Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cinema version reunites the play's author, who worked on the script, its director, Elia Kazan, and most of the original principals, including Marlon (The Men) Brando as the tormented heroine's brutish brother-in-law, Kim Hunter as her well-balanced sister and Karl Maiden as her mama's-boy suitor. Even in casting Vivien Leigh in the leading role, thus brightening the marquee with a star more familiar to moviegoers than Broadway's Jessica Tandy, Director Kazan has chosen an actress who grew into the part in the London production of the play...
...anything more to do with him-seems not only mild but temporary. Elsewhere the movie's changes are more subtle. The play took no sides between Blanche and Kowalski; the film softens her into a more sympathetic figure, turns him into more of a loudmouthed heel. The new script also muffles the undertone of sex that accompanied the hostility between the two characters in the play...
Director John Farrow, apparently as puzzled by the script as any moviegoer, ends the film with a comedy rescue involving a band of Mexican Keystone cops. Jane Russell, looking woodenly decorative, works her throaty way through a couple of songs (Five Little Miles from San Berdoo and You'll Know), while Mitchum manages his undemanding part with an air of stoical resignation...
...have felt flattered by the new one. No director could hope (or want) to reproduce the mass of detail which Dreiser took from life to fill out the case history of a young man charged with the murder of his cast-off sweetheart. Moviemaker Stevens, working with an intelligent script by Michael Wilson and Harry Brown, captures the power of the novel without its heaviness, the insight without the inventories. The story still flows inexorably from the springs of character and environment. And though Stevens concentrates on its poignant love affairs, he neither overlooks Dreiser's implied social comment...
...script is more notable for words than action, and its pretensions to serious drama are undermined by a plot that never quite overcomes its resemblance to boudoir farce. Uriah the Hittite (Kieron Moore), whom David cheats first of his wife and then of his life, may well be the most gullible cuckold in literature; even played straight, the character seems like a fugitive from a Molière comedy...