A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
Something went gloriously awry when Elia Kazan staged Tennessee Williams' poetic parable of antique Southern illusions colliding with postwar urban brutishness. The young Marlon Brando made Stanley Kowalski a manifesto for sexual menace that defines American acting to this day. The 1951 film version, with Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois, restores equilibrium without neutering Brando--a great play revitalized. It's in a topflight pack of six Williams adaptations that includes chats with surviving co-stars, TIME critic Richard Schickel's Kazan documentary and an early, quirky Brando screen test.
THE MIRACLE WORKER
It could be a soppy homily: the emergence of...
