When Streetcar was released in 1951, the public walked out, but the critics stayed and raved over acting that was probably the most powerful ever seen on an American screen. Pauline Kael, for example: “Vivien Leigh gives one of those rare performances that can truly be said to evoke pity and terror. As Blanche, she looks and acts like a destroyed Dresden shepherdess. No one since the early Lillian Gish and the almost unknown, exquisite Nadia Sibirskaya of Menilmontant has had this quality of hopeless, feminine frailty; Shakespeare might have had women like this in mind when he conceived Ophelia. Blanche's plea, ‘I don't want realism...I want magic!' is central to Streetcar. When Marlon Brando, as the realist Kowalski, shatters her system of illusions, she disintegrates. And he is revealed as a man without compassion--both infant and brute. Elia Kazan's direction is often stagey, the sets and arrangements of actors are frequently too transparently ‘worked out'; but who cares when you're looking at just about the best feminine performance you're ever going to see, as well as an interpretation by Brando that is just about perfection. This film has some of the best dialogue ever written by an American....”
The public, of course, eventually caught on, and the imitations of Blanche du Bois and Stanley Kowalski haven't stopped since; if only to quiet the camp, Streetcar Named Desire is worth another, serious look. It's interesting to note that Kazan himself describes it as “a beautiful play that I shot without softening or deepening it, filming it as it was because there was nothing to change.”