Wolff rating: EXCELLENT
Plot summary: Faded southern belle comes to live with her sister in a French Quarter tenement.
Biased, pithy comments: Tennessee Williams can write scary people. Stanley, of course, is scary, but so are the other few characters in this claustrophobic hell-hole of a story. Our society, in fifty years, can now name these things that didn't have a name back then, so a lot of the focus and shock value of this movie makes less sense than it used to. At the time, this was a landmark movie in terms of censorship; it cut just a few minutes (minutes that mostly center around a woman's sexual desire, which is something that movies didn't have in 1951) to get the movie into theaters. I have only seen the restored version, and it's a striking movie, and so different than other movies from that time. Compare Stanley's hulking proto-human broad shoulders with ``Foriegn Correspondent'''s Clark Gable in his sock garters. Once you get over the ravishing sexuality, you're left with a good character drama with excellent acting (Brando, Leigh, Norton, and Malden) as well as a vision of the Quarter before it became a tourist trap filled with college students. Excellent, but it helps to be in context.
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden.
Directed by: Elia Kazan