A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

The classic adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, featuring one of Marlon Brando's legendary performances.

That melancholy we feel as it closes is a mourning for me that I'll never be able to see this film again for the first time--and that I'll never be able to appreciate any film that came before it without the stain of it in my perception.

Brando pulls off astonishing things as Stanley Kowalski, and Vivien Leigh gives a performance that must have taken everything she had as Blanche DuBois.

Brando's performance is probably the most influential in movie history for the way its raw naturalism smolders amid the stiff theatricality that surrounds him.

Streetcar should have been Vivien Leigh's picture, she's the main character, but it's Brando who steals every scene he's in.

This is a film about passion, and the movie positively oozes it.

...Kazan achieves a sort of theatrical intensity in which the sweaty realism sometimes clashes awkwardly with the stylisation that heightens the dialogue into a kind of poetry.

With The Glass Menagerie, one of the best Tennesee Williams film adaptations.