A Streetcar Named Desire

 Year:  1951

Director:  Elia Kazan

Screenplay:  Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan and Oscar Saul, based on the play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

Starring:  Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden

Running Time:  125 minutes

Genre:  Drama

Faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois (Leigh) leaves her hometown under a cloud and arrives at the home of her sister Stella (Hunter) and brother-in-law Stanley (Brando), in a rundown tenement in the French Quarter of New Orleans.  Under pressure from the brutal Stanley, Blanche begins a slow descent into insanity.

This is the best known of several screen adaptations of Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize winning 1947 play.  Retaining most of the cast of the original Broadway play, with the exception of Jessica Tandy, who played Blanche on Broadway, and was replaced in the film by Vivien Leigh, because the studio wanted a bigger name.  Vivien Leigh, in an Oscar winning performance, is fantastic as the brittle Blanche, clinging to the past, with her affected gentility and manners and shunning the light to mask her true age.  The film however belongs to Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, a controlling, suspicious, violent man, who buses his wife Stella and treats Blanche with varying degrees of contempt, suspicion and violence.  Blanche often refers to Stanley as an "ape" and Brando has an animalistic quality in his performance, while Blanche wants to escape into a world of dreams and magic, Stanley is all ferocious physicality and violent sexual energy.  There is almost. strange vulnerability to him at times, such as in the film's most famous scene, where Stella leaves him and goes to the flat upstairs and Stanley stands at the bottom of the staircase, his tee-shirt torn to shreds, bellowing her name over and over again, like a wounded animal, falling to his knees as she appears and slowly walks down to him.  Kim Hunter is good as Stella torn between the love of and fear for her sister and the love of and fear of her husband.  While Blanche wanted to retain the faded dreams of youth, she went for the more physical charms of Stanley Kowalski and her own nightmare.  Karl Malden plays Stanley's poker buddy Mitch who falls for Blanche.  Mitch is a very different type of man to Stanley, seemingly more sensitive and intelligent, and yet just as capable of cruelty.  Stylishly directed by Elia Kazan, the film has a fecund, overheated quality, in fact the heat seems to radiate from the screen, the actors all seemingly drenched in sweat, and the sultry jazz score by Alex North.  This is one of the greatest of all American films.

Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando take A Streetcar Named Desire

Women Talking

Year:  2022

Director:  Sarah Polley

Screenplay:  Sarah Polley, based on the novel Women Talking by Miriam Toews

Starring:  Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Ben Whishaw, Frances McDormand

Running Time:  104 minutes 

Genre:  Drama

In an isolated Mennonite colony women are drugged and raped over a period of years.  Their claims are dismissed by the colony's authorities as either supernatural attacks or "wild female imagination".  Until, that is one of the attackers is caught, and he promptly names the others.  The attackers are arrested and taken to the nearest city to stand trial.  The other men of the colony accompany them in order to pay their bail.  The colony elders order the women to forgive their attackers by the time they return in two days or be banished from the colony.  Left alone, the women debate how to proceed:  Should they stay and obey their orders?  Stay and fight the men?  Or leave and found a new colony?

Based on the 2018 novel by Miriam Toews, which itself was based on a real life incident that occurred in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia.  The film doesn't focus on the attacks, instead it focuses on the women's response, and most of the film is the debate on how they should proceed.  In fact men are more or less entirely absent from the film with the notable exception of August (played by Ben Whishaw), the gentle schoolteacher who was educated away from the colony, and takes the minutes of the meetings, because none of the women have been taught how to read and write.  In the novel he narrates the story, but in the film the voice-over narrator is the yet unborn daughter of one of the women. The other exception is Melvin (played by August Winter) a transgender man who was raped and refuses to speak except to the youngest children who he cares for while the women are debating.  However men and male violence is the spectre that haunts the entire film.  The women live in an extremely patriarchal society where they are completely subservient to the men.  The film doesn't really come down against the Mennonite way of life, none of the women want to abandon their faith they just want to interpret it in a better and more fair way.  The film has a muted, washed out colour scheme, that evokes old photographs from the 19th century.  It is briefly mentioned that the year is 2010, but the only vision of modernity is a census taker driving through the colony in an old truck, with a loudspeaker on the roof playing the song "Daydream Believer".  The film boasts excellent performances, particularly from Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Ben Whishaw.  This is a great film, wonderfully directed by Sarah Polley, who keeps the drama tight and intense, but provides enough brief glimpses of the world away from the meetings, so it doesn't feel to claustrophobic, and also lets up the tension with some flashes of mordant humour.  It's a moving and powerful piece of quiet rebellion.

Women Talking

The Swimmer

Year:  1968

Director:  Frank Perry

Screenplay:   Eleanor Perry, based on the short story by "The Swimmer" by John Cheever

Starring:  Burt Lancaster, Janet Landgard, Janice Rule

Running Time:  95 minutes

Genre:  Drama 

Middle-aged businessman Ned Merrill (Lancaster) is visiting with some friends when he gets the idea to swim home, using the outdoor swimming pools of his neighbours as a makeshift "river".  As his journey progresses his interactions with his neighbours, become increasingly strained and confrontational, as it appears that they know troubling things about himself and his family that Ned either can't, or won't, remember.

Based on an acclaimed short story by John Cheever, which was first published in The New Yorker in 1964, this surreal film, did not do well on it's original release, and yet it's reputation has grown, and it has come to be seen as something of a cult film.  The film starts on a bright, sunny summer afternoon, with Ned Merrill, a fit, middle-aged man emerging from the forest, wearing only a set of swimming trunks.  Merrill comes across a pool party hosted by friends, all of whom are nursing hangovers, but still knocking back the gin and martinis.  They seem surprised, but happy to see Merrill, who has apparently been away somewhere (although it is not revealed where he has been or for how long).  Looking out over the valley that houses the wealthy, suburban neighbourhood, Merrill works out that all the various swimming pools make a kind of river, that he can use to go home.  Right from the start it becomes apparent that there is some secret which his friends know, but that Merrill is seemingly oblivious to.  The journey becomes increasingly uncomfortable, as it appears from his interactions with others that Merrill is in severe personal and financial difficulties, although the nature of it is never made clear.  It also becomes apparent that Merrill's family life is not as idyllic as he claims.  As the film progresses the weather seems to change as well, becoming increasingly colder and more autumnal.  If you want to plunge in the deep end, you could read the film as being about American masculinity, the middle-class, suburban life, middle-aged disillusionment, or anything.  While the film may be too strange for some tastes, it has a strange, nightmarish power, with scenes such as Merrill's frantic dash across a busy motorway, a busy public pool becoming a wet and wild inferno, and the powerful final image packing a punch that lingers for a long time.  Burt Lancaster, who spends the entire film barefoot and clad only in swimming trunks, gives a powerful performance as a man who falls apart before our eyes, and what starts as a seeming jape becoming a grim odyssey into a suburban heart of darkness.  Lancaster subsequently rated The Swimmer as his best film.  The film boasts an impressive score by Marvin Hamlisch, and features the acting debut of comedian Joan Rivers.  

Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer