
A Streetcar Named Desire
Three of its four leads won Academy Awards and the fourth was Brando: this is where screen acting stopped being theatrical and started being something else entirely.

Three of its four leads won Academy Awards and the fourth was Brando: this is where screen acting stopped being theatrical and started being something else entirely.

The premise is so clean that thrillers have been borrowing it for seventy years: two men meet on a train and one of them proposes swapping murders.

Huston took the production into the Congo and almost everyone fell ill: what came back is Bogart and Hepburn on a battered steam launch, insulting each other into something like love.

It ends with a seventeen-minute ballet and no dialogue, staged against sets copied from French painters: Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli bet a whole musical on one uninterrupted dance.

George Stevens shot the close-ups so tight that Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor barely fit the frame: a poor young man takes a job at his rich uncle's factory and starts climbing.

Peter Ustinov plays Nero as a needy child with an empire, and steals the entire picture: MGM built ancient Rome at Cinecitta and the film rescued the studio's finances.