Core Response #3 - Josh Nallathambi

The performances of the two leads in A Streetcar Named Desire indicate the juxtaposition in eras, acting styles, and star personas.

Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois represents what Gledhill and Dyer would classify as a melodramatic way of acting. She brings a larger than life presence to make her character pop off the screen. Her choices fall into the definition of excess of expression involved with melodramatic identities: “hyperbolic emotions, extravagant gesture, high-flown sentiments, declamatory speech, spectacular settings and so on.” Leigh makes the viewer fully aware that it’s her as Blanche. Though her character is suffering a mental breakdown and unstable, Leigh still takes every moment as an “acting moment.” Her delivery and body movement is constantly the most dynamic it can be. She carries herself like she is the main star of the film, which at its release, probably was. She was the one of the main four actors who was already an icon, already playing one legendary character 12 years ago with Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. The main draw for audiences going into this movie wouldn’t have been the allure of Tennessee Williams’ play, but Vivien Leigh playing a juicy role. Leigh certainly knew that and milked it every second she appears on screen.

In contrast, Marlon Brando’s performance as Stanley Kowalski embodies the method portrayal of acting. Brando, nowhere near the star he was yet to become when Streetcar first premiered, sought to disappear his persona within the brute physicality of Kowalski’s character. As Gledhill says, the Method allowed Brando to impose his body and delivery in a way that diffused his persona into Stanley without it taking away from the truth of the character. He doesn’t want the viewer to think of it as a Marlon Brando performance. He wants it to be them watching Stanley Kowalski, a brash dock worker in New Orleans. Though it set the stage for the rough masculine persona that Brando would perfect time and time again throughout the rest of his career, his relative low profile at the time allowed for the viewer to attach onto the persona of Stanley Kowalski rather than Marlon Brando.