Force Fed Films: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

As is with most Thursdays, today is yet another Force Fed Film. I know we have a few new readers recently, so I'll just quickly explain the concept here. Normally Puneet and myself have the benefit of picking and choosing what films we watch, but once a week we pick a film for each other to watch, and no matter what it is, we have to watch it.

Today the movie Puneet picked for me was A Streetcar Named Desire. He's been having some successes giving me all these classic movies the past few weeks. I was hopeful that this famous Marlon Brando movie would be just as successful for me. See if I enjoyed this 1951 film, or if it was too out of date to connect with.


So obviously this is a classic film that most people will know about. Even I immediately recognized the names of the characters and was simply waiting for famous lines to spring up. Speaking of the names of characters, this film stars Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, Kim Hunter as his wife Stella, Vivian Leigh as Blanche DuBois. Now if you're a fan of movies, you should be able to put some of these together with famous movie lines. One would be the sound of Marlon Brando's voice screaming "Stelllaaaaa!" into the night. The other line I was waiting for is harder for you to guess without hearing her voice, but it would be Blanche DuBois saying "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers." This last one haunted me the whole movie as it turns out it's the very last line of the whole film.

The story is that Blanche DuBois shows up at her sister Stella's apartment looking for somewhere to say. She claims she's lost the old family home and her job. She's clearly very distressed and babbles on and on. Stella is trying to take it easy on her, attributing the stress to the trip and losing her job. When her husband Stanley comes home, he's almost immediately suspicious of her, wondering why such a woman has suddenly shown up, and not fully believing her story of "losing the house" which is so vague and she never goes into it. He becomes increasingly suspicious once her lavish belongings arrive the next day, some of which are far beyond the small wage of an English teacher. The rest of the film is simply about Blanche trying to find a good man, and her constant unstable ramblings. Meanwhile the whole situation is taking a huge strain on Stanley and Stella's marriage as Blanche stays for months on end.

Stanley talking with Stella about all the pearls Blanche owns

As good as this story sounds on paper, I actually found the execution was not an enjoyable one. Mainly this is due to Blanche's ceaseless rambling which I just found annoying. I also couldn't connect with any of the characters, and this I think is due to the era the film was made in. To be honest, I wasn't even a fan of Marlon Brando's acting in this. Not that I thought he was bad, I just didn't like Stanley at all. While I've enjoyed other older films, I just couldn't get into this one at all and quite disliked it.

I can say some positive things about it though. Even though I didn't enjoy the movie, I thought the writing was well done. As much as Blanche's speeches were annoying, they were almost poetic in their descriptiveness. I also liked the score to the movie in places. The story at its core about this woman who is slowly falling apart and going insane is somewhat interesting.

I think it's pretty clear that I didn't enjoy this movie. I'm not entirely sure what it was about the movie, maybe the era, maybe the sensibilities of the characters, maybe the characters themselves, or maybe a little bit of all of it. But in the end it just didn't work for me at all. It's definitely a classic though, and it was kinda cool to see where those famous lines fit into the context of the film. It's still a piece of history, so check it out if you're curious. Hopefully you'll get more out of it than I did.