Do you find Blanche DuBois a sympathetic character?

I saw a community college production where the audience cheered the rape.

This was the 70s, but still....

Of course. She is crushed by fate, by circumstance, by changing times, by a cold and uncaring society. She is crushed by the Almighty dollar.

She and her sister were born into prominence and raised to be refined young Southern ladies. And then the world changed. They both ended up penniless, in the same sweaty New Orleans tenement getting fucked by the same Polack. Her life was one degrading experience after another and nothing she was taught as a girl is of any use to her now.

Why would anyone not feel sympathy for a woman destroyed by life?

I was on her side until she started fucking with Stanley. She really thought she could take him down, but he showed her.

I did. She was a very flawed person who had to deal with things she wasnt strong enough for ,but did the best she could . We have to remember the time that Blanche was raised in . Women were raised to be married . Period . They werent expected to have to cope with things that a man would have handled . I also think she might have been suffering from alcoholic dementia ,wich Im not sure people had heard of then .

I suppose I'm asking about the way Williams wrote her, not necessarily her circumstances, if that makes sense, r2.

Of course, she is sympatric when viewed solely in terms of her circumstances.

People who have been destroyed by circumstance rarely become nicer.

Yes, because I think there's something about her that I innately relate to as a gay man. Hard to actually put my finger on. Another character I feel this way about is Diane Chambers from Cheers.

I thought she was a manipulative bitch who didn't deserve to be raped but did deserve to be called out on her jealousy and passive-aggressiveness toward Stella.

So a woman who moves in uninvited into a small home, tries to destroy the marriage of the people living there, and acts like they should be grateful for the privilege of having her fuck with their lives--that is supposed to be sympathetic?

And we will leave out trying to fuck the paperboy.

Yes, I’m a kind stranger.

Depends on who’s playing her. Vivien Leigh? Yes. Jessica Lange? No. Rosemary Harris? Yes. Blythe Danner? No.

I actually find Stella a lot more sympathetic than Blanche, even in the play version ending, in which we willingly returns to her sister's rapist. Which I guess should make her less sympathetic, but realistically, she had a kid and very few other options.

She *is* DL -- past her prime, alcoholic, with delusions of grandeur and a history of questionable relationships.

Thank you, R13.

Also, she is ME.

[quote] They both ended up penniless, in the same sweaty New Orleans tenement getting fucked by the same Polack.

Ugh! A POLACK!

The poor dears!

Blanche was a loser that insisted on making others feel as though they were losers. A perpetrator pretending to be a victim.

Stanley had her number and dealt with her in terms she couldn’t bullshit her way out of.

She got to close to the beast, poked it with a stick and got what she deserved.

Stanley was hot, but he was an asshole and should have gone to jail for brutally raping his wife's sister.

If course she was worthy of sympathy. She was mentally ill.

Still, Stella should have arranged to have her received at the local Spinster Central. But, given her habits she would probably have been politely, yet firmly, asked to leave there, too.

From the minute Blanche walked into that apartment, there was only one way it was going to end. Stanley took her down in the only way where they were evenly matched. Blanche used predatory sex to destroy herself. Stanley used it to finish her off. Two predators in the ultimate battle.

"In the play version ending"????

Not sure what that is supposed to mean.

It is a play.

YOU HAVE ENTERED...THE PREDADOME!!!!!

The Vivien Leigh film had a different ending, r20.

In the film, Blanche rapes Stanley and then opens a very successful hotel in the French Quarter.

She's a typical mid-20th century antihero. She's not meant to represent any particular virtue that you admire, but you may see a little of yourself or someone you know in her. You're not really supposed to feel sympathetic to her, but, depending on the sort of person you are, you may pity her. But Stanley is definitely not supposed to be a good guy in any way. If you're cheering on the rape then there's either something wrong with you or something wrong with the production.

r23 thanks, I needed that laugh today

Why does she have a French name?

Are we all forgetting that Blanche had to leave town for fucking one of her high school students?

Leave town? That bitch was driven to the county line by a lynch mob. And you know he wasn't her first. And now I picture Blanche's husband as a young Lindsey Graham type.

[quote] From the minute Blanche walked into that apartment, there was only one way it was going to end.

It ends in a rape.

So you're saying it's not Stanley's fault he raped her... that she was basically asking for it?

[quote] Why does she have a French name?

Because her parents were huge fans of Edith Piaf, Rose.

No R29. It ends in Blanche's destruction. The rape was the vehicle.

But the destruction is made possible by the rape, which also happens at the end of the play. SO, I will repeat my question: is Blanche basically asking to be raped?

She was asking for a beignet but Stanley misheard her.

You are clearly too stupid to be a part of this discussion R32.

She put on airs from the start, which is how she ended up with a gay husband in the first place. Drove him to suicide even though she would have heard rumours or generally "knew." Acted the sinned against maiden in the Laurel school mooching off the parents until they died. Neglected to share any of the inheritance with her sister and racked up such bills she had to sell the place and move into a hovel. Tried to recover her pride with a child, and had to leave town. Went to New Orleans to express disdain for sister's husband and boss her sister around by playing unworldly, set out to trap one his friends, failed, and then well bad things happened. She is not a sympathetic character.

R16 is awful.

What did she do to the paperboy?!

[quote]Why does she have a French name?

Who knows?

r14=Miss Lindsey

She might be worthy of some pity, after being raped and going mental, but she’s annoying AF until then.

What did people think of Jess Lange's interpretation /s of her?

Lange's take was probably as close to William's vision for the character as anyone. Blanche was not a good person.

R36, she lures the paperboy into a hot kiss on the mouth, followed by a great line: "I've got to be good....I've got to keep my hands off children." Signals the reason she was kicked out of her teaching job in Laurel, Mississippi. She goes after teenage boys because she's evermore searching for Allan Grey, her husband who in spite of being gay, was the one true love of her life--as least in her idealized vision of love.

Blanche is pitiful, and yet somehow regal in spite of it. Who else could make such an innocuous statement as, "I have just washed my hair!" sound like the announcement of a royal birth. Yeah, she's a pain in the ass, but you've got to love watching her do her thing, especially when played by the right actress.

Sympathetic? No. Pathetic? Yes. Completely fabulous? Yes, too.

[quote]"I've got to be good....I've got to keep my hands off children."

My best friend and I say that line all the time.

[quote]Lange's take was probably as close to William's vision

Oh, dear.

In literary terms, rape is never deserved. It's portrayed often as being "deserved" in pulp paperbacks and cheesy, low-rent novels, but Williams did not on any level intend for Blanche's rape to mean that a terrible bitch finally "got what she deserved."

Remember that the people in the play react more strongly to her "putting on airs" and hiding her real age than they EVER did to her putting her hands on children or being racist. Stanley rapes her because she thinks she's better than him, but she's not; unfortunately for him, he's not better than her as he thinks he is, they're actually equals. Stanley isn't meant to dole out justice, because he's a piece of shit, too, just like she is, only more out of choice than much else. She acts out by fantasizing that she's still a rich beautiful teen, he acts out by raping and abusing.

Modern audiences get too hung up on the rape. This is a not a play about rape.

Ann-Margret was chosen by Tennessee Williams for the television production in the 1980s. If you want to know how Tennessee saw Blanche, watch that production. She gives a terrific performance. As does Beverly DeAngelo as Stella.

And Treat Williams. Just amazing.

It turns out she was right about Stanley, but nobody believed her because all the fantasies she'd fed them. It was a morality play about the terrible consequences of lying all the time.

What if Bea Arthur had played her? And Jaleel White played Stanley?

Interestingly, in the stage directions for the play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Williams describes Stella as a twenty-five-year-old girl, and Blanche as her five-years-older sister. Williams’ original vision is Blanche as only thirty years old! It seems all interpretations of the character portray her as a 40ish/maybe even 50ish faded Southern belle. Vivien Leigh was 39 when she made the film. I don’t know how old Jessica Tandy was when she originated the role on Broadway.

It was the plot device that locked in her madness but also a true dramatization of rape: a violent act to show contempt and power and to demean.

I wonder, if when he wrote it, William's (I like that upthread oh, dear) knew what he was doing or it reflects what we understand now about rape.

Shout out to Nan, BTW, I previously hadn't given it a lot of thought.

Ann Margret as Blanche. She plays her very predatory.

I only saw Vivien's film (where she was so rudely made to look old by the ugly director).

I saw no rape in that film. Though that ugly director should have played the brute Stanley (instead of the elegant man who did).

The same scene with Vivien Leigh, who plays it like Blanche is already disassociating from reality.

As r27 noted, she was preying on her students. She's a fascinating character, but I don't find her particularly sympathetic. Ever since the Mary Kay LeTournaux case (or however you spell it), that's who I see in my mind's eye when I think of Blanche. Ugh.

Dear Christ but Brando was walking sex in that movie.

R57 he was too elegantly beautiful to 'rape' anyone.

She wasn't all bad.

Elizabeth Marvel was the only Blanche I ever saw who was the right age. It made such a difference.

Lange’s is the best, R41.

Also, Williams wrote some wonderfully favorable things about Lange after “King Kong”. He could instantly tell that she would evolve into a fantastic actress.

Blanche had a child? How did I miss this? I never saw the play, only the movie, and I remember nothing about a child. She referred to her young man as a child...

R57 R58 You don't understand rape. If Stanley was so beautiful, why would he need to rape? You must appreciate the animal type and excuse their behavior.

I never said the rape was excused. I said Brando was walking sex in that movie, which he was. Stanley is still an awful human being, albeit one with a fantastic ass.

To complete the triumvirate of Blanches, here is Jessica Lange as Blanche seducing the newspaper boy. While Ann Margret was predatory and Vivien Leigh disassociated, Lange plays it straight-up flirtatious, like she's chatting with a man in a bar. It helps that the newspaper boy in this iteration looks 25 instead of 15.

Of the 3 Blanches, I like Lange's interpretation the best.

I was embarrassed for her but also felt sorry for her

Lange had the advantage of the hottest paperboy and she still sucked.

[quote] Jessica Lange

I can't be sympathetic to any character played by her. She looks like Miriam Hopkin's truck-driving brother.

Whereas Blanche Du Bois was a refined, delicate beauty.

Blanche was boozing and whoring and fucking teens, that refined, delicate beauty was neither refined nor delicate.

Blanche had a secret illness just like Tennessee Williams' sister, Rose, had a secret illness.

It was just one of those secret bat-squeaks in the brain.

R66 Actually, though she is definitely flirtatious in a charming, seemingly innocent way during this scene, she turn predatory towards the end of the scene, particularly when she realizes the boy isn’t taking the bait. Her look hardens and suddenly, she becomes subtly forceful and determined. It’s a brilliant piece of acting.

She does something similar with Stanley after her barges into her sleeping area and she’s sprawled out on the seat, fanning herself in the stifling heat. She gives him a “come fuck me” look but it’s ever so subtle. I love how she didn’t shy away from revealing how Blanche was both broken, self-destructive, and self-sabotaging. She has a hand in bringing upon herself some of the tragedies she endures.

Lange handles Blanche’s jittery pathos and pitch-black descents better than all of them.

In the 1995 version, the final confrontation between Stanley and Blanche is much more ambiguous than in the1951 version (which is as explicitly a rape scene as you could get in that time) or the 1984 version (where it's staged as a straight-up violent rape). Lange and Baldwin play it so it could be rape or it could just be rough, drunken sex. Did Baldwin's Stanley rape Lange's Blanche, or is that the only way she could process fucking her sister's husband while her sister was in labor? It's an interesting interpretation.

I heartily disagree R72 . Though I like Lange's Blanche ,she doesnt have that faint air of ruined aristocracy that Leigh so effortlessly conveys.

My problem with Leigh's Blanche is 1) her accent was all over the place and 2) she seems crazy from the beginning. Blanche is fragile when she comes to New Orleans, but there is an arc to her character in the play and in the later film versions. Leigh's Blanche starts crazy and stays crazy.

Ann Margret's Blanche is brassy and seductive, and she doesn't break until Stanley brutally rapes her and her sister won't believe the truth. In the final scene with the doctor, Margret's Blanche seems more enraged and despairing than insane. It's one way of playing it, but not my favorite way. I prefer Lange's interpretation, which is more complex than Leigh's and less vulgar than Margret's.

R74 Well, I can’t argue much with you because I absolutely LOVE Leigh’s interpretation. She and Lange are my favorite Blanche’s. They both do wonders with the character.

Where I view Leigh’s interpretation as, as you pointed out, that of the decay and dismantling of an aristocratic woman’s facade, I view Lange’s interpretation as the revealing of an ill, perhaps abused and traumatized, woman’s true self.

I view Leigh’s Blanche as primarily being affected by poverty and age, whereas I see Lange’s Blanche as affected by something that isn’t even touched upon in the text. Perhaps she was molested as a child or raped, or suffers from a chemical imbalance. The poverty and aging just brings the rot to the surface, whereas in Leigh’s case they are the cause for her descent.

I want to add: It’s almost like Lange’s Blanche was always too damaged to be properly aristocratic. She was broken way before poverty, aging, and the scandals blighted her. I think this is why I find her performance the most heartbreaking of all of them. You sort of realize her Blanche never had a chance.

By the time she was fucking students, she was deeply traumatized and self-hating. The other trials just exacerbated her fragile state; they weren’t the cause of it.

I wouldn't say I sympathize with her, I'd say I empathize with her. I feel empathy for how she was crushed by conditions out of her control, but I don't sympathize with her because Stella went through almost the exact same shit Blanche did and didn't end up with the awful personality.

Blanche was crushed by life. For that I feel bad for her. But Stella was also crushed by life. The difference is that Stella didn't respond to that by becoming a horrible person.

Although I understand her, I would not say I see Blanche as sympathetic. You can understand why a person acts a certain way, how they only act that way because of the tragic circumstances that befell them, and still not sympathize with them.

The people who feel sympathize with Blanche because of her circumstances reminds me of the people who sympathize with school shooters who were bullied, to which I bring up this argument; lots of kids are bullied, but not every bullied kid shoots up a school.

Lots of people have been crushed by the circumstances of life, lots of people have had their way of life pulled out from under them, but not all of those people respond to it in the way that Blanche did.

Blanche didn't deserve what happened to her, by any stretch of the imagination, but just because she didn't deserve to be raped and sent to an asylum doesn't mean she was a saint, or even a good person for that matter.

R78 This is why, especially in the case of Lange’s interpretation, I think there was something else going on with her.

To be fair, though, Blanche went through more than Stella because she stayed behind and endured the slow death of the family and it’s wealth. Stella was gone by then.

“Where were you! In bed with your—Polack!” (1.185).

Elizabeth Marvel played the rape scene completely shit faced. You could barely understand what she was saying. Stanley was equally shit faced and the rape was just like some awful car wreck. Neither party was in control of themselves and there was no way anything good could have happened.

I wish I had seen Shirley Knight as Blanche. I am told she played the final scene completely sane---which makes complete sense and makes it even more devastating.

*its wealth

Crumble and fade and - regrets - recriminations... 'If you'd done this, it wouldn't've cost me that!' My most favorite line in the whole movie.

R83 God, me too. All of B’s dialogue is perfection and meant for a gay man.

As a teen, I’d watch my videotaped copy of Lange’s version and I memorized all of her monologues. I would wait until I had the house to myself and when I did, I’d wrap a bedsheet around my body, being very careful to have it drape off my bare shoulder just right, and I would go. to. town.

My poor cat, perched atop shelves and doors, would peer at me with the most startled and disgusted look on his face.

“Recriminations... lEGAHcies...”

😂

[quote]What if Bea Arthur had played her? And Jaleel White played Stanley?

It would have been severe miscasting. If they had switched roles, maybe not so much.

That's an interesting point about Lange's Blanche, R76. She has a giant pit in the middle of her that can never be filled, probably because something vital was crushed inside of her when she was very young. Abuse victims sometimes become hypersexual later in life because their wounded self-esteem is so wrapped up in being desirable and in trying to repeat the bad sexual patterns of the past and correct them. Blanche doesn't just want male attention, she NEEDS it like oxygen.

Which, again, makes the rape scene with Stanley very ambiguous. Baldwin's Stanley isn't a violent thug like Brando's or Williams's. He seems in some ways as bewildered as she is by what's happening. I'd argue that it comes off more as a mutual bad decision than a rape, though interestingly only Blanche is punished for the act by being institutionalized--Stanley keeps his wife and child.

Stella is just as awful as the others. Stanley works hard all day long and when he comes home, what does she feed him? Salad. Stella probably spent the day upstairs gossiping with the neighbor and didn't have time to fix Stanley a proper supper.

You said perfectly and better than I could:

[quote] She has a giant pit in the middle of her that can never be filled, probably because something vital was crushed inside of her when she was very young. Abuse victims sometimes become hypersexual later in life because their wounded self-esteem is so wrapped up in being desirable and in trying to repeat the bad sexual patterns of the past and correct them. Blanche doesn't just want male attention, she NEEDS it like oxygen.

I remember this realization hit me during one of many rewatches, specifically during the scene in which Blanche reminisces about the sailors calling her name in the middle of the night. She was always promiscuous, and I believe she preyed on students because she was once preyed upon in her youth.

Ann-Margaret is the only Blanche who doesn't play it as crazy from the start. Her Blanche starts out solid, almost normal and then slowly unravels. It's a shame her version is the worst put together (the director's choices are awful and result in the whole production feeling clunky and unnatural) considering she is probably the best Blanche.

R89 Puh-leeze. She’s definitely interesting as Blanche but somewhat summer stock-ish.

Did anyone see Glenn Close in the London production? Her performance was the closest to Tennessee Williams' intent of having Blanche played by a man in drag.

This is one of those times when I think psychiatric analysis has destroyed us. We over analyze everything as some kind of childhood trauma or abuse. Sometimes a hot mess is just a hot mess. Blanche was a hot mess. She married a gay man and then spent the years after his death trying to prove that she was woman enough by sleeping with anything with a pulse. She needed constant affirmation of her femininity and attention from men. She was also probably hooking at some point to make ends meet. Then all of her lies and fantasies got jumbled up in her head and it drove her mad. She hated that her sister was happy and she set out to fuck Stanley, but it blew up in her face. Every bad thing that happened to Blanche was all on Blanche.

Blanche could have been abused as a child and still be responsible for her adult choices. An explanation is different from an excuse.

Fun fact: Williams' sister Rose, who suffered from mental health issues that have never been clearly diagnosed, accused her father of molesting her. Not long after, her parents had her lobotomized.

R92 Your version of Blanche’s life is boring, dear, and not at all what I had in mind..

Glenn was 55 when she played Blanche. That's a bit long in the tooth for the role, considering Blanche is supposed to be 30.

Vivien Leigh was Ann-Margret was 43, Vivien Leigh was 38, and Jessica Lange was 46 when they played the role.

Has there ever been an all male production of Streetcar or Menagerie or any of Williams' other plays?

I know that Albee himself stepped in to prevent an all male production of Virginia Woof and left instructions to his estate never to allow one. Did Williams do anything similar?

R91 I’m sorry but I cannot picture Glenn as Blanche, even while staring at a picture of her as Blanche.

I can picture Glenn as Mitch.

R92 Implying that Blanche is a hot mess for no reason at all involves disregarding 95% of the play. You don't have to sympathize with her to admit that she's dealt with some shitty things in life. Her trauma is written into the play, to the point where it isn't even subtext, it's just text. If you think she's a hot mess just because she's a hot mess and that there's no reason behind it then I'm guessing the only version of Streetcar you're familiar with is the Sparks Notes version.

R97 I always dreamt of playing Blanche and Maggie in all-male productions.

R97 There was a "genderqueer" version featuring the world's first ever tranny Blanche.

R102 I would’ve been prettier goddammit!

In terms of "legitimate theatre" Blanches, I've seen Beatrice Straight, Rosemary Harris, Lois Nettleton, Natasha Richardson, Claire Bloom, Jessica Lange, and (via National Theatre Live transmission) Gillian Anderson. But the best live one in my experience was Cate Blanchett, at BAM. Of course you can get a taste of Cate's Blanche in "Blue Jasmine," Woody Allen's "rewrite" of "Streetcar."

R104 God, she’s sublime in BJ. I always figured she was just as good in Streetcar.

I would have loved to see Blanchett play Blanche. She'd bring an intelligence to the character you don't necessarily see in other interpretations.

Trans Blanche is such a funny concept. How does the rape even work in that situation? The whole point of the rape is that Stanley is taking advantage of Blanche's femininity, the thing she has always weaponized for her benefit, in the worst and most brutal way possible.

How does that work when Blanche has bigger muscles, broader shoulders, and a taller frame than Stanley?

Cate breaks my heart and cracks me up in BJ...

Is the implication at the end of Blue Jasmine that Jasmine will become a crazy homeless bag lady muttering to herself on street corners? That is an interesting update of what happened to Blanche.

R107 Rape is rape, and obviously Stanley would be taking advantage of my tight, pink, feminine asshole, asshole!

A transgender Blanche just doesn't work. So much of the play is based around the female body, its complexities, and its relationship with masculinity and how men react to it. Having Blanche be trans spits in the face of the text.

A trans actor playing a female Blanche is different than a trans actor playing a trans Blanche. The former might work with the right actor in the part. The latter wouldn't work at all.

R112 In order for it to work it'd have to be a trans woman like one of the girls from Pose. Post-Op with enough botox and surgery to at least mimic looking female. The production listed above clearly just chose a man in a wig, which ruins the play.

I agree, that would ruin the play. You know who would have been an interesting trans actor for Blanche? Candy Darling. She even starred in a Tennessee Williams play at one point.

The trans actor playing Blanche proclaimed Blanche to be "genderqueer".

R114 Candy was a goddess, though. She would been remarkable as Blanche but she wouldn't have been a trans Blanche. She would have been a woman playing a woman. Trans people, and more importantly trans actresses, are nothing like Candy today. Candy wasn't trans, she was just a woman. Nowadays when you get a trans actress you get what you see at R115: men in wigs.

[quote] Blanche was crushed by life. For that I feel bad for her. But Stella was also crushed by life. The difference is that Stella didn't respond to that by becoming a horrible person.

Stella was dumb and simple compared to Blanche. Stella fit in more with what was expected of a woman. Get married, keep house, don’t complain too much. Life was easier for Stella. Blanche was intelligent enough to see beyond facades. She was older and damaged goods & at the same time had delusions of grandeur.

I don’t know... I think Stella was the smart one. She got away from all the myths and decay. She followed her heart and her libido and didn’t really look back until Blanche came slinking into town. Stanley would make her see those colors. Blanche wallowed in self pity and regret.

Clarity doesn't always equal intelligence. Maybe Stella learned how to become what was expected of a married woman in order to survive. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is resign yourself to facades, because the facade is what keeps your lights on.

[quote]This is one of those times when I think psychiatric analysis has destroyed us. We over analyze everything as some kind of childhood trauma or abuse. Sometimes a hot mess is just a hot mess. Blanche was a hot mess. She married a gay man and then spent the years after his death trying to prove that she was woman enough by sleeping with anything with a pulse. She needed constant affirmation of her femininity and attention from men.

I mean... you know that's "psychiatric analysis," right, r92? You start out criticizing people who analyze the psychology of the characters, then you do it yourself.

Williams very much intended for the characters' psyches to be part of the play, and in fact, there's a good case to be made that the characters are human manifestations of the psyche/souls of the old South (Blanche, genteel and sentimental but broken beyond repair) and the new modern America (Stanley, melting pot, crass but desired, takes everything by force).

Was Blanche supposed to be trans in the trans production or was it just the actor?

[quote] … Virginia Woof…

R97 Virginia Woolf (1882-1941; and a genius)

I do not know why on this website as soon as someone ask a question about the French or France haters or sarcastic people come to answer surly. I don't think America has ever had France as an enemy, on the contrary France is its first and oldest ally, so y'all should have to calm down and stop your French bashing for no reason. I was just wondering why Blanche Dubois has a French first and last name, because maybe in the Tenesse Williams story that I have never read, she is French or a French Canadian? Instead of answering my question, you are immediately in the cynicism. No wonder Trump can be Presidentin the US. You are hateful by nature. I will look for an answer elsewhere, I thought I was on an adult website I was wrong.

I disagree with the guy who said that Stella and Blanche "went through the same shit", they didn't.

Stella was the one who "got out", she left her family and the stifling home full of dying relatives and the stultifying small town, she is the one who went to the big city and jettisoned all the pretensions of former aristocrats and "married beneath her". And Blanche is the one who stayed home and stayed enmeshed, the one who followed the family rules and who held onto their pretensions, who suffered every agonizing moment of the family's slow decline, while Stella was making a new life for herself.

Anyone who's ever thrown over the traces and made a new life comes away with a strength and confidence that stays with them, even if the new life they've made isn't great, even if your new life is no better than Stella's, you realize that you CAN change your life. That's an experience that Blanche never had and it's a big part of her decline, she needs to change and start a new life, and she can't. She wasn't brought up to it, and she's deluded enough to think that any change would be a comedown, instead of a step up.

[quote] … Stella and Blanche "went through the same shit"…

You don't go through it. You deposit it in the toilet.

And while I understand the argument that Stella went back to Stanley because she didn't have many other options, you could also look at it as Stella went back to Stanley because she wasn't going to allow the old ways and Blanche to destroy her new life. She had gotten out and Blanche dragged her back in as much as she was going to allow.

Blanche was the one tie to the past that was remaining and now she was locked up. There was no need now for Stella to ever look back. She had her husband and a new baby and no more dusty memories of the what she left behind.

This thread alone is worth every cent of my DL subscription fees I've ever paid, combined.

You bitches always come through.

Tennessee Williams once said that Claire Bloom was his favorite Blanche.

I didn't like Langevin this role, she was too old and mannered in the 1996 version. Plus Alec Baldwin is a huge come down from Marlon Brando.

When I was young and making my life, I empathized with her situation but was working hard to make sure this never happened to me. Also I went out with 2 old dandies and I understood the thing about lighting - their smoke and mirrors apartments, and Blanche reduced to a Chinese paper lantern. Poignant but pathetic.

There was something in common with Norma Desmond, a character I became aware of in my boyhood, before I really understood all that was implied.

I think Blanche is not sympathetic. The character traits and actions are examples of tragic and deluded reactions to life challenges.

It was said that Tennessee Williams always laughed at the ending. I wonder if Blanche was modeled on his mother and he was always mentally getting his revenge.

Pay special attention to what R120 wrote. "Streetcar" is at its root an indictment of modern America.

Tennessee Williams made that indictment more than once. When the Gentleman Caller tells Laura Wingfield that he can go to night school and study public speaking and analyze a person as well as any doctor, Tennessee has made his statement about all the old ways, including education and expertise and civilization and respect, being tossed aside by this country for something fast and easily acquired. Tennessee was born in 1911, just before World War I changed everything. Streetcar debuted on Broadway in 1947, making 30 year old Blanche DuBois being born at the close of World War I. Her parents and family and everything she was born into at Belle Rive was doomed. If the changes in the world that followed the war did not do them in, then the Great Depression that followed certainly finished them off. And then Ambler and Ambler came in and picked their bones clean and pushed them off their land. Seeing the changes, Blanche acquired a profession. She was raised to be a wife on a plantation, not to work for her living. But it wasn't enough to save her. By 30, Blanche had experienced all of that loss. So had the entire country. Between 1917 and 1947, everything was different. Blanche also cared for her dying relatives. Any of us here who survived the 1980s and 1990s know the effect of that on one's soul and psyche.

Tennessee shared Blanche's experience in that way and he was extremely pessimistic about what he saw coming in this newly reorganized society. With Streetcar, Tennessee brilliantly dramatized the whole damned thing and showed us where it would take us. To an insane asylum.

All of this is why I like Ann-Margret best. She seems to be fighting to the end to hold it together. She conveys that this happened to her and it could happen to any of us. The others are just bat shit crazy and then whatever happens flows from that. It's not enough to rest this play upon.

. The others PLAYING BLANCHE are just bat shit crazy and then whatever happens flows from that.

Sorry.

Ann Margaret just didn't for me. She was a little too "much". But I haven't watched it in a number of years, so I will try again to see if my opinion holds or has changed.

It is pretty clear in the text that it was Allan's suicide that drove Blanche over the edge. Without that, all the other issues might never have risen to the surface.

Blanche was there when it happened and understood the role she played in his death.

This is contrasted with Stella, who faced her own trauma in the play, her sister's rape. Unlike Blanche, Stella denies the event and her own responsibility.

So Stella is okay with living in a world of illusion, so she gets to go on.

Blanche faces reality, so she is defeated.

Stella must be 15 points lower in IQ. Its easier for stupid people to live in denial. In fact they forget about any moral doubts that cross their minds.

Williams said he thought Blanche would be in the hospital for a few months, fuck a few orderlies, and then when she got out open a small flower shop or something in New Orleans.

R137 Didn’t Williams admit that Blanche was very much based on himself?

I love Blanche. Such a neurotic little Virgo.

The problem that I have with many productions is that Blanche and Stella never seem to be sisters. It's like they don't have the shared history that siblings have. Blanche may have been the stuck up older sister who put on airs, but Stella should show a certain amount of breeding. No matter how far a person has run away or fallen, there are still signs of their upbringing.

R136 Sometimes living in denial is the smartest thing a person can do. Why do you think it's only stupid people that live in denial? Living in denial = survival.

[quote]Williams did not on any level intend for Blanche's rape to mean that a terrible bitch finally "got what she deserved."

How do you know this, R45?

R141 Did you not pay attention to the writing of the rape? The acting of it? The staging? You know, all of the big red flags that it was indeed not supposed to be a terrible bitch finally getting what she deserved?

How did 1940s audiences react to a rape in a Broadway production?

I always had the impression that Stella was a late in life surprise baby and Blanche was at least 10-15 years older . I also always thought Blanche had gotten married very young,like 16 or so . As a teen ,could you imagine coping with the great love of your life eating a bullet at a party ? Talk about ptsd . And she would have been forever tainted by the scandal ,wich in the south then was a real issue. Obviously Stella met Stanley because of the base being near,and split for New Orleans as soon as he popped her cherry ,leaving Blanche as the oldest child to cope with the dying relatives and lost fortune ,as well as her own personal demons. in fact ,Stella abandoned her sister to save herself,wich I get ,but its still a very selfish act .Blanch fucked up,a lot , but she stuck it out till the bitter end ,didnt she ? Thats admirable in itself.

Did Jessica Tandy do any nudity?

[R47] Thanks for pointing that out; Ann-Margret was superb. I'm definitely in the minority, but I think Leigh is too over the top from the beginning. English prof here...I have stopped teaching the play because students hate Blanche and actually do approve of the rape. Go figure.

R143, there have been rapes in plays for centuries. And Broadway was no stranger to melodrama.

That said, rape was a more common plot element because the act was not seen with the same level of horror with which we see it now in a post feminist world. Violence against women may not have been condoned, but it was understood as part of how the world worked for most of history.

So writers were more casual about including domestic violence and rape in their dramas than we would be now.

Maggie should have been raped. It would have put her on the straight and narrow.

Maggie would agree.

Blanche is a lot like the mother in "The Glass Menagerie," bragging about her gentlemen callers (glory days past). In reality, stuck in a drab, tiny apartment.

Yes, despite everything, I do find Blanche sympathetic. There are aspects of her that I fear: growing old & being damaged goods, being too broke to have my own apartment (living with hostile relatives). Being stuck with a Stanley, who is dumber than me, but who has lots of power over me. Also, finally, being ultimately abandoned by my own sister. (I think the alternate ending (Leigh version) where Stella goes back to Stanley is 100% more believable.)

That's were Tennessee Williams excelled, in tapping into everyday fears & life letdowns.

Yes, I do

Dorothy, less so

OP here ... thanks everyone! This thread is becoming a real gem.

Instead of being filmed at Warner's with Brando and Leigh and an only slightly watered down script, it should have been shot at MGM with Greer Garson, Clark Gable and a screenplay by John Lee Mahin.

The whole thing is Blanche's dream and surely she would have wanted the full deluxe MGM treatment. Score by Otto Harbach or Max Steiner?

^ Directed by Fleming or Minnelli?

Garson would have asked for Cukor but he would probably have refused to shoot with Mahin's script.

In the movie (Leigh version) Stella says at the end, " "I'm not going back in there....not this time. I'm never going back...never."

In the play Stella is with Stanley again at the end, crying as he holds her.

Fleming for director.

"I'm going to make this picture a melodrama."

No Coco was the sympathetic one

[quote]She put on airs from the start, which is how she ended up with a gay husband in the first place.

LOL!

Would an all lesbian cast work? I suggest Rosie O'Donnell as Stanley.

Remember Belle Reprieve? A lesbian couple played Stella and Stanley and a gay male couple played Blanche and Mitch.

Peggy Shaw was an amazing and sexy Stanley.

The Code fucked up the Leigh version. It was still good, but you had to be familiar with the play or make some educated guesses to figure out what was at the root of Blanche's problem.

r162 I think the ending of the Leigh version casts Stella in a much different light as well. It's almost as if she were a different character entirely.

If Stella believes that Blanche is telling the truth about the rape, which motivates her not to go back to Stanley, then why would she have Blanche committed?

That makes no sense.

Cognitive dissonance I assume r164.

She even says (paraphrasing) to the upstairs neighbor, "I couldn't believe her story and go on living with Stanley." [This was in the film version and I assume in the play too? I can't remember.)

She was in denial, but she knew she was in denial.

For R161

She had her committed as the woman had a complete breakdown

Is this true? I've read that in the original script for the play, Blanche is described as wearing clothes that are loud and slutty, and that Vivien Leigh wanted to change her wardrobe to pale lacy things and had to fight the studio wardrobe department to get her way.

If this is true the Leigh was absolutely right, I can't concieve of Blanche wearing anything that isn't dainty and ladylike. Sure, Blanche is a monster slut, but she's in denial about being a slut and thinks of herself as a ladylike lady.

I find many of these comments--and OP's question itself--disturbing. If you do not feel sympathy for Blanche DuBois, you need to be watching another play, by another playwright.

You’ve obviously never studied (nor excelled) in American literature, R169.

IMHO Maggie the Cat is the only Williams heroine who couldn't be easily changed to a gay man.

Mitch is a classic "but I'm a nice guy!" guy.

R171 is correct.

100%. Is there a more poignant line in all of drama than "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers"?

"They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!"

But r170, I did so study (as well as English and Irish dramas), and I did excel.

I have never been to the USA so I wonder of those street directions @R175 are useful?

^

The desirable street-car is now a bus.

Yes, those were actual directions for how to get to Elysian Fields---an actual neighborhood service by a streetcar line named "Desire"

[quote]"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers"

Well THAT'S a stupid thing to do! I much prefer: "Sometimes there's God so quickly" I say it a few times a year when appropriate.

[quote] "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers"

I know that Britain is a Welfare State and 40% of the population depend on the kindness of strangers with a fortnightly welfare cheque.

Sympathetic when played by Vivien Leigh.

Unsympathetic when played by Jessica Tandy.

Betty Buckley’s portrayal of a young Blanche in “Streetcar Named Desire - On Ice!” did not sit well with me - a vulnerable woman does not do Hamill Camels. The audience kept chucking trash onto the ice to make her trip. It wasn’t that great.

R181, You are confusing Dickensian England with the Social Contract. Do you know what "welfare" denotes?

^ 'The Social Contract' is a book of theories from 1762. English Welfare is White Dee and overweight slobs without motivation nor responsibility.

[quote] Well THAT'S a stupid thing to do! I much prefer: "Sometimes there's God so quickly" I say it a few times a year when appropriate.

Yes! That’s my favorite line of Blanche’s too!

Paperboys have always been that-boys. As in early adolescence. The character is always played by a man of about college age which is wrong. Even in old movies you see paperboys range in age from 8 to 13-14. When Blanche says she has to keep her hands off of children she means that literally. So even when a productions claims it is uncompromising it really isn't. Above somebody compared her to Mary Le Tourneau-she was having a relationship with a 12 year old boy- which is correct. If you see Blanche kissing a 13 year old paperboy which is what she wants the character becomes as repulsive without any sympathy whatsoever as it seems Williams wants her to be.

R187, the main reason that stage productions cast someone college-age as the "paperboy" is that there are heavy restrictions on the hours a child actor can work, so using actual children is a stage production is difficult, awkward, expensive, and involves dealing with stage parents. It's the same for modern TV and movies, most teenagers are played by young adults who are over 18, and who can work as many hours as the production needs.

Even in 1950, child actors were supposed to take several hours a day off of work for school, at least in theory. The guy in the movie looks about 18, young enough that Vivien Leigh could fairly use the word "children".

I agree with what R188 is saying about work hours and age, but it wouldn't surprise me if producers decided to cast older so that Blanche wouldn't come across as a total monster.

Oh, for God's sake. Warner Brothers could easily afford to pay a bit more for a SINGLE child, if cast in a major motion picture. The studios did that daily in the normal course of business. The money they saved on that shitty wig plopped on Vivien Leigh's head would have amply funded it. It's one fucking scene. The kid wasn't employed for more than a very short time.

The reason they cast a college student in the film is obviously related to why they change the ending of the fucking play and a large amount of critical dialogue.

Making the paperboy an older adolescent, 16-18, still makes Blanche seem icky.

And with the Hays Code still in effect in the early 50s, there is no way that the studio would have cast a child actor as the paperboy.

You do realize that the plot of Streetcar is basically the plot of Sophocles' Antigone, right? Stanley is Creon, the new ruler, the embodiment of a new age, laying down new rules that are abhorrent under the old regime. Stella is Ismene, the pragmatic sister who accommodates herself to the changed world. Blanche is Antigone, loyal to the old ways of her ancestors, and it is that ancestor-worship that the audience knows instinctively will lead to her doom. They even entomb Blanche in a mental hospital at the end, just as they walled up Antigone in a cave.

Do you guys think that Karl Malden was good casting for Stanley? John Goodman played Stanley in another iteration of Streetcar.

Thanks, R192, didn't know that about Antigone & Streetcar.

Sorry, meant Mitch (Malden / Goodman).

I only saw Vivien's version and I felt pity for her towards the end. She obviously was mentally/emotionally unstable . She needed help/undestanding and not derision or judgement especially from the men in her life.

r190 and others, what were the major changes from the play in terms of dialogue and characterisation?

I don't see how someone couldn't feel tremendous sympathy for Blanche. This was a woman who was told her entire life that her looks, manners, and upbringing were the most important things in the world. As her looks begin to fade, she has nothing to fall back on. Being from the south, I know several women quite like her. Many of them marry early and when their husbands either leave them or die, they're completely lost in the world and don't know what to do. They find their looks have faded as well as it's not as easy to rope in a man.

It's very tragic and goes to show us all that simply having looks isn't going to be enough to keep you taken care of. You also need personality, goals, dreams, and skills of some sort. In that way, I can say I've seen this reflected in many gay men as well. They have nothing to offer the world except a handsome face and a great body and when those start to fade, they find themselves very lost and it's sad. Even if you don't like them, there's still something pitiful about them.

I do hate when people play Blanche is a complete basket case from the start. She's on her last legs, but she's not at rock bottom yet. When someone plays here like that, there's nowhere for them to go for the next two hours. This is what makes it so much more tragic. You see this sensitive woman unprepared to fight in the real world getting thrown to the wolves and she keeps trying to fight back until she simply can't anymore and she has a psychotic break from reality. I've always found the ending both tragic and sort of comforting. At least she's in her own world where no one can hurt her and she's going to have a roof over her head for awhile and maybe she'll get better and get another chance. I don't think she stays in there forever.

Compare that to the ending of Blue Jasmine which seems incredibly bleak. Jasmine's a raving homeless person on a park bench muttering to herself. Her sister might drive up an hour later and help her again or she might continue down this road and never get help again.

Someone should start a similar thread on Mama Rose from Gypsy next. That'd be fascinating.

One unsympathetic facet of Blanche was that she did condescend to Stanley. On top of that, she had already been knocked down several pegs (financially broke, living with relatives in an already crowded house, run out of town in shame). So, she had no reason to condescend, especially to the person who had provided her a place to stay.

She was insufferable. No, she didn't deserve to get raped.

Did she really lose the house or was she just drummed out of town?

[quote]This was a woman who was told her entire life that her looks, manners, and upbringing were the most important things in the world.

That's so completely not what Blanche DuBois is about. Where did you get that silly idea? And, no. Your experience in the South is not something you can slather all over Blanche. That's your life. Blanche has her own.

I think a critic once said that Blanche's line, "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers" , is, from the audience's perspective (but not Blanche's) , an example of tragic irony.

No. Not with all that borderline personality waifing.

R202, what makes you the definitive expert? Blanche was a woman who's family home was taken away. Her only family is Stella now. Everything she'd been taught turned out to be utterly useless to her in the real world. Her breeding and manners turned out to not be worth anything. All she had were her looks, which she used to prostitute herself both literally and figuratively in many ways. With her looks fading, what else does she have? Her wonderfully condescending personality where she still believes she's some genteel lady? That's not going to win her any new friends or admirers.

And to think she's all of 29 or 30. That's why I think a young teen is a better paper boy.

I know Texan women aged 25 or 26 who are uncomfortable socially because they haven't yet found a man. Their families and co-workers cheerfully give them shit about it. So I see how widow Blanche feels. And I see why she's usually played by a woman over 40.

But it would be fun to see, say, a Southern actress like Jennifer Lawrence play her, maybe opposite Florence Pugh or Elle Fanning. Lawrence's schtick is that she's one of the dudes so I could imagine her portrayal to be a bit like Gillian Anderson's, who wore, as armour, just a touch of a hard-drinking, red-power-suited glamour-bitch pose. In Lawrence's eagerness to act like a sassy teenager you it would be interesting to see her called on her shit by a Mitch.

The south is still kinda weird to women over 25 or 30 who aren't married with kids. It's a bit disturbing.

I'm wondering if audiences could take Blanche as she really is and not as just a victim of circumstance.

Is the Gillian Anderson version available anywhere? I had hoped that once those special showings (of the stage production) in movie theaters were done of the stage play, that the filmed version would be released on DVD. I really enjoyed that whole production. But, as far as I can tell, it ended with the cinema showings and hasn't been commercially released or broadcast.

"I don't see how someone couldn't feel tremendous sympathy for Blanche. This was a woman who was told her entire life that her looks, manners, and upbringing were the most important things in the world. As her looks begin to fade, she has nothing to fall back on."

I have a bit of sympathy for such people, but in my case it's mingled with a bit of well-hidden contempt. People like that have missed out on everything important and interesting in life, usually out of sheer foolishness, vanity, and unwarranted self-esteem. They're too irritating to be properly tragic.

I also feel irritated with people who never break away from their upbringing, as Blanche has not. She still thinks her big-fish-in-a-small-pond social background makes her a "lady" better than honest working people, in a city where nobody has ever heard of the town her family used to rule over. She should have been spending her time faking references and looking for a teaching job, and working on her handjob technique because how else was she going to win over those big-city teen boys...

R202 is right, R197. As the play indicates it was the suicide of her husband and her guilt for her role in it that started the slide. It was not her fading looks that changed things for her--that is Amanda's story. Rather her shame is the issue that makes her seek out the shadows--the script is pretty clear about this as are most productions.

Shirley Knight played the final scene completely sane. I would love to see another actress do it, since I think that elevates the play to a whole other level of tragedy.

"As the play indicates it was the suicide of her husband and her guilt for her role in it that started the slide. It was not her fading looks that changed things for her--that is Amanda's story. "

Blanche's guilt over her husband's death may have been the final blow that sent her into the downward spiral we see, but the loss of the family fortune, her fading looks, her inability to adapt to changing circumstances, and yes, her fading beauty loom just as large in her personal tragedy. And the fact that she's losing her beauty affects her future as well as her past and present, even broke and disgraces good looks would give her a shot at changing her circumstances, but if all she can pull is a Mitch, oy what a comedown.

The woman was practically sitting in the dark on dates. So, yes, her fading looks, brought on by the booze and the boys lifestyle she was living back home, didn't push her over the edge but it was taking its toll. Someone like Blanche has to suffer many, many indignities (in her case, mostly self inflicted) before the final one made her snap.

R213 has misread the play. The death of Blanche's husband was not the final blow---it happened BEFORE the loss of family fortune and while Blanche still very young.

Misunderstanding the play's timeline would impact one's ability to interpret the events,

Losing one's looks is never a personal tragedy. Not even Tennessee Williams could write a major play about such nonsense.

Yes absolutely. I can relate to aspects of her.

[quote] Losing one's looks is never a personal tragedy. Not even Tennessee Williams could write a major play about such nonsense.

For some people, yes, it is a personal tragedy. I'm not joking. Tennessee Williams, IMO, is the perfect person to write a play about this type of tragedy.

No. Aging is part of life.

Being so foolish and shallow that one cannot accept that inevitability probably still falls short of a personal tragedy.

Losing your child is a personal tragedy.

I find her sympathetic. She wasn’t raised to survive in the real world. She was raised in a home with money and status. She married a gay man who ultimately commits suicide. She doesn’t have any skills to make it in the world without her husband, family money, and fading youth. She is afraid and lives in a fantasy because it’s easier for her than living in reality. There is obvious depression and other mental illness going on with her, as well. I read somewhere that when Vivienne Leigh played the role she actually had a meltdown on set. Perhaps the character struck too close to home for her

Blanche was perfectly capable of surviving in the real world. She was a high school English teacher.

Rather than selling the family estate, he plan was to work part-time as a prostitute to make up the shortfall. But any idiot would know that would not work. It seems to be more about sexual compulsion. The addictive behavior makes sense given the textbook alcoholism that Williams so carefully delineates.

I do not think that people become sexually compulsive because their looks are fading or they do not know how to handle the real world. It is Blanche's compulsions that destroy her ability to function, not her lack of functioning that leads to her compulsion.

And Williams takes great pains to situate the suicide as the origin point for Blanche's compulsions.

I saw the Gillian Anderson play, and had seen the movie a long time before that. The staging of the Anderson version updates the look so it is vaguely contemporary; or at least not specifically 1948. That abstraction helped me, because I always have a hard time with many Williams characters seeming weirdly anachronistic -- and Blanche, as written, is one of those.

I'm sure much of it has to do with my own ignorance about the early 20th century South, but if Blanch is only around 30 she would have been born in 1918 and still a child when the market crashed in 29 -- so her manner, pretension and even the talk of a "plantation" seem strange for someone who turned 20 during the depths of the Depression, as opposed to around 1900 like Amanda Wingfield.

The tendency to cast her older, sometimes much older, does make her backstory and timeline more logical, but then as another poster above noted above she and Stella really don't seem like sisters. Was Williams' usual intention to create plays that function more according to dream-logic than reality, so am I just looking at them with too much literal-mindedness?

I also saw the Gillian Anderson play. I didn't really like her performance and I hated the more contemporary setting. I see Streetcar as one of those plays that is locked in a certain time period to really be effective. But that's just me.

[quote]Losing one's looks is never a personal tragedy. Not even Tennessee Williams could write a major play about such nonsense.

[quote]For some people, yes, it is a personal tragedy. I'm not joking. Tennessee Williams, IMO, is the perfect person to write a play about this type of tragedy.

Tennessee Williams would not write something so facile.

[quote]Blanche was perfectly capable of surviving in the real world. She was a high school English teacher.

Exactly. People act like she was Scarlett O'Hara. She wasn't. Blanche was intelligent, educated and employed.

Well, Blanche got fired from her high school teaching job, presumably for screwing the students. So if she wanted to work at a school again, she'd have to fuck the principal and probably the whole school board, if she wanted to get a job without references from her old job.

Which was the sensible course of action - write fake references or ask an old boyfriend back home to pose as the principal of the school where she used to work, start working at a school or a shop and get a place of her own, or move in with some other single gal who gives herself airs. But I don't recall her even talking about trying to look for work, she seems to spend the play lying around Mitch and Stella's apartment, acting like she's too fragile to think of getting a job, and when Mitch offers her the easy way out she acts like it's her only option. A real person would have looked for work or at least have talked about doing so, but the play isn't strictly realistic. Williams wants to present a person who isn't real, but who is an embodiment of ladylike pretensions.

"...if Blanch is only around 30 she would have been born in 1918 and still a child when the market crashed in 29 -- so her manner, pretension and even the talk of a "plantation" seem strange for someone who turned 20 during the depths of the Depression"

Actually, it's believable that the family's pretensions and overemphasis on manners would outlast the money. And I don't think the family was ruined by the crash of 1929, although their circumstances were probably reduced. Doesn't Blanche talk about the last of the family fortune being spent on the horde of dying old relatives? So there must have been some money left when Blanche was grown and Stella set off for the big city, even Stella doesn't seem aware that the money is gone.

[quote]And I don't think the family was ruined by the crash of 1929....

What is there in the play that leads you to believe that this family escaped the Great Depression that leveled the rest of the country? How did this aging family with a large Southern estate... and two daughters... no sons to take over, if that was possible... pull through that economic deprivation?

The two girls were born into and raised to be a part of a world that NO LONGER EXISTED. Stella saw that and bolted. Blanche stayed. And for her trouble, she attended the deaths of her aging family members and was pushed out of Belle Rive by Ambler and Ambler.

Not everyone was absoulutely ruined by the crash of 1929, everyone took a hit, things changed for everyone, but not everyone in the US went bankrupt at once.

It's possible that there could have been *some* money left when Blanche was a young woman, enough that Stanley thinks that Stella has been cheated out of her inheritance.

I love Leigh’s performance. From the first moment her eyes face body tells she is trouble. I can’t stand Lange in the role. Her performance is forced. Leigh brought the character’s flaws out effortlessly. Maybe because when Tandy played the part on Broadway Leigh played it in West End. I read somewhere Leigh thought the role hit closely to her private life. I wonder how hard it was to perform every night on stage. She acted it to perfection. Well deserved Oscar.

Let's see...Blanche's young first husband, who she worshipped and adored, turned out to be a closeted gay. After she lets him know she knows his secret and is disgusted by him he kills himself. Stella leaves the family home to start a new life elsewhere but Blanche stays and has to be the caregiver for all the dying family members. The family home is lost, probably due nonpayment of the mortgage or taxes, although Blanche seems unsure of what exactly happened to it. She goes to live in a sleazy hotel. Her mental condition deteriorates. She seeks respite in sex and booze and gets so needy and reckless that she gets involved with a 17 year old boy which causes her to lose her teaching job. Destitute, she goes to stay with her sister and her loutish husband. Yes, I think Blanche is deserving of a little sympathy. She's immoral, but she's a tormented soul who has taken a lot of beatings.

How was Tandy's portrayal received?

Surprised to reread the thread and see that no one has referenced Her Majesty's most recent Christmas message to the UK:

[quote]“We continue to be inspired by the kindness of strangers and draw comfort that — even on the darkest nights — there is hope in the new dawn," she said.

So what kind of Blanche would Her Majesty have made? She's been through a few things herself over the years. She at least learned to just watch and wait.

In the original Brando/Leigh film, some bits were edited out for being too much for the censorship bureau. The last DVD release included those brief bits and one of them is Very interesting. After Stanley cries out for Stella to come back downstairs to him, Stella does come out and comes down. There is a close-up shot of Kim Hunter with a smirk smile on her face, as if she pulled one over on Stanley. She KNOWS he needs her more than he would admit. It's an interesting quick glance into how Stella's mind works.

The movie was a watered down version of the stage play. The word "goddamn" couldn't be uttered. Blanche has "meetings with strangers." instead of "intimacies with strangers." And of course there was the stupid ending which implies Stella is leaving Stanley for good. The stage ending had Stella sobbing in Stanley's arms while he coos "now, love, now, now love" to her while fondling her breast, and his buddies start another hand of cards. The last line of the play is "This game is seven card stud." Blanche is driven off to the loony bin but life goes on as usual.

Olivier directed his wife Vivien in the original London stage production and by all accounts it was a different take on both the play and Blanche's character than what Kazan had done in New York. Leigh didn't want to change her interpretation when she reported to work on the film. She and Kazan supposedly had a very rocky time at the beginning of filming until they gained some trust and respect for each other, stopped fighting and actually started collaborating.

[qote]Blanche is driven off to the loony bin but life goes on as usual.

It's prettied up and more genteel but isn't that essentially how the film ends?

It was a Code film, so I would assume that both Blanche and Stanley had to pay.

Kim Hunter on the movie's revised ending:

"And there was a problem with the ending: We couldn't leave in the rape scene unless Stanley was punished. Stella had to leave him. Well, Stella's not going to leave him. The relationship would never be the same again, but leave him? Never! We had to re-shoot the ending. Originally, I took the baby and said, 'I'm not going back' only once. The censors said that was not strong enough. They wanted me to say the line several times. That pleased them and us [because we felt] it made it less positive that Stella was not going back."

"Blanche had a child? How did I miss this?"

You didn't miss anything. She didn't have a child.

"It's prettied up and more genteel but isn't that essentially how the film ends?"

No, the film ends with Stella, holding her baby in her arms, running upstairs mumbling "I'm never going back, never" while Stanley yells "STELLAAH!" The film ending makes it seem like Stanley is getting his punishment. But in the play he and Stella are still together and the poker game goes on and everything goes on as usual. Stanley gets away with raping and ruining Blanche his life remains intact.

Yes. He wins. Stanley wins. He is a brute, and boor, and a thug, and he wins. And Stella and Blanche, raised with all the right things, the right people, the right manners... they are powerless against him and are crushed by him.

Tennessee was writing about America. Our culture. How it works and what it does.

[quote]Yes. He wins. Stanley wins. He is a brute, and boor, and a thug, and he wins.

You and I were watching something entirely different. Which is fine. Because I don't think Stanley won anything. Blanche was the victor. She broke Stanley and brought him down to her level. Stanley was rough around the edges, but he wasn't at Blanche's level.

Williams himself said that Blanche would spend a few months in the loony bin, fuck some orderlies, then get out and open a flower shop in the French Quarter.

Shaw said Eliza would open a flower shop and support her husband Freddy.

Of course Stanley wins! He fucks his pretty but annoying sister-in-law, gets rid of her for hood, and gets his wife and baby back, when Stella realizes what being what a working single mother will be like. He gets things his way, and goes on being Stanley.

William's couldn't conceive of a top losing.

When I watched the film (before I knew of the play's ending), I assumed that Stella would return to Stanley shortly after the closing credits. We had seen this happen earlier in the film: he attacked her, she ran upstairs, and he screamed and won her back.

So in both stage and film versions, Stella and Stanley end up together, Crazy Sister gets carted off to Crazy Farm and life goes on. Status quo restored. Isn't that what I asked about above?

There's no way Stella would stay away from Stanley, she may have been independent enough to leave home and live an ordinary life in the big city, but she was also raised to be indolent and there's no way in hell she'd stick at being the sole support of herself and her baby. AND her useless sister, who'd probably want to move in after she's released from the nut house. Going back to Stanley would at least keep Blanche out of her hair.

And then Stanley would get her pregnant again and again, and there's be no way out until the kids were grown.

But she would be getting that prime Polish dick, and that's not nothing.

"So in both stage and film versions, Stella and Stanley end up together, Crazy Sister gets carted off to Crazy Farm and life goes on. "

No, in the film version with Brando and Leigh the ending would have you believe that Stella leaves Stanley once and for all. The bad guy gets punished. That's not the ending in the play. Stanley gets away with everything in the play and comes out on top in the end. The downfall is all Blanche's.

I think you 251 posters are putting the flower on the anvil.

This was Williams' third play when he still finding his métier. His first plays were poetic, prissy, allusive, imagistic (and not suitable for our strict retrospective scrutiny).

After this he changed in order to specialise in sloppy, sex-neurosis melodramas.

Yet another 20th century play about a woman having sex as an expression of neurosis and trauma, there's no way in hell that anyone would put on a play about a woman having sex because she liked men and sex was fun! It wouldn't have been considered concieveable, it wouldn't have been taken seriously, it just wasn't done!

But of course, a gay man of Williams's era would have had a lot of guilt and conflict over sex and men, and so did the theater-going middle class and the critics. It just wouldn't have been possible for anyone to think of Blanche as a woman who screwed around because she liked it, and because it helped her deal with the stress of taking care of all those aging, dying, relatives.

I think Blanche liked the sex she was having. But she was compulsive about it. She was using it as a tension reliever and since she was under a lot of tension she had a lot of sex with anyone available. And she definitely had a liking for young boys. Stanley sensed Blanche's penchant for sex: "If I didn't that you was my wife's sister I'd get ideas about you!" She says "Such a what?" He says "Don't play dumb. You know what!" Yes, Stanley senses Blanche's sexual vibe and later acts on it: "We've had this date with each other since the beginning!"

Was Brando ever really a great actor? When I was little, in the sixties and seventies, he had a reputation for greatness that even I could see was overblown. Yes, his early work was fantastic, but IMHO he isn't so much great in "Streetcar" and "Waterfront" because he's a brilliant talent, as because he's overloaded with charisma and it carries him through certain roles.

Because the man had very little range, when he tried to branch out from playing tough guys, he generally sucked.

[quote] Was Brando ever really a great actor?

No he wasn't. He was scared to go on a real stage.

He performed in movies with groomers and directors to control his image. And he had sound men to amplify and standardise his sloppy vocals. And most importantly, he had film editors to pick out his good line readings from all the mistakes.

(But he was an endomorph who was briefly pretty)

Thank you! I think Brandon is probably one of the most overrated actors of all time.

Oh--but nice dick, though, even if a tad on the stubby side.

Mitch always struck me as more repulsive than Stanley. They're both misogynists, but whereas Stanley wears his misogyny proudly on his sleeve, Mitch tucks it away behind geniality and respectability.

I think the most disgusting line of the play is, "You're not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother."

Who cares about "sympathetic?"

Perhaps the dozens of posters who replied to this thread, r260

Do people really want to be sympathetic to a character?

I think people are more concerned by if a character is interesting and coherent.

Yes, I want a character to be sympathetic, that is, that I can like them in some way and not actively despise them. And that's given a very broad definition of "like" and "sympathetic", there has to be a reason I want to spend two hours or whatever with a character - I like them or love them, they're charming or fun, I empathize with their troubles, they're fascinating or brilliant, I admire the way they deal with said troubles, etc.

If I don't like or empathize with the characters in a film, I wonder why the hell I'm spending my time with people I dislike. At my age, life is too short to spend with people you dislike,

I tend to enjoy characters I would never want to spend time with in real life.

What came first, Blanche's overall illness or her interest in teenage boys?

Blanche was not crazy. Delusional and crazy are not the same thing. She can be clinging to the past without being schizophrenic. Blanche isn't crazy, she's just a normal human being whose world fell out from under her and now, as a result, is trying to handle that the only way she knows how: like a proper southern belle. The only problem is that all of the ways she was taught to handle her problems do not work in the real world, the one outside of aristocracy. As a result she comes off as a bit crazy, but in truth she really isn't, she only responds the way that she does to certain thing (putting on airs, delusions of grandeur, throwing herself at men, being in denial about her situations, etc etc) because that was how she learned to adapt to the world. The only problem is that she's now in an entirely different world, with real problems and a new society, which is why her methods of coping make her seem "crazy".

Great assessment r266

R253 Are you insane? The play isn't about a woman being over-sexed as a result of trauma because of some weird 20th century misogyny, it's about that because that's what Williams writes. He writes complicated dramas. If you want to watch a movie or see a play about a woman who has lots of sex because she enjoys sex and men, go watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Williams does not write those kinds of stories, his works tend to have a bit more substance.

And we think about stories in which women have sex for pleasure as lightweight. But stories about women who are over-sexed from trauma as somehow deep. However, many serious plays feature men who have sex for pleasure without being seen as lightweight. (the men in O'Neill are often promiscuous, some in Miller, and it is not due to trauma.)

As R253 points out, part of why "that's what Williams writes" is because of position in society as a gay man.

[quote] Do people really want to be sympathetic to a character? I think people are more concerned by if a character is interesting and coherent.

People do want to be sympathetic to a character, e.g., Tony Soprano. You can't make him a child-beater, though. You can see him murdering a guy who was also in the mob and "knew the risks."

I think Blanche would be quite limp after these 270 posts of analysis.

(I just enjoy seeing Vivien on screen and hate Kazan for being such a hateful person and doing it in cheap black and white).

Maybe it's confirmation bias, but I think it works better in black and white r271

Much like Sunset Boulevard

R271, "Hateful?" "Cheap"

Serious films were black and white in 1951.

Had the film been made in color, it would have lowered its prestige.

Vivien Leigh was a sympathetic actress, so she put her own spin on Blanche. Blanche sounded like a spoiled bitch, slutty and psycho in the play, but how could you not forgive Ms. Leigh?

Kazan was 'hateful' because he angled the movie from Stanley's perception. Poor Vivien/Blanche was seen as the outsider right from the start.

R272, R273 I adore Wilder and Boulevard but I'm still prejudiced against cheap black and white. I reckon Wilder could tell a serious, artful, 'prestigious' story without making all the characters and the audience feel dirty.

I believe that Kazan (aka Elias Kazantzoglou) had issues about the wealthy comfortable Americans he met and enjoyed making us feel distressed and dirty.

If you want a clean, non-distressing Streetcar, the recent NT Live comes close.

R276 I'm guessing Elias Kazantzoglou was an angry outsider which is why Darryl Francis Zanuck chose him for 'Gentleman's Agreement' in '47.

This movie had a lot of well-dressed, beautiful people in it but it had an angry, outsider's heart.

Who in Streetcar should be wealthy and comfortable?

[quote]Poor Vivien/Blanche was seen as the outsider right from the start.

Because she was an outsider.

R275, Blanche IS an outsider for the duration of the play. The whole thing is set in Stanley's world - in Stanley's apartment in Stanley's neighborhood, surrounded by Stanley's friends and neighbors, with everyone in the low-rent buildings that are all Stanley can afford. Stella may have chosen to enter that world and try to it in, but Blanche will always be an outsider there because she'll die before making any attempt to fit in.

And that's been the course of Blanche's adult life, fitting in less and less as time passes and the world she was raised to belong to went away. So I think portraying Blanche as the outsider and Stanley as the king of his little world is correct.

R281 I don't know if Kazan was a Socialist/Communist but yes, the bulk of this constricted, stage-bound, talk-fest is located in the flat paid by Stanley's labor. And Blanche doesn't contribute financially to this arrangement.

But a sympathetic film director would tell the story from Blanche's view.

A good director allows the audience to understand, appreciate, if not sympathise with, the main character.

But I'm not certain that Williams wants the audience to sympathize with Blanche. Blanche is the antagonist.

team blanche

Well of course there's a little bit of sympathy for Stanley, at least for much of the play, he's a regular guy who works hard and doesn't ask for much, just a few beers, some pals, his martial bed, some other people's martial beds if he gets the chance (I'm sure)... and he's stuck with this snooty sister-in-law sponging off of him and dissing him to his wife. Any reasonable person would find Stanley's in-law troubles hard to bear.

And I think that Williams meant Stanley to be at least somewhat sympathetic, and not just because Williamswas like most of us - willing to forgive a hot young guy absolutely anything. No, I think he wanted the audience to have mixed feelings about both Blance and Stanley, they're both flawed, complex people who have good and bad qualities, and I think we're meant to feel ambivalent about them both for much of the play.

From day one Blanche comes into Stanley's house stirring the shit. Before Blanche shows up Stanley and Stella were a regular young couple, probably with regular young couple problems and trying to make ends meet. Blanche comes in, starts niggling with every little thing, until Stanley has had enough. And on top of all of that she is clearly hitting on him, because that is really all she has left.

Stanley represents the loud, brash, cruel, vulgar, predatory America that crushes everything and everyone it can and pockets whatever it can take. You all know that America. Like Blanche, you all struggle to live in it.

The woman's fucking name is "Blanche," which is French (not Polish) and means 'white' or 'fair.' White symbolizes purity and innocence and virtue. She was born to be beautiful and pleasing and protected. But the world she was born into crumbles and she is thrown, defenseless, into a predatory world and finally into a slum in New Orleans in the height of summer where she gets raped by the same man fucking her own sister.

There's no need for amateur psychoanalysis when trying to understand this play. It was all subsequently reduced by a cartoonist to about 90 seconds.

I really like what Ebert said about black and white, in few words:

[quote]I also love black and white, which some people assume they don't like. For me, it's more stylized and less realistic than color, more dreamlike, more concerned with essences than details.

She's basically every 40 year old bottom, so not sympathetic at all.

Lol r289

Also, I think Blanche is supposed to be around 30. Right?

R285 your misspelling suggests irony or a Freudian slip

[quote] he's a regular guy who works hard and doesn't ask for much, just a few beers, some pals, his martial bed,

The script indicates that she is around 30. And a Virgo (which is the sign of the teacher and the prostitute.)

Considering Blanche was never prepared for a life away from her family and her own world, I find it very easy to feel for her. If any of us had been in her position, we might have done the same things. It reminds me of how difficult life was for my mother after my father died. When you've become used to doing things one way for most of your life and that's taken away from you abruptly and without warning, you're bound to fall to pieces and not know what to do, still holding on to whatever shred of the familiar you can find.

I do believe Blanche gets better after her stay in the asylum. I don't think she's still in there 30 years later pulling out her hair and screaming and crying. She'd get some good therapy and pills and make another go of it.

Yet the play does not suggest any of this, R294. It places the suicide as the incident that changes Blanche and implies that it was what made her incapable of dealing the creditors.

The reading that makes her response to the suicide as just another symptom of being too effete for this world rather than a precipitating incident oversimplify the play.

A complete aside, but the older I get, the less I speculate on what happens to a character after the novel/film/play closes. I used to think about it a lot. Now I feel that this is the story that was told, and here is where it ends.

[quote] It places the suicide as the incident that changes Blanche and implies that it was what made her incapable of dealing the creditors.

Oh, it does not. Having no money makes one incapable of dealing with creditors. Blanche has been through enough traumatic life experiences to break anyone.

BLANCHE: I, I, I took the blows in my face and my body! All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father, mother! Margaret, that dreadful way! So big with it, it couldn't be put in a coffin! But had to be burned like rubbish! You just came home in time for the funerals, Stella. And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths--not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, and sometimes it rattles, and sometimes they even cry out to you, "Don't let me go!" Even the old, sometimes, say, "Don't let me go." As if you were able to stop them! But funerals are quiet, with pretty flowers. And, oh, what gorgeous boxes they pack them away in! Unless you were there at the bed when they cried out, "Hold me!" you'd never suspect there was the struggle for breath and bleeding. You didn't dream, but I saw! Saw! Saw! And now you sit there telling me with your eyes that I let the place go! How in hell do you think all that sickness and dying was paid for? Death is expensive, Miss Stella! And old Cousin Jessie's right after Margaret's, hers! Why, the Grim Reaper had put up his tent on our doorstep!... Stella. Belle Reve was his headquarters! Honey--that's how it slipped through my fingers! Which of them left us a fortune? Which of them left a cent of insurance even? Only poor Jessie--one hundred to pay for her coffin. That was all, Stella! And I with my pitiful salary at the school. Yes, accuse me! Sit there and stare at me, thinking I let the place go! I let the place go? Where were you! In bed with your--Polack!

^ Harold Pinter would be yowling in his grave.

Human beings DON'T talk like that. The poor playwright was still in his adolescent flower stage while writing that tortured, LONG speech and thankfully he loosened up later.

"It places the suicide as the incident that changes Blanche and implies that it was what made her incapable of dealing the creditors."

Isn't the whole suicide story what she told Stanley when she was trying to rope him in? I wonder if it really happened that way, or if it happened at all, as I can't see Blanche being terribly honest with a man.

I believe the endless grind of elder care was real, though, Stella knows about all the deaths. Why not fuck around when you get a chance if that's your home life, it's a way to feel alive! But of course, in the middle of the 20th century it was considered pathological for a woman to fuck around, however lonely or burdened by the Grim Reaper hanging out on the doorstep she was.

Blanche was the only sympathetic character in the whole play. Everyone else was despicable. I really don’t like the play at all. I never understood the raves and Marlon Brando.

Streetcar is a classic tragedy, following Aristotle's Poetics. Blanche is the protagonist. Being kicked out of town was the inciting incident. Brando's performance was so terrific it did overpower the inherent dramatic structure of the play.

But what is your point, R301?

Is Blanche, protagonist or not, sympathetic? Or not?

Is pity sympathetic? Aristotle states that the purpose of tragedy is to arouse “terror and pity” and thereby effect the catharsis of these emotions. The interpretation generally accepted is that through experiencing fear vicariously in a controlled situation, the spectator’s own anxieties are directed outward, and, through sympathetic identification with the tragic protagonist, his insight and outlook are enlarged.

She was very fragile. She didn't seem to be able to cope with life, outside of her fantasies.

Sorry to resurrect an old thread but I just got done watching the 2014 Gillian Anderson Streetcar and I felt like chatting about it,

To answer the OP, yes. Anyone who has needed to seek some shelter into illusions, even if momentarily, when reality becomes too unbearable, should. I actually feel alot of the traits that people consider unlikeable or unsympathetic about her (lying, manipulation, self delusion) are borne out of a necessity to survive, so I can't fault her too much for those. It's the ones that aren't borne out of a need for survival ( her vanity, shallowness, classicism, bigotry) that actually I struggle the most with with Blanche. But one is a product of one's environment I suppose, and those less favorable traits were no doubt also exacerbated by Stanley.

Also, just wanted to point out for whoever said that Blanche and Stella went through the same thing but only Blanche developed her disorders was 100% wrong. Stella not only did not have to go through marrying a man she loved and worshipped, only to fail tragically at a marriage and a proper love life with him for reasons that back in the 1930's were completely unthinkable and unmentionable, but also, like Blanche said, she was the one that tried to hold on to Belle Reeve, took care of every dying relative on her own, tried to save the estate, while Stella had conveniently left her to fend for herself (I always thought there was more than enough validity to Blanche's recriminations to her in the beginning). So yeah, discovering your husband is gay and dealing with the guilt of his suicide AND dealing with some sort of illness that was bumping off every single member of your family AND loosing your entire estate would affect you. Stella was exempt from all this.

Favorite Blanche remains Vivien, but she isn't the ultimate Blanche either. She could use a bit more of a back bone and be more outwardly seductive to be the Blanche I feel is in the actual play. Ann Margret was decent as a sultrier, low key Blanche but she disappointed me in her last scenes, and just went loony without playing up the tragedy and heartbreak . Lange played Blanche with too much of a back bone for me, a little too manipulative, but she was excellent in the last act. Anderson's is a gripping powerhouse performance, but who she's playing just isn't Blanche, unless she grew up in a trailer park...she plays Blanche like a hoochie mama. And goes crazy way too fast in the play.

Anyway, I love this play. It's an absolute gift. There are still things I am realizing and discovering about it after 25 years from when I first saw the film.