"Everything that kept the Broadway "Streetcar" from spinning off into
ridiculous melodrama--everything thoughtful, muted,
three-dimensional--has been raped, along with poor Blanche Dubois, in
the Hollywood wood version....
"However, if the
author surrendered without firing a shot, the actors and directors
certainly did not. Marlon Brando, who on the stage gave a revolutionary
head-on portrait of the rough-and-ready, second-generation American Joe,
has upped the voltage of every eccentricity by several thousand watts.
The performance is now more cinematic and flexible, but the addition of a
lush physicality and a show-off's flamboyance to the character of
Stanley makes him seem like a muscular version of a petulant, crazily
egotistical homosexual. Brando, having fallen hard for the critics' idea
that Stanley is simply animal and slob, now screams and postures and
sweeps plates off the table with an ape-like emphasis that unfortunately
becomes predictable."
"As the ex-school-teacher-harlot-belle in this study of social-sexual disintegration, Miss Leigh injects a bitter-sweet fragrance and acrobatic excitement into the role, but the effects are freakish, too ambitious and endless...."
Manny Farber, October 20, 1951
reprinted p. 369-70
(left out some)
