A Film Canon

The greatest cinematic vision of lust, A Streetcar Named Desire turns on two different types of acting - traditional (Vivien Leigh) and Method (Marlon Brando) - and, more specifically, on their respective characterisation of bodily extremities as a mere extension of speech, as evinced in Blanche Dubois' continual, restless use of hands, fingers and hair to parse her increasingly baroque monologues, and of speech as a mere extension of bodily extremities, as evinced in Stanley Kowalski's unprecedented muscularity, whose all- encompassing presence includes his lips, reducing everything they offer to the Tarzan-like grunts appropriate to his plethora of ripped and half-ripped shirts. In this way, Kazan and Tennessee Williams manage to evoke the extraordinary bodily convulsion, or reconfiguration, that constitutes giving into "desire...brutal desire", as well as the magnitude of hysteria required to resist it, opening up a wealth of sexual material previously unavailable in mainstream cinema - particularly female nymphomania and (possibly) paedophilia (certainly predation) - as well as imbuing, and occasionally disguising, it with the decadent morbidity of the Southern family from which Blanche and sister Stella (Kim Hunter) spring, the American Romanticism that Blanche so liberally quotes and, above all, the queasy, dreamy ambience of the "Quarter"; a tympanum for her wandering mind, bending time round its desire: "...these long, rainy afternoons in New Orleans, when an hour isn't just an hour, but a little piece of eternity dropped in our hand."