A Streetcar Named Desire

Experience the greatest films from Hollywood’s Golden Age back on the big screen, every week at The Loft Cinema!  

In acclaimed director Elia Kazan’s steamy hothouse movie version of his own Broadway smash (which garnered playwright Tennessee Williams his first Pulitzer Prize), faded Southern belle Blanche Dubois (Vivien Leigh) drifts into New Orleans with a head full of fantasies and delusions, and is destroyed by her brutish brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando) – an electrifying acting double header that legendary film critic referred to as “two of the greatest performances ever put on film.”  A landmark Hollywood film in terms of its overwhelmingly seedy and sexual atmosphere (which raised the censorship hackles of the Legion of Decency) and Brando’s animalistic, t-shirt tearing, peel-the-paint-off-the-walls performance (the likes of which had never before been seen onscreen), A Streetcar Named Desire brilliantly evokes the claustrophobic passion and bruised psychology of Williams’ stage classic, effectively raising the bar for all future onscreen depictions of sweat-soaked madness.  Winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Actress (Leigh), Best Supporting Actress (Kim Hunter) and Best Supporting Actor (Karl Malden) … although Brando walked away empty-handed, in one of Hollywood’s most notorious examples of “just not getting it.”  (Dir. by Elia Kazan, 1951, USA, 122 mins., Not Rated)