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

Planet of the Apes

 Year:  1968

Director:  Franklin J. Schaffner

Screenplay:  Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, based on the novel Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle

Starring:  Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Maurice Evans, Kim Hunter, James Whitmore, James Daly, Linda Harrison

Running Time:  112 minutes

Genre:  Science-fiction

Three astronauts crash-land on a seemingly desolate planet, in the far future.  As they explore, they discover, to their horror, that humans are mute, primitive creatures, and apes have become the dominant species, having developed language, technology and society.  

Based on the 1963 novel by French author Pierre Boulle, this has become one of the most influential science-fiction films ever made.   The film opens with the four astronauts in suspended animation, crashing into a lake.  Stewart, the only woman on the ship, has died due to a leak in her suspended animation capsule. The survivors: macho, cigar-chomping cynic Taylor (Charlton Heston), square-jawed, idealistic patriot Landon (Robert Gunnar) and ambitious scientist  Dodge (Jeff Burton), soon discover that 2978, two thousand years after they set out, and believe that they are on an alien planet.  As they explore they discover a tribe of humans, who are hunted by armed gorillas on horseback.  In the course of which, Dodge is killed, Landon knocked out and Taylor shot in the throat, rendering him temporarily unable to speak.  Taylor is locked in a kind of zoo, where he has to convince the chimpanzee scientists researching him that he is an intelligent being.  The film builds itself up quite slowly, the apes don't appear at all until quite well into the film, with a lot of time being spent on the bickering between the three astronauts.  Early in the film Taylor states that he joined the expedition because he wanted to find "something better than man".  The apes have an organised, fairly placid society (or so it seems), if very hierarchical:  Orang-utans are the leaders, judges, priests and teachers; Gorillas are the military and law enforcement and Chimpanzees are kind of the middle-class.  In the Pierre Boulle novel, the apes have a technologically advanced society, however the filmmakers deemed it easier, and cheaper to have the apes in a more primitive society.  The look of the ape village, and the costume designs are impressive.  However, it is fair that the ape make up (which won an honorary Academy Award for John Chambers for astounding make-up achievement) hasn't aged well and looks slightly comical today at times, and you might question why apes living in the 3978 would speak and write English.  The script was written by Michael Wilson, who worked on Bridge on the River Kwai, another Boulle adaptation, and Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, and it was Serling who came up with the film's iconic conclusion, which is possibly one of the most famous movie endings of all time.  Heston is good at the heroics, snarling lines such as "Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!"  Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter as sympathetic chimpanzees Cornelius and Zira, and Maurice Evans as orange-utan Doctor Zaius do very well, acting under layers of heavy ape makeup.   The film has plenty of action, and there is some good humour (such as sulky teen chimp Lucius (Lou Wagner) moaning about the older generation, and three orang-utan judges doing the "Three Wise Monkeys", and Zira's reaction when Taylor moves to kiss her, telling him: "But your so ugly!"), however it is also an intelligent film depicting a world where the balance of power has reversed, and where humans are treated by apes, much the same as how humans have treated apes in our own world ("You lead me around on a leash!" Taylor snarls.  "We thought you were inferior" explains Zira).  Linda Harrison plays Nova, one of the mute humans, who the ape scientists want to mate with Taylor, and who eventually forms a mutual attachment with him.  However, she really doesn't have much at all to do.  The film ends with a shocking twist ending, and the final image packs a punch no matter how many times it has been parodied and references in the years since.

Chimpanzee that!:  Roddy McDowell, Kim Hunter and Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes