When watching the movie A Streetcar Named Desire, one must compare the differences between the movie and its original source material. There are only a few major differences between the two, but there are also smaller differences that are quite noticeable to those who read the play in depth. There are tiny differences all throughout the movie which makes one wonder why these changes were put into place.
In the beginning of the original play, written by Tennessee Williams, the protagonist, Blanche Dubois is in New Orleans looking for her sister, Stella Dubois, and her home in the French Quarter. Blanche is definitely out of her comfort zone and someone helps her out. In the original play, Blanche arrives on the doorstep of her sister’s home, but doesn’t seem to believe that it was the right place. Eunice, Stella’s neighbor and friend, sees Blanche and lets her know that she is in the right place. However, in the movie, Blanche has not arrived yet to her sister’s place and gets help from a young man. This seems like an intentional change because it reflects on Blanche’s past and how she messed around with young boys in her hometown.
Another difference between the movie and the original play is how they mention people of color. In the play, Blanche is clearly racist and disapproves of how her sister is around so many black people and even in the beginning calls one black person the n word. There is also another point in the play when Blanche expresses how a “colored girl” should be helping Stella out in the household. In the movie, there is no mention of Blanche’s distaste for the people of color around her. In the movie, they are truly invisible while in the play they are talked about as low lives. This makes one question why the movie changed something about Blanche’s character. A possible answer to this question is the time period in which this movie was made. This movie was released in 1951 and during that time, segregation was in full swing. It could be possible that this had an effect on the actual movie. Another reason might be that the actress who played Blanche, Vivien Leigh, refused to be a part of a movie that discriminated against people of color, but that might just be wishful thinking.
I also saw that the movie had changed some of the scenes that were in the original play. For example, when Blanche first arrives at Stella’s house, she waits for her there, but in the movie Blanche goes over to the bowling alley that Stella is at. Blanche and Stella were at a cafe when talking for the first time but I thought that they were in Stella’s apartment when I read the play. I noticed also that Blanche always seemed to be in the spotlight whenever around Mitch which was somewhat different from the book because Blanche always hid herself from him. This could be because it was a movie and they had to make the actress look good.
These little differences added up for me, and even though the base of the story is there, I feel as though I ingested two different pieces of media rather than one work. I believe that these changes were put in place to make it feel like something new and make it separate from the play. This could have been a cash grab for the movie industry because the play was already being performed so they had to make it different in some aspects.