Kazan controls this sequence tremendously. For the first few minutes, we don’t understand quite why the mood is so tense and subdued and why Stella is so wretched. There is a dark genius in the final scene when poor Blanche is getting ready, expecting the gentleman caller and former beau who is going to take her away on a Caribbean cruise. Having said that, Mitch does get to say exactly what is on his mind in a way that Stanley perhaps doesn’t. Only in this context can you understand Stanley’s puzzled unease and contempt.īrando tends to upstage and upend the whole picture in his way, and Karl Malden, although excellent as Blanche’s diffident suitor Mitch – a man whose feelings are trifled with by her – is obviously in Brando’s shade. My own view is that Williams has ventriloquised and heterosexualised his own sensibilities into Blanche: this is a fictional variant of a gay man doing the tense bickering and bantering with a half-naked Stanley and, perhaps, delicately kissing a young boy on the lips. But that doesn’t quite explain how simmeringly resentful and conflicted Stanley is around Blanche. Is there some brutal part of Stanley that thinks maybe he is entitled to sex from Blanche in lieu of this legacy? But the house is now apparently worthless, hopelessly mortgaged for debts, perhaps due to Blanche’s mismanagement – so Stanley’s share of that supposed inheritance is zero. In their minds, it’s as legendary a place as Tara in Gone With the Wind, a film that featured Leigh at the age Blanche believes she still is now. Stanley resents Blanche’s condescension and snobbery and is also suspicious of her furs and jewels, and the way she has apparently abandoned her parents’ handsome family home. What is the nature of this toxic chemistry between Stanley and Blanche? It is not all about sex: much of it is about class. When a delicate young boy comes around collecting money, Blanche insists on kissing him on the lips: the nearest she comes to actual desire in the whole picture, but it is more innocent than predatory. But it isn’t clear why she has had to quit her schoolteacher’s job back in her home town, and there are worrying rumours about her entertaining guests there in a certain local hotel.
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