I’ve mentioned this before, but when I first saw A Streetcar Named Desire in the mid ’70s I was totally on Team Kowalski. Marlon Brando was 25 or 26 during filming, and that primitive, coiled-spring magnetism was certainly peaking at this stage. But over the subsequent decades I’ve felt more and more compassion for poor, broken-wing, Japanese-lamp-shade Blanche Dubois.
The curious thing is that Tennessee Williams imagined Blanche to be 30 years old, which by today’s terms would and should be prime time for an educated woman, but by late 1940s or early ’50s terms it qualified her for old-maid status. (Vivien Leigh was 37 or 38 during filming in 1950 or early ’51, and so she seemed a tad more lined and middle-aged.)
I’m reacting to Michael Musto‘s post about feeling jolted by recognizing that he’s more than twice Blanche’s age now, and older than Bette Davis‘s Baby Jane Hudson, who’s supposed to be in her mid 50s, and Gloria Swanson‘s slightly younger Norma Desmond. (Born in 1899, Swanson was 50 when Sunset Boulevard was shot and 51 when it was released.)
The culture was awfully cruel to even slightly older women back in the ’50s and ’60s. Today a 50ish woman who keeps in shape and watches her diet isn’t seen as compromised or diminished at all.
