Product Description

A Streeetcar Named Desire: The Original Director's Version is the Elia Kazan/Tennessee Williams film moviegoers would have seen had not Legion of Decency censorship occurred at the last minute. It features three minutes of previously unseen footage underscoring among other things the sexual tension between Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) and Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando) and Stella Kowalski's (Kim Hunter) passion for husband Stanley. Catch all of the classic - nominated for 12 Academy AwardsO including Best Picture and winner of 4* - that introduced a new era of filmmaking. Step aboard this Streetcar.Running Time: 122 min.System Requirements:Running Time 122 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 085393893224 Manufacturer No: 38932

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4243 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2006-05-02
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dubbed, DVD, Original recording remastered, Special Edition, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 2
• Dimensions: .30 pounds
• Running time: 122 minutes

Features

• A Streeetcar Named Desire: The Original Director's Version is the Elia Kazan/Tennessee Williams film moviegoers would have seen had not Legion of Decency censorship occurred at the last minute. It features three minutes of previously unseen footage underscoring, among other things, the sexual tension between Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) and Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando), and Stella Kowalski's

Amazon.com essential video
Looking for a benchmark in movie acting? Breakthrough performances don't come much more electrifying than Marlon Brando's animalistic turn as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Sweaty, brutish, mumbling, yet with the balanced grace of a prizefighter, Brando storms through the role--a role he had originated in the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams's celebrated play. Stanley and his wife, Stella (as in Brando's oft-mimicked line, "Hey, Stellaaaaaa!"), are the earthy couple in New Orleans's French Quarter whose lives are upended by the arrival of Stella's sister, Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh). Blanche, a disturbed, lyrical, faded Southern belle, is immediately drawn into a battle of wills with Stanley, beautifully captured in the differing styles of the two actors. This extraordinarily fine adaptation won acting Oscars for Leigh, Kim Hunter (as Stella), and Karl Malden (as Blanche's clueless suitor), but not for Brando. Although it had already been considerably cleaned up from the daringly adult stage play, director Elia Kazan was forced to trim a few of the franker scenes he had shot. In 1993, Streetcar was rereleased in a "director's cut" that restored these moments, deepening a film that had already secured its place as an essential American work. --Robert Horton

On the DVD
An exemplary selection of supporting material makes this second disc much more than a throw-in. Richard Schickel's lucid 90-minute profile, Elia Kazan: A Director's Journey, gives a fine account of the Kazan career, including lesser-known but worthy films such as Wild River and America, America. (One wonders, however, why a documentary about the art of a director can't letterbox its widescreen clips.) Kazan's work, rather than his fascinating life, is the focus, and his cooperative testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s is given a brief, neutral treatment. Clips from those Kazan interviews figure in two shorter docs, a look at the origins of Streetcar on Broadway (and the way Marlon Brando's performance threatened to tip the balance of the play) and a thorough half-hour history of the movie adaptation. A nine-minute profile of Brando is mostly an excuse for reminiscences from Karl Malden, but they are wonderful memories indeed. (Malden also contributes his sharp recollections and wise insights to a commentary track on the film, along with film writers Rudy Behlmer and Jeff Young, all recorded separately.) A ten-minute look at composer Alex North's contribution is informative and smart. Outtakes here are really a collection of snippets, of interest to fanatics. A Brando screen test is surprisingly ordinary, although one can see hints of the tiger waiting to escape. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

Paper Moon.
As a playwright, Tennessee Williams was to the South what William Faulkner was as a fiction writer: a creative genius who revolutionized not only the region's arts scene and literature but that of 20th century America as a whole, bringing a Southern voice to the forefront while addressing universally important themes, and influencing and inspiring generations of later writers.

Pulitzer-Prize-winning "A Streetcar Named Desire" dates from the peak of Williams's creativity, the period between 1944 ("A Glass Menagerie") and 1955 ("Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," his second Pulitzer-winner). After its successful 1947 run on Broadway, "Streetcar" was adapted into a screenplay by Williams himself for this movie produced and directed by Elia Kazan, starring the entire Broadway cast except Jessica Tandy, who was replaced by the star of the play's London production, Vivien Leigh. The piece takes its title from one of the New Orleans streetcar lines that protagonist Blanche DuBois (Leigh) rides on her way to the apartment of her sister Stella (Kim Hunter), foreshadowing her later path, from (ever-unfulfilled) Desire to Cemetery (death, or the loss of reality) and a street called Elysian Fields, like the ancient mythological land of the dead.

Although Blanche is the person most visibly engaging in deception (of herself and others), almost everyone of the characters suffers loss after a brutal reality check: Stella, who hasn't been back home for years, first learns from Blanche that their genteel home Belle Reve (literally: "beautiful dream") is "lost" - although in what manner precisely Blanche doesn't specify, which immediately raises the suspicion of Stella's husband Stanley (Marlon Brando) - only to later hear from Stanley that under the veneer of Blanche's appearance as a delicate Southern lady lies a promiscuous past, and the true circumstances of her ouster from her job and ultimately from their home town were not as Blanche would have Stella believe. Stanley's friend Mitch (Karl Malden), who despite their disparate social backgrounds intends to marry Blanche after they are drawn to each other by their mutual need for "somebody" in their life, is similarly disillusioned by Stanley, and subsequently by Blanche herself when he insists on seeing her in bright light instead of the dim light of dancehalls and of the paper lamp she has insisted on hanging over Stella and Stanley's living room lamp, neither able to face the effects of age and a profligate lifestyle herself nor willing to reveal them to others. And Blanche's own loss of innocence, finally, set in years earlier, when she found her young husband in bed with another man and he committed suicide after she publicly reproached him. "Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life," Tennessee Williams says about "A Streetcar Named Desire" in Kazan's 1988 autobiography "A Life;" and in a letter opposing the movie's censoring before its release he described the story as being about "ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal forces of modern society."

The brute, of course, is Stanley, who not only becomes the catalyst of Blanche's fate and the destroyer of Stella's, Mitch's and Blanche's own illusions, but is her antagonist in everything from background to personality: Where she is a fading belle dreaming of days gone by he is all youthful virility, a working-class man living in the here and now; where she is refined he is crude, and where she engages in pretense, he tears down the facade behind which she is hiding. The conversation during which Stanley tells Stella about Blanche's past is pointedly set against Blanche's humming the Arlen/Harburg tune "It's Only a Paper Moon," which sees love transforming life into a fantasy world, which in turn however "wouldn't be make-believe if you believed in me." Yet, as portrayed by Marlon Brando, who with this movie stormed into public awareness with his unique and volcanic approach to acting, Stanley is no mere vulgar beast but a complex, often controversial character, despite his brutal streak almost childishly dependant on his wife and frequently hiding his own insecurities under his raw appearance (thus putting up a certain front as well, but unlike Blanche's, a socially acceptable, even common one). Ever the method actor, Brando reportedly stayed in character even during filming breaks; much to the disgust of Vivien Leigh, for whom lines like "[h]e's like an animal. ... Thousands of years have passed him right by and there he is: Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the stone-age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle" must consequently have come from the bottom of her heart.

In early 1950s' society, "Streetcar" was considered way too risque - even downright sordid - to be presented to moviegoing audiences without severe censorship, which Williams and Kazan were only partly able to fight. One of the most substantial changes made in the adaptation was that at the end of the movie Stanley is punished for his brutality towards Blanche, whereas in the play's cynical original ending he is the only character experiencing no loss at all; indeed seeing his world restored after Blanche's exit. Since Kazan's suggestion to produce two alternate versions (one to please the censors, one in conformity with Williams's play) was rejected, even the 1993 "Original Director's Version" retains its altered, censorship-induced ending. Therefore, the play will forever constitute the last word on Williams's intentions. But even in its censored version this movie was a deserved quadruple Oscar- and multiple other award-winner (albeit undeservedly not for Brando). It has long-since become a true classic: a cinematic gem of first-rate direction and superlative performances throughout.

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

Hart Crane, "The Broken Tower": Preface to the published version of Tennessee Williams's play.

Also recommended:
Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937-1955 (Library of America)
Tennessee Williams: Plays 1957-1980 (Library of America)
Tennessee Williams Film Collection (A Streetcar Named Desire 1951 Two-Disc Special Edition / Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 1958 Deluxe Edition / Sweet Bird of Youth / The Night of the Iguana / Baby Doll / The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone)
Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (Broadway Theatre Archive)
The Rose Tattoo
Suddenly, Last Summer
Baby Doll
This Property Is Condemned
Tennessee Williams' Dragon Country (Broadway Theatre Archive)

There was no widescreen
The film (like virtually all pre-1952 films) was shot in the Academy format of 1.37 to 1. Because your non-widescreen TV is 1.33 to 1, there is no reason to letterbox the DVD image. So the aspect ratio has only been altered to the extent that you're losing a few millimeters on each side. (The same is true of virtually all other pre-1952 films, despite numerous posts at Amazon.com complaining about no widescreen and pan-and-scan cutting, etc. It's great that people now look for widescreen videos and DVDs, but it's not so great that people don't understand that you're not going to find them before the fifties.) "Streetcar" is a masterpiece, certainly one of the top 50 American movies every made. The only reason I've given it 4 stars instead of 5 is because the film print used for this DVD is somewhat warn and there is much graininess in the image. There's also a hiss on the mono audio. Hopefully, this film will be remastered for DVD someday. In the meantime, this is still the best the film has ever looked for the home market. Also, at this price it's a real bargain.

My rating is for the DVD...not the film.
I won't go into how amazing this movie is. We all know that. What gets me is how little respect Warner Bros. pays to the classic films that built their studios. Here you have one of the best films of all time and they release it on a DVD with virtually no extras and a VERY sub-par transfer. From the moment the Warner Bros. logo pops up you can see how unstable the image is...not to mention a large amount of dirt and debris running through every scene. The sound quality isn't much better (I actually had to turn the subtitles on for some of the pivotal scenes).Isn't this film worthy of a restoration? I've run across this same problem a lot with this company's releases. I guess they know that people will buy these wonderful movies based on the reviews of the movies themselves and don't feel any need to fork out cash to ensure the quality of their products.