Year: 1951
Director: Elia Kazan
Damn. My NY resolution is to consume more of the classics in one form or another, and the project began strongly with films of A Man For All Seasons (1966), The Crucible (1996), Cleopatra (1963), The Scarlet Letter (1995) and Far From the Madding Crowd (2015), all of which I’ve got a kick out of for one reason or another.
Things came to a screeching halt with Streetcar. I always thought I liked Tennessee Williams and remember enjoying the play at Leicester Haymarket in the early 1990s, but this? Non merci. Could I really dig the Demi Moore box-office poison of The Scarlet Letter more than a movie commonly considered to be one of the greatest ever made, a film Woody Allen calls ‘total artistic perfection’?
Yes. Perhaps it coming so soon after the latest lockdown announcement was to blame, but two hours of Vivien Leigh’s nails-down-a-blackboard screeching and Marlon Brando breaking things proved a stressful and exhausting experience, offering no insight into the human condition other than ‘these people really need to calm down’. Having recognised a chunk of sampled dialogue, I paused the film in order to locate and play the song in question (a million brownie points if you can guess what it was) but resuming, I found the last act to be even more melodramatic and overheated than what came before, and I was overjoyed when it finally ended. Perhaps I’ve already had my Tennessee Williams phase. (I’m certainly reconsidering showings of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie.) Perhaps it’s all Covid’s fault. Either way, it’s big thumbs down from me.
Might appeal to people who enjoyed:
Arguments
Son is a big fan of 40s and 50s classic B and W’s so we have consumed recently His Girl Friday, Some Like It Hot, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity etc. Tennessee Williams, a playwright almost entirely about atmosphere, is very tricky to translate to film and not sure any film of his work is entirely successful.
Amazon also has early Fellini i Vitelloni free on prime video at the moment – a world away from the surreal excess of later films, its an Italian version of Billy Liar and truly to be recommended.
Great post! I never liked this film either.
I hope this is the start of a series.
Since Christmas I have watched 4 vintage films and enjoyed them immensely.
Double Indemnity
Casablanca
Rear Window
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
The two Bogart films were my favourites with possibly Casablanca shading Treasure ( but there is not a lot in it ).
All four were certainly much better than the utter unfathomable pile of shite that I watched last night (Tenet).
Classic movies are well worth the effort.
Revisiting the Third Man next.
Yes, and I caught North By Northwest on the idiot box again the other day. What a movie. Gags? check. Thrills? check. Great set pieces? check. Really nasty baddies? check. Sparkling dialogue? check. Great yarn? youbetcha. Yet nowadays all films seem to be trying so much it’s become tedious to watch them strain too hard to deliver anything like the same mixture of hokum, scares and charms. There’s little elegance anymore, just lots of flash. I think the last genuinely great action thriller with humour was the first Indiana Jones. Since then it’s been downhill all the way to the server farm.
Out of Sight ticks all the boxes and Cary Grant would surely have been in it if it had been made 50 years previous. You’re in for a retro stylish thriller treat if you’ve not seen it. A minor miracle – even extracting an A-grade performance from J-Lo.
And a little boy shoving his fingers in his ears before the gun goes off in the café scene!
I think one of the most richly entertaining films ever made. Perfection, Hitchcock was the best.
As for recent films, Knives Out was a very old fashioned, extremely entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. Saw it almost exactly a year ago in one of those luxury cinemas. Remember when we used to leave the house to watch films with other people? I miss it.
I can only agree on the subject of vintage film.
Since Christmas, I have watched:
Rear Window
A Night at the Opera
Key Largo
School for Scoundrels
The Cruel Sea
Comfort & Joy (not exactly vintage, I know)
I can’t say Tenet or any of the current crop are inspiring me to see them…
A Night At the Opera. Pure joy on celluloid. To think there are at least two Marx Brothers films that are better.
Maybe so…but it remains my favourite…
Not trying to put it down, its one of my top 3 MB films, but a testament to how great their great is that (IMHO) they made two films even better than Night at the Opera.
Is Night at the opera on any streaming services (or day at the races, for that matter)? I only have the first four MB DVDs, sadly none of the later.
Key Largo. What a film!
Nobody fancy a crack at the sampled dialogue? Clue number one, the dialogue was:
Stella: “You didn’t need to be so cruel to someone as alone as she is.”
Stanley: “The delicate article she is.”
Stella: “She is, she was. You didn’t know Blanche as a girl. Nobody. nobody was as tender or as trusting as she was. But people like you abused her and forced her to change.”
Clue number two. It was featured on the band’s debut but was removed from subsequent pressings. (A fact I only discovered last night, which made me wonder if I could have got more for the copy I sold on Discogs the other day.)
Is there only me playing?
Well, there can be only one winner, and you’re it!
I’d like to thank my parents, my manager, Marlon Brando for being an all-round stellar guy….
STELLAR!!!!!!!
That video is an outrage! Those women were not really playing on the record! But then again neither were The Manics, except James Dean Bradfield who played everything apart from the drums which were programmed.
What film does “Blanket Roll Blues” come from? I’d always assumed it was Streetcar. Apparently no.
As we proved last year, old ones are (generally) the best:
“Streetcar” probably deserves to be seen once, like many films adapted from plays it is rather static and non cinematic. I think Vivien Leigh’s performance is pretty good though. Marlon, well I think he was an overrated actor, very good in On the Waterfront though (also a dated film), “STELLA ….”
I haven’t seen the film, but watched the filmed National Theatre production with Gillian Anderson as Blanche when it was broadcast in the first lockdown. La Anderson was electrifying.
I’m on board with all of this. Gave Streetcar a go a few months back, and bailed for the same reason after about half an hour. As the actor Ernest Thesiger is reputed to have said while in the trenches, ‘My dear, the noise! The people!’
It’s a great sadness to me that Mrs thep can’t be made to watch old black-and-white films – they remind her of wet Sunday afternoons in her childhood, she says (which is precisely why I like them, of course). She’s pretty suspicious of old colour films too – there are so many films I haven’t seen, is her rationale. Including this one, I generally reply, and so we go round and round. She even gave up on Mank halfway through.
Getting Mrs Bangs on board is partly my thinking behind behind badging it the Year of Classics. The idea is a varied diet of established oldies, recent adaptations and even — in the case of The Scarlet Letter — interesting failures.
Last night’s offering, The Bishop’s Wife, was a hit.
Mank, as a black and white film about the making of a black and white film, must have annoyed her twice over.
I liked it, a bit too long, but lots of atmosphere and good performances, particularly from Gary Oldman and Charles Dance. I’m no big film buff, but I did know about the history it is trying to revise, of Welles being the sole author of Citizen Kane. I thought it went too far in the other direction, and made it look as though Herman Mankiewicz should have got all of the recognition for it. Even if he did write the majority of it, and I’m not sure that he did, a film isn’t all in the script, or there would be no point in making it. Welles must get at a big part of the credit for the direction and visual aspects along with Gregg Toland for the photography. Interesting, though, that a film which is now 80 years old has developed a mythology which is still argued about.
I was surprised Mankiewicz was only 43 at the time. He seemed much older. It’s not Gary Oldman’s appearance, he looks pretty good for 62, but the way the character is written and played.
There must be something going round. I decided to try and investigate omissions from my viewing recently too. This week’s entry is The Thin Man.
What’s all this fuss about watching old movies?
When people ask me what my favourite genre of film is, I usually say “black and white”.
We HKR fans are more enlightened and open to the possibility of Technicolor…
Technicolor? You lot out east don’t even have electricity…