Brando pulls off astonishing things as Stanley Kowalski, and Vivien Leigh gives a performance that must have taken everything she had as Blanche DuBois.
Comment
05/26/06
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
98
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:46
Fresh:45
Rotten:1
Average Rating:8.5/10
Runtime: 2 hrs 11 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: Tennessee Williams based his screenplay on Oscar Saul's adaptation of Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning play set in a grimy New Orleans project. The story of the fragile sentimentalism of a former... [More]
Starring: Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden
Director: Elia Kazan
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Reviews for A Streetcar Named Desire
...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.
02/09/06
Thanks to the excellent text and superb actors, Kazan managed to create a very good film, but he still failed to turn it into genuine and everlasting masterpiece.
01/01/00
A wonderful screen drama.
01/01/00
The film is perhaps best regarded as an intelligent and engaged recreation of the original Broadway experience, in which Jessica Tandy first played the role. There's no denying the awful horror and pity of the final scene.
11/14/08
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.
06/15/06
The blistering sexual repression is the entire point of the 1950s. Quite simply, fabulous.
11/14/08
Simply a masterful adap of Tennessee Williams' sultry, searing play and an affirmation of Marlon Brando's acting genius.
11/14/08
Inner torments are seldom projected with such sensitivity and clarity on the screen.
05/20/03
Top CriticA Streetcar Named Desire (1951) is a subversive, steamy film classic that was adapted from Tennessee Williams' 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name.
01/01/00
Despite the overwhelming power of Brando's performance, Streetcar is one of the great ensemble pieces in the movies.
01/01/00
Top CriticThe powerful performances remain untarnished by time.
01/01/00
...if the hothouse style was ever justified, this is the occasion.
06/28/07
Top CriticA Streetcar Named Desire is a fascinating, wrenching character study.
09/10/02
Over a dozen Tennessee Williams’ plays have been translated on celluloid 41 times to date, yet none match this production.
03/03/02
This is a film about passion, and the movie positively oozes it.
04/10/06
Streetcar should have been Vivien Leigh's picture, she's the main character, but it's Brando who steals every scene he's in.
04/27/06
There's an inevitable staginess to Tennessee Williams' devastating portrait of delusion and cruelty, but director Elia Kazan catches the squalid, claustrophobic atmosphere of a New Orleans tenement just right.
11/14/08
it's a close-to-definitive example of how to make a great play work on film, for all the very slight air of Hollywood compromise.
11/14/08
Brando's performance as Stanley is one of those rare screen legends that are all they're cracked up to be.
01/01/00
Top CriticLatest News for A Streetcar Named Desire
August 12, 2008:
Taylor Hackford Revisits Tennessee Williams' Early Years 
Taylor Hackford has signed on to direct Tenn, a Robin Shushan-scripted drama about the formative years of playwright Tennessee Williams. More...
June 22, 2007:
AFI Announces Top 100 Movies of All Time ... Again
Ten years ago the AFI gave us a list of the Top 100 American Films Ever Made -- and when that was done they churned out 15 other lists every few years. And then last night they... More...
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