A Streetcar Named Desire (VHS) (TV) [1995] Jessica Lange

A Streetcar Named Desire (1995) (TV)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114565/

THE SOURCE VIDEO WAS 15 YEARS OLD THERE IS SOME MINOR AUDIO DISTORTION AT SOME POINTS

A Streetcar Named Desire is a 1947 play written by American playwright Tennessee Williams for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948. The play opened on Broadway on December 3, 1947, and closed on December 17, 1949, in the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. The Broadway production was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden. The London production opened in 1949 with Bonar Colleano, Vivien Leigh, and Renee Asherson and was directed by Laurence Olivier. A highly publicized 1992 revival starred Alec Baldwin as Stanley and Jessica Lange as Blanche and was staged at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, the same theatre the original production was staged in. The 1995 television version was based on the highly successful Broadway revival that starred Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange. However, only Baldwin and Lange were from the stage production. The TV version added John Goodman as Mitch and Diane Lane as Stella. This production was directed by Glenn Jordan. Baldwin, Lange and Goodman all received Emmy Award nominations. Lange won a Golden Globe award (for Best Actress in a Miniseries or TV Movie), while Baldwin was nominated for Best Actor, but did not win.

Alec Baldwin ... Stanley Kowalski
Jessica Lange ... Blanche DuBois
John Goodman ... Harold \'Mitch\' Mitchell
Diane Lane ... Stella
Frederick Coffin ... Steve (as Fred Coffin)
Carlos GÃƒÂ³mez ... Pablo
Jerry Hardin ... The Doctor (as Jerry Harden)
Patricia Herd ... The Matron
Matt Keeslar ... Collector (as Matt Keesler)
Tina Lifford ... The Neighbor
Rondi Reed ... Eunice
Carmen Zapata ... Flower Seller

A recurring theme that can be found in A Streetcar Named Desire is the reflection of the decayed agrarian South and a thriving, industrialized new America. Blanche is penniless and homeless; Stanley, the descendant of Polish immigrants and proud to be working class, is powerful and confident. There is constant conflict between reality and fantasy, actual and ideal. Blanche says \"I don\'t want realism, I want magic.\" This recurring theme is read most strongly in Williams\' characterization of Blanche DuBois and the physical tropes that she employs in her pursuit of what is magical and idealized: a paper lampshade with which she covers the harsh white light bulb in the living room; her chronically deceptive recounting of her last years in Belle Reve; the misleading letters she presumes to write to Shep Huntleigh; and a pronounced tendency toward excessive consumption of alcohol. As one critic writes, \"Blanche spins a cocoon linguistically for protection.\" Blanche creates her own fantasy world through the characters she plays, such as the damsel, southern belle or school teacher. She wears her costumes to create a faÃƒÂ§ade to hide behind, concealing her secrets and attempting to reach her former glory, and illustrating her inability to relate to others in a \"normal\" sense.

Notably, Blanche\'s deception of others and herself is not characterized by malicious intent, but rather a heart-broken and saddened retreat to a romantic time and happier moments before disaster struck her life (her previous loved one, the refined Allan Gray, committed suicide during a Varsouviana Polka, as a reaction to Blanche\'s revulsion when she discovered he was homosexual, after she accidentally encountered him having sex with another man).

The contrast between Blanche and Stanley can be understood as reflecting a similar opposition: the \'fake\', illusionary and self-deceptive woman, versus her sister\'s coarsely, brutally present and animalistic husband, simplistic and \'real\' in his corporeal presence.

In fairy tales, the failing princess or the damsel in distress is often rescued by a heroic white knight. A Streetcar Named Desire is characterized by the conspicuous absence of the male protagonist imbued with heroic qualities. Indeed, the polar opposite of what a literary chivalric hero might be is represented in the leading male character of the play, Stanley Kowalski. Stanley is described by Blanche as a \"survivor of the Stone Age\" and is further depicted in this primitive light by numerous traits that he exhibits: uncivilized manners, demanding and forceful behavior, lack of empathy, crass selfishness, and a chauvinistic attitude towards women. The replacement of the heroic white knight by a character such as Stanley Kowalski further heightens Williams\' theme of the demise of the romantic \"old South.\" However, at the end of scene two, Blanche realises the need for Stanley. Stanley is seen as the way forward for the Dubois bloodline. \"Maybe he\'s what we need to mix with our blood now that we\'ve lost Belle Reve and have to go on without Belle Reve to protect us\" Blanche knows that she can no longer depend on Belle Reve to sustain her and Stella in their life, even though Stella has adapted to her new and current surroundings. The relationship that Stanley and Stella have is purely based on a physical level, and not so much an emotional level. Blanche does not understand the need and reasoning for their purely physical level. Blanche also does not understand why Stella returns to Stanley in scene three after he brutally hit her, making Stella run up to Eunices flat for protection. It is made aware that Stanley and Stella\'s relationship is very obsessive when Stanley shouted up at Eunices\' flat for Stella with tears streaming down his face. When Stella hears his cries, an almost possessed look crosses her eyes and she is unable to resist his call.

NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF STAGE PRODUCTION:
A Streetcar Named Desire; Alec Baldwin Does Battle With the Ghosts
Published: April 13, 1992

Depending on your feelings about \"Long Day\'s Journey Into Night,\" \"A Streetcar Named Desire\" is either the greatest or second-greatest play ever written by an American. But actors have to be half-mad to star in Tennessee Williams\'s drama on Broadway, where the glare is unforgiving and the ghosts of Elia Kazan\'s original 1947 production, as magnified by the director\'s classic 1951 film version, are fierce. Stacked against Marlon Brando, the first Stanley Kowalski, and Jessica Tandy and Vivien Leigh, the stage and screen originators of Blanche DuBois, who can win?

The exciting news from the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where Gregory Mosher\'s new Broadway staging of \"Streetcar\" arrived last night, is that Alec Baldwin has won. His Stanley is the first I\'ve seen that doesn\'t leave one longing for Mr. Brando, even as his performance inevitably overlaps his predecessor\'s. Mr. Baldwin is simply fresh, dynamic and true to his part as written and lets the echoes fall where they may. While his Stanley does not in the end ignite this play\'s explosive power, that limitation seems imposed not by his talent but by the production surrounding him and, especially, by his unequal partner in unhinged desire, Jessica Lange\'s Blanche DuBois.

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Baldwin imbues Stanley with an animalistic sexual energy that sends waves through the house every time he appears onstage. The audience responds with edgy delight from when he first removes his shirt and unself-consciously uses it to wipe the New Orleans sweat from his armpits and torso. Yet the actor\'s more important achievement is to bring a full palette to a man who is less than a hero but more than a brute. Cruel as Mr. Baldwin\'s Stanley is, and must be, he comes across as an ingenuous, almost-innocent working stiff until Blanche provokes him to move in for the kill. His Stanley is funny in a post-adolescent, bowling buddy way as late as the rape scene, when he fondly emulates a cousin who was a \"human bottle-opener.\" Even the famous interlude in which he screams for his wife, Stella, becomes pitiful as well as harrowing when Mr. Baldwin, a fallen, baffled beast, deposits himself in a sobbing heap at the bottom of a tenement\'s towering stairs.

Not the least of the actor\'s achievements is to remind us why Williams\'s play is so much more than the sum of its story of Stanley\'s battle with the sister-in-law who invades his and Stella\'s shabby French Quarter flat. \"I am 100 percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth,\" Stanley rightly bellows at one point, after Blanche has taunted him one time too many for being a \"Polack.\" He fills the play with the America of big-shouldered urban industrialism, of can-do pragmatism, of brute strength and vulgar humors: the swaggering America that believes, as Stanley paraphrases Huey Long, that \"every man is a king.\" Mr. Baldwin makes it easy to see how Blanche and the ambivalent, self-destructive author for whom she is a surrogate could find this simian, menacing man mesmerizing even as he embodies the very forces on a \"dark march\" to destroy them and their romantic old America of decaying plantations, kind strangers and \"tenderer feelings.\"

That destruction, which is the inexorable tragedy of \"Streetcar,\" remains untapped here because Ms. Lange\'s Blanche leaves the play pretty much as she enters it: as a weepy, uncertain yet resourceful woman who has endured some hard knocks rather than suffered a complete meltdown into madness. A terrific film actress who deserves credit for courageously making her Broadway debut in the most demanding of roles, Ms. Lange can easily be faulted for her lack of stage technique, including a voice that is not always audible and never sounds like that of a lapsed Mississippi belle. But she works harder and more intelligently than all three movie stars put together across the street in \"Death and the Maiden,\" and the real problem with her Blanche is less a matter of deficient stage experience than of emotional timidity.

\"I don\'t want realism, I want magic!\" goes one of Blanche\'s signature lines, but Ms. Lange insists on providing realism. She\'s not a moth facing disintegration as she flies into the flame but a spaced out, softer-spoken Frances Farmer in her cups. The diaphanous web of artifice that surrounds this heroine, the gauzy lies and fantasies that cloak her as surely as her paper Chinese lantern disguises her room\'s naked light bulb, never materializes.

Without them, there are no layers of personality for Mr. Baldwin\'s Stanley to rip through and no chance for the audience to be shattered by the drama of a woman being stripped of illusion after illusion until there is nothing left but the faint, bruised memory of an existence torn between the poles of gentility and desire. In Ms. Lange\'s resilient characterization, which siphons off much of Blanche\'s fragility and sorrow into an omnipresent and much-twisted handkerchief, the heroine\'s wry English teacher\'s humor survives but the traumatic soliloquies, from the account of her husband\'s suicide to her late confession of promiscuity, seem thought out rather than felt.