I finally got my copy

I finally got my copy of the forthcoming two-disc A Streetcar Named Desire (Warner Home Video, 5.2), and here are two recordings from the 1947 Marlon Brando screen test, when he was 23. It's mainly footage of Brando and a somewhat older actress acting a scene from an early version of a script called Rebel Without a Cause, in which Brando's character wasn't named "Jim Stark" (the teenaged kid played by James Dean in the 1955 film) but "Harold." In excerpt #1, Harold, obviously angry and distressed, is talking to the girl about getting away (maybe to South America, he says), and excerpt #2 is recorded from footage of an off-the-cuff chat between Brando and an off-screen casting woman (possibly named Ruth Ford). The test was apparently shot before Brando began performing in the '47 play of "A Streetcar Named Desire"-- when the woman asks for his previous stage credits he only mentions plays he did prior to "Streetcar."

Posted by Jeffrey Wells on April 4, 2006 at 11:57 AM

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