BEFORE: Of course, I went into this crazy project with a background knowledge of movies, even of ones I hadn't seen. But I've also been reading movie "best of" lists to figure out where the gaps are in my viewing experience. There's a book called "1001 Movies to See Before You Die" (which is strange, because I don't understand how you can see them after) plus I've gone through a list the top 250 movies on IMDB. So far I've seen 248 of the 1,001 MTSBYD, and 144 of IMDB's Top 250, so I'd say I'm doing pretty well. This is a film that appears on just about every "Best of" list - which puts it in my Top 10 most glaring movie omission, along with films like "Gone With the Wind" and "Gandhi".
You guessed it, today would have been Marlon Brando's birthday, so he gets SHOUT-out #28. Linking from last night's film, Alec Guinness was in "The Empire Strikes Back" with Billy Dee Williams, who was in "Brian's Song" with James Caan, who was in "The Godfather" with Brando.
THE PLOT: Disturbed Blanche DuBois moves in with her sister in New Orleans and is tormented by her brutish brother-in-law while her reality crumbles around her.
AFTER: Like last night's film, it's a look at how much tension can be created just by having different people living under one roof. Last night it was a criminal and his landlady, tonight it's an uppity neurotic Southern belle, who lost the family estate, and has to stay with her sister Stella and her lower-class husband, Stanley Kowalski (Brando, of course).
Stanley's hobbies include bowling, playing poker, drinking, and ummm, amateur boxing, but using his wife as the punching bag. But he's hip to the fact that Blanche may be hiding family money from her sister, and that Blanche's stories seem to be full of holes.
A word about the acting, since most everyone in this film came out of the "method" school, Brando most notably. We went to see a high-school production of "Phantom of the Opera" today, and it was done pretty well, for a school production. Some of the actors, however, got a little lost on the stage, or seemed to not know what to do between their lines. Stage acting (generally speaking) requires actors to be big, bold, and to stay in character between lines. However, the same rules don't always carry over into film acting. The performances of Brando and Vivien Leigh here felt over-the-top to me, I'd go so far as to call it "over-acting".
And even though I was paying attention, and stayed awake for the whole film - I still had to read up on the original Broadway play to figure out the subtext. Like, what really happened to Blanche's husband? What did they mean by pointing out that Blanche was hanging out at a hotel? And what, exactly happened while Stella was in the hospital? I guess there were things that you couldn't blatantly say in a film in 1951, they had to sort of hint at things and dance around them.
As a result, whatever the takeaway was supposed to be about the struggles between men vs. women, or between upper and lower classes, I didn't really get it. Did I miss it, or was the film just being too oblique?
The film is perhaps most famous for two quotes - Brando screaming "Stella!" while standing in the rain, and Blanche saying "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers" in her Southern drawl. I know the quotes, of course - it's nice to finally get some context, in order to ascertain what they might mean.
Also starring Kim Hunter, Karl Malden (last seen in "On the Waterfront").
RATING: 5 out of 10 coke bottles
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