“The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one’s office for a job.”

-Tennessee Williams, quoted in Kenneth Tynan’s Profiles

Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, dir. Elia Kazan)

Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, dir. Elia Kazan)

“The audience at the beginning should see her negative effect on Stella and want Stanley to tell her off. He does, he exposes her, and then we gradually see how genuinely in pain, how actually desperate she is, how warm, tender, and loving she can be (the Mitch story) - then we begin to go with her. The audience realizes that they are witnessing the death of something extraordinary - colorful, varied, lost, witty, imaginative, of her own integrity - and thus they feel the tragedy. 

Blanche, out of place, unappreciated, a stranger in the modern, rough, coarse South; yet despite sickness and unbalance, she has more warmth than any of them. It is important symbolically that Blanche is an English teacher. She is the last repository of culture, abandoned, not prized, deformed, destroyed, gone begging for protection.

At the end, the grandeur and nobility belong to Blanche, and the “victors”, Stella and Stanley, are left with each other, a relationship of vulgar crudity and, for Stella, of growing emptiness and terror. (Also, Tennessee [Williams] wants desperately to be with other people, yet be superior to them.)”

-Elia Kazan, quoted in Kazan on Directing

Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958, dir. Richard Brooks) 

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Suddenly, Last Summer (1959, dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz) (via)

“Man devours man in a metaphorical sense. He feeds upon his fellow creatures, without the excuse of animals. Animals actually do it for survival, out of hunger…. I use that metaphor [of cannibalism] to express my repulsion with this characteristic of man, the way people use each other without conscience: ‘We all use each other and that’s what we think of as love.’

It horrified me, the film. [Producer] Sam Spiegel made the mistake of inviting me to a private screening of it in his apartment and I walked out in the middle of it. I was so offended by the literal approach because the play was metaphorical; it was sort of a poem, I thought. I loved Katharine Hepburn in it, but I didn’t like the film. 

…[The death by cannibalism scene] became so realistic, with the boys chasing Sebastian up the hill - I thought it was a travesty. It was about how people devour each other in an allegorical sense.”

-Tennessee Williams, Conversations with Tennessee Williams

Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959, dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz) Photo by Burt Glinn (via)

Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, dir. Elia Kazan)

Marlon Brando, 1950 (photo by Philippe Halsman) (via)

“I have read the play [Orpheus Descending] three times since yesterday and am going to read it again. I think that it is the best play that you have done so far. I have been afraid for you sometimes, because success sings a deadly lullaby to most people. Success is a real and subtle whore, who would like nothing better than to catch you sleeping and bite your cock off.

You have been as brave as anybody I’ve known, and it is comforting to think about it. You probably don’t think of yourself as brave because nobody who really has courage does, but I know you are and I get food from that.”

-Brando, in a 1955 letter to Tennessee Williams (full letter here)(via) 

Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, dir. Elia Kazan)

“Blanche is a woman with everything stripped away. She is a tragic figure and I understand her. But playing her tipped me into madness.” 

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Carroll Baker in Baby Doll (1956, dir. Elia Kazan) (via)