Cirrus@Austlit

'One of the indelible moving images of the postwar era is Marlon Brando’s screen-andT-shirt-ripping realisation of Stanley Kowalski in the screen version of Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, in 1951. It is worth dwelling for a moment on that date, because there is something extraordinary and almost uncanny about it. This is a film whose visual style (noir-ish chiaroscuro and heavy set design) associates it with the late 1940s, but whose acting style lifts it into the 1950s thanks to Karl Malden and Kim Hunter, both engaged in a new naturalism cribbed from Stella Adler. But then, on top of that palimpsest, another layer is added: for somehow, Brando’s performance belongs neither to the 1940s nor the 1950s, but is projected ahead into the future, and – in its hulking, electric, infantile combustibility – manages to incarnate something essential and true about the 1960s to come. And this is an anomaly that cannot be said to inhere in Tennessee Williams’ play text either, since it only emerged, fully fledged on the New York stage, through Brando’s muscular interpretation of the role, which shocked Williams and turned audiences into unwitting supporters of a character that he had intended mainly as an unsympathetic brute.' (Introduction)