1947 ‘They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at – Elysian Fields.’ These are the first lines spoken by Blanche Dubois, ‘daintily dressed’, according to the stage directions, ‘in a white suit with a fluffy bodice, necklace and earrings of pearl, white gloves and a hat’, in Tennessee Williams’s classic melodrama, set in the working-class Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans.
Arriving to stay with her sister Stella, Blanche is perplexed. Can this slum with the L&M Railroad tracks running through it really be the ‘Elysian Fields’? Blanche commiserates with her sister, but has her own grief to tell, in a powerful speech about relatives seen through their dying moments, and their gracious southern mansion in ruins. When Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski comes in from a night of bowling, the explosive triangle is complete: the faded beauty living in the past, the robust, rough-hewn working-class son of Polish immigrants, and his submissive wife.
Playing Stanley Kowalski, Marlon Brando method-acted his way to stardom, scowling, snarling, bullying, slamming doors, and finally drunkenly forcing himself on Blanche, saying: ‘We’ve had this date from the beginning.’ Elia Kazan, who directed the first production, later took him to the film version (1951), in which Vivien Leigh supplanted Jessica Tandy as Blanche, then on to Viva Zapata (1952) and On the Waterfront (1954).
Meanwhile, Brando brought the method to Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech in Joseph Manciewicz’s film production of Julius Caesar (1953), before donning the gear and a menacing air as leader of a motorcycle gang in The Wild One (1953), directed by Laslo Benedek. The film started a world-wide craze for leathers and ‘cycle boots’ – not to mention widespread anxiety about where ‘the youth of today’ were heading.
All of these have lasted better than Streetcar, which now seems a little dated in posing the illusions of the past against the vibrant realities of the present, when the lively culture of the white working class itself now seems to belong to the past.