A Streetcar named desire

Marlon Brando was a little-known actor when he was cast in the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s play; the film adaptation made him a star. “As Stanley, the brutish brother-in-law of fading belle Blanche DuBois (Vivienne Leigh), Brando is magnetic, even, and almost especially, when he’s barely doing anything at all. Indelibly sexy, swaggering, animalistic and balancing a sense of real danger with the occasional fleck of childlike joy and even a kind of romance, his performance threatens to topple the film over into the Stanley Kowalski show, and yet . . . there’s never a moment where he feels anything but real” (IndieWire).