leigh) arriving in New Orleans, where she intends to stay with her pregnant sister Stella Kowalski (Hunter) and her brutish husband Stanley (Brando). (To get to their seedy apartment, Blanche has to take a streetcar named Desire--named for a New Orleans street.) Stella, an earthy, pragmatic woman, seems happy in her marriage to the trashy but overtly sexual Stanley, but Blanche is delicate, morose, and deeply neurotic. Stanley immediately sees through Blanche's southern-belle facade and the two are quickly at odds. As sexual and financial tensions escalate, Stanley sets out to reveal the truth about Blanche. A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE features some of the finest ensemble acting ever offered on the screen, speaking some of Williams's most vivid dialogue. Kazan's direction, however, sometimes verges on the pedestrian, as though he's struggling to recreate his Broadway staging in a much more visually demanding medium. Leigh, in the final great triumph of her screen career, is the very picture of tattered magnificence. She's like a cracked figurine from The Glass Menagerie come to life; her emotional choices are tragic and horrifying at the same time. Brando's character is strictly scratch, mumble, flex, and roar, but it's telegraphed all through force-of-nature persona. As countless subsequent productions have shown, Brando has no peer when it comes to conveying the physical threat and sexual potency that make the character work. Kim Hunter is more than adequate in the most sketchily written role. Three minutes of footage censored from the original were restored in a 1994 video re-release.
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Summary: HEY MAAAAARLOOOOOOON!!!!!!!
Review: "Every man's a king and I'm the king around here, and don't you forget it!" How could we forget! In this film Marlon gives an amazing performance,so amazingly real in fact that a lot of people thought that the rude and violent Stanley was really how Marlon was in real life. As the crude, immature and violent brute, you can't take your eyes off of him, and you can't help but love him (and may I just add that the man looks amazing in a torn wet t-shirt, wow!). The rest of the cast is wonderful, especially Vivien Leigh, whose scenes with Marlon are the best in the film. I would recommend this film to anyone, and if you are a Brando fan and haven't seen this one,"Whasa matter with you?"
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