For my investigation, I will use some important sources regarding the issue of censorship and adaptation. The first is R. Barton Palmer’s study, titled Hollywood in Crisis: Tennessee Williams and the Evolution of the Adult Film which investigates the ways in which the Hollywood filmmaking system changed radically from the 1930s because of the introduction of the censorship. Palmer takes his example based on Tennessee Williams’s celebrated play which was adapted into film by Elia Kazan in 1947, A Streetcar Named Desire. In 2014, Gillian Anderson directed and starred in a short prequel to A Streetcar Named Desire, titled The Departure. The short film was written by the novelist Andrew O'Hagan and is part of Young Vic's short film series, which was produced in collaboration with The Guardian. [35] Opera [ edit ] In a 1992 episode of The Simpsons, " A Streetcar Named Marge", a musical version of the play, titled Oh, Streetcar!, was featured. Ned Flanders and Marge Simpson took the leading roles as Stanley and Blanche, respectively.

Manvell, Roger. Theatre and Film: A Comparative Study of the Two Forms of Dramatic Art, and of the Problems of Adaptation of Stage Plays into Films. Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses Inc, 1979. 133 Maxine Peake stalks to the heart of Blanche DuBois". Theguardian.com. September 18, 2016 . Retrieved September 23, 2016. Wood, Alex (February 28, 2023). "Olivier Awards 2023 nominations announced – see the full list". WhatsOnStage.com . Retrieved February 28, 2023. Keywords: PCA, Hollywood, censorship, stardom, Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, Glenn Jordan, Woody Allen, Pedro AlmodóvarIn 1955, the television program Omnibus featured Jessica Tandy reviving her original Broadway performance as Blanche, with her husband, Hume Cronyn, as Mitch. It aired only portions of the play that featured the Blanche and Mitch characters. In 1995, André Previn adapted the play into an opera with a libretto by Philip Littel. Three years later, Previn conducted its world premiere with the San Francisco Opera. The play was also adapted for television in 1995. Starring Alec Baldwin as Stanley, Jessica Lange as Blanche, and Diane Lane as Stella, this was the second television adaptation. (An earlier version had been produced in 1984.) For some television watchers (this author included), their first exposure to Williams’s play was its musical send up in “A Streetcar Named Marge,” a 1992 episode of the animated series The Simpsons written by Jeff Martin. Unidentified photographer. Tennessee Williams and Lars Schmidt. Lars Schmidt Collection, Music Division. A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the most critically acclaimed plays of the twentieth century [2] and Williams's most popular work. It still ranks among his most performed plays, and has inspired many adaptations in other forms, notably a critically acclaimed film that was released in 1951. [3] Name [ edit ]

The Sydney Theatre Company production of A Streetcar Named Desire premiered on September 5 and ran until October 17, 2009. This production, directed by Liv Ullmann, starred Cate Blanchett as Blanche, Joel Edgerton as Stanley, Robin McLeavy as Stella and Tim Richards as Mitch. [17] The action begins with the arrival of Blanche DuBois at the New Orleans home of her sister, Stella Kowalski. Blanche references the title of the show among her first lines as she explains to one of Stella’s neighbors that “they told me to take a streetcar named Desire….” Having suffered the loss of her family home and her job, Blanche is emotionally and mentally fragile. She is no match for the corrosive cruelty of her brother-in-law, Stanley, and ultimately suffers an emotional breakdown. The play ends with a doctor and a nurse leading Blanche away from the Kowalski home. The personality of the star meant the artists themselves in their private lives, at least that image they showed to the public combined with the fictional character(s) they played. The persona meant a “durable image manifested repeatedly in the media” which belonged to the person no matter if it was just “an adjustment of the self to the contingencies of media exposure” (King, 2015, 11). It was important, therefore, to give a great performance in a movie since the audience would recognize the actors as the characters they were impersonating and later they would refer to them as such, creating a double identity, a persona for the artist. If the actor’s career was rising, the persona would become “a self-sufficient public image” (King, 2015, 12). It was the studios’ best interest, therefore, to protect the actors’ persona and hide if it was only a pose, an image for the public eye (King, 2015, 12). However, there were times when the artists’ private lives and personalities did not match with their public personas. This mismatch was also a question of identity. But with the rapid development of the media, the appearance of gossip journals and tabloids and the rising number of paparazzi, especially from the 1970s, it was immensely difficult to preserve any such dual identities. Therefore, the star image has become truly complex, including “everything that is publicly available about them” (Dyer 1986, 2) and consisting of the opinion of the critics, journalists, the “way the image is used in […] advertisements, novels, [and] pop songs” (3). What is more, another important factor for a star’s image is the pool of different film genres he or she plays in and the type of characters he or she portrays. In this regard, Richard Dyer pointed out that a star cannot be fully unique due to her or his image that appear (stereo)typical to the audience. Put it differently, “it is never possible for any individual member of the audience to comprehensively know all the textual sources through which a star’s identity is represented” (McDonald 2000, 7) with the only tool which displays them to the world being the media and the different films they play in. Due to various images stars have, they can be put in different categories such as ’stars as capital’ which, according to Paul Mcdonald means that

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Censorship and Stardom in Various Adaptations of Tenessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire" by HelgaSzabó

The film adaptation was released on September 19, 1951. Although Tandy won a Tony Award for her portrayal as Blanche, she was the only one of the four main cast not to reprise her role for the film version. Vivian Leigh portrayed Blanche and won an Academy Award for Best Actress for the role. Hunter and Malden were also awarded Oscars for their respective roles, but Brando lost to Humphrey Bogart. Despite this loss, Brando’s portrayal of Stanley and his desperate plea of “Hey, Stella!” remains part of popular culture to this day. Alex North. Conductor’s score for A Streetcar Named Desire ballet, undated. Box-Folder 17/1, Alex North Music for Documentary Film, Theater, Dance, and Concert, Music Division. In a 2016 episode of The Originals, titled "A Streetcar Named Desire", Klaus Mikaelson and Elijah Mikaelson are forced to face two siblings, Tristan and Aurora de Martel, once friends but now foes. For a good auteur several elements are needed to make a film successful. It is not enough to create a good narrative line and interesting dialogues but the characters of the movie are crucial part of the movie’s success. More precisely, the actors behind the characters are the core elements, too, because as an artist’s figure and aura can turn a dull narrative into an exciting one through bringing his or her own personality into the characters he or she is impersonating. This is one of the features of stardom. The Method actors, Brando foremost, always claimed their style was a way to reach realism in a performance, but the Method led to super-realism, to a heightened emotional content that few "real" people would be able to sustain for long, or convincingly. Running just over two hours, and being minimalist in its being so intimate and dialogue-driven, the film manages to sustain a fair bit of momentum and intrigue through plenty of smart scripting and engaging performances found on and off of the screen, but it is still too long, losing a lot of momentum and getting to be repetitious with its great deal of chatter, much of which may as well be about a whole lot of nothing, if it's not going to bring much to the expository depths. There's not much in the way of immediate development in this intimate drama which drops you right into the story of characters who you get used to amidst all of the dialogue, and get invested in through good acting, but who still have something missing in their exposition, feeling like types whose circumstances feel rather unconvincing, at least in the wake of histrionics. As a southern gothic, this drama has the potential to be both fresh and realist, and it betrays both of the those aspects by conforming, to melodramatics, exacerbating a sense of somewhat unconvincing thinness to the characterization with improbable happenings and turns, made all the worse by sentimental dramatic atmospherics and some theatrical aspects. Marlon Brando and a few other performers are right on the money, and Kim Hunter is solid for the most part, but Vivien Leigh, often bombing in a way only a 1950s film starlet could, joins Elia Kazan's overdramatic directorial touches and Tennessee Williams' and Oscar Saul's aforementioned lapses in written genuineness in reflecting the dating and staginess that really does a number of the full effectiveness of this film. To make matters worse, although the subject matter and certain other elements of this melodrama are very weighty, there's not much one can do with a basic story concept that is so reliant on dialogue and an almost claustrophobic scope, which could be better embraced as intimate if it wasn't for the shortcomings that extend beyond the natural. There are a number of rewardingly engrossing attributes in this melodrama, and the final product at least manages to come to the brink of rewarding, yet momentum gradually sinks under the overwhelming weight of natural shortcomings that you grow more aware of the more dragging, histrionics and dated staginess set in. I find the final product rather underwhelming, but it would have been more so if there weren't a couple of elements that hit fairly hard, including aesthetic elements.NY Times: A Streetcar Named Desire". Movies & TV Dept. The New York Times. 2009. Archived from the original on January 25, 2009 . Retrieved December 19, 2008. The theatre critic and former actress Blanche Marvin, a friend of Williams, says the playwright used her name for the character Blanche DuBois, named the character's sister Stella after Marvin's former surname Zohar (which means Star), and took the play's line "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers" from something she said to him. [44] "A Streetcar Named Success" [ edit ]

I happen to agree with Louis L'Amour. As a red-blooded American, I am perplexed at the way this movie unfolds. It's as if the movie is trying to prove that Stanley is a waste of masculinity, while using the most attractive actor and acting to portray him. Or something like that....?

Glenn Jordan directed a new A Streetcar Named Desire film for the CBS network in 1995, attempting to revive the original play. For this reason, Jordan followed the narrative structure of Streetcar word by word, creating a fidelity to the letter adaptation, which was a thorough borrowing process. Jordan did not alter any lines from the play in his 1995 adaptation; on the contrary, the plot is the exactly same as in the 1947 version. What is more, the performance of Jessica Lange, however, strongly resembles that of Vivien Leigh from Elia Kazan’s Streetcar adaptation. Nevertheless, Lange could not provide an entirely new figure of the lost ‘Southern Belle’ and Jordan’s directing turned out to be a less creative in its use of intertextual allusions. All in all, the director’s intention, that of producing a remake of Tennessee Williams’s successful drama was a success in terms of adapting the play but without the aim of create something new in its spirit. A Tribute From Tennessee Williams To 'Heroic Tallulah Bankhead' ". archive.nytimes.com . Retrieved December 23, 2022. In April 2012, Blair Underwood, Nicole Ari Parker, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Wood Harris starred in a multiracial adaptation at the Broadhurst Theatre. [18] Theatre review aggregator Curtain Critic gave the production a score of 61 out of 100 based on the opinions of 17 critics. [19]