"A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE" Tennessee Williams w

When the play was staged on Broadway, the New York Times said that it "reveals Mr. Williams as a genuinely poetic playwright whose knowledge of people is honest and thorough and whose sympathy is profoundly human " (Beckerman 286). The movie also served the text well, and most critics point out that it has become a classic over the years.

Pauline Kael agreed with the fact that the main characters continued to be powerful in the screen version. She had reservations about Elia Kazan's direction (he had directed the play on Broadway), saying that it was too stagey and the arrangement of actors was too transparently "worked out."

This being said, she still concluded: "But who cares when you're looking at two of the greatest performances ever put on film and listening to some of the finest dialogue ever written by an American?" (Kael 564)

The dialogue that Kael is speaking of is especially wellwritten from Blanche's standpoint. In the final scene, as she is talking with her sister Stella she says: "I can smell the sea air. The rest of my time I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on t

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he leads him on, and then backs away slightly, but Stanley will not be stopped. He says: "Oh! So you want some rough-house! All right, let's have some rough-house." She cries out and strikes out at him, but he grabs her wrist. He continues: "We've had this date with each other from the beginning!" (Williams 130) This is a determinist way of looking at the characters. Williams has the utmost sympathy for Blanche, and in many ways he identified most strongly with her. But he knew that she was a woman who could not bluff a coarse man like Stanley. Stanley's portrait emerges as more polished in the film, as opposed to the play the way it is written. This is probably because Kazan had had several years to re-think the material, and also that he was directing Brando in a Hollywood film. In this sense, he had to watch out for censorship, and so the actual rape scene is not as graphic as it might have been. Williams adapted the play himself, and so there was no chance that the playwright could claim that Hollywood had ruined his words or even his staging. Despite Kael's reservations, the movie version of "A Streetcar Named Desire" is very successful because Kazan was able to "open up" the play with various locales in New Or
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1347
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)