A Streetcar Named Desire

Dir. Elia Kazan. 1951, 122 mins. DCP. With Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden. Kazan’s epochal adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s smash Broadway drama features a mesmerizing Leigh as the faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois, arrived from Mississippi to her sister Stella’s apartment in New Orleans with nothing more than a suitcase. Stella’s husband, the brutish Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando, in his magnetic, medium-shifting breakout), suspicious of her mysterious backstory and ladylike demeanor, forces her to reckon with her past, leading to a battle of wills between two symbols of a shifting America—and, in the brilliant stylizations of Leigh and Brando, representatives of modern and traditional acting approaches. Full of iconic moments that pointed toward a new kind of cinema of the 1950s, Kazan’s film is the ultimate cinematic representative of the Actors Studio period in movies, which inspired Anderson in devising Asteroid City’s 1950s theatrical backdrop.

Tickets: $15 / $11 senior and students / $9 youth (ages 3–17) / discounted for MoMI members ($7–$11). Order tickets. Please pick up tickets at the Museum’s admissions desk upon arrival. All seating is general admission. Review safety protocols before your visit.