"A Streetcar Named Desire": A Seminal Case in Cinema Censorship

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) is an interesting case study in Studio Era censorship. Despite the painstaking re-editing of the film demanded by the MPPDA, most critics at the time declared it to be faithful to the sexually bold and poetically bleak essence of Tennessee Williams’s play. In “The Artful Re-Routing of Streetcar,” Linda Cahir attributes the effectiveness of Kazan’s adaptation to the skillful way he used censorship constraints to his advantage, preserving the moral complexity of the play's characters and the unsettling sexual dynamic between them. By contrast, Roger Ebert wrote about the 1992 restoration of Streetcar claiming that the five minutes of sexually-charged scenes that had been cut were crucial to the film and enabled us to see, in retrospect, “how daring it really was” prior to the Catholic Legion of Decency’s inoculated version.

Such observations place Streetcar at the intersection of two discussions surrounding cinema censorship: first, how Kazan’s film handles the representation of female sexuality (a constant worry for censors at the time), and second, whether it is possible, as Cahir argues, to read between the lines in the 1951 version – to see the undercurrents of lust and homosexuality despite the Legion’s attempt to sanitize the film’s “sexual deviance.” Is Streetcar an example of ineffective censorship – a film where, despite the censors’ attempts, we still intuit its repressed and unarticulated taboos, and discern holes in its fabric where the gritty naturalism and primal instincts of the play leak through? Or do the missing five minutes add a crucial new dimension that makes the 1992 uncut version significantly more faithful to the play?

The question of how Streetcar shapes female desire/sexuality has been broached by scholars already, in The Catholic Crusade Against the Movies (Gregory Black), Flesh and Blood: National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence, and Censorship (Peter Keough), and “The Historical and Critical Context of Streetcar” (Annette Davison). All delineate the edits undertaken to make Blanche and Stella “acceptable” female characters. Keough's chapter focuses specifically on the reshaping of Blanche’s character to become “more virginal” – a clear victim of the brutish Stanley Kowalski, in contrast to her repressed but evident sexual appetite in Williams’ play.

Gregory Black's book looks at Streetcar’s revised ending and how it reveals the Legion’s “aversion to ambiguity” and moral discomfort – with Stella righteously leaving her abusive husband once and for all, instead of remaining with him as she does in the original version. “The Historical and Critical Context of Streetcar” draws attention to the fact that Stella’s character, rather than Stanley or Blanche, was considered most problematic by the Legion in the final stages of editing, due to its unapologetic embodiment of a woman openly craving and enjoying sex.

What all these sources point to is the preoccupation of Breen Era censors with taming the sexuality of the play’s female characters. Notable, too, is the fact that censors were more intent on reining in the film’s sexual energy than excluding the rape scene, which they decided to retain provided that due punishment was meted out to Stanley Kowalski.