This month at the BFI, you won’t be able to move for distressed Southern dames and rugged young men in vests: a season of movies adapted from Tennessee Williams’s plays is under way. Its centrepiece is a new print of Elia Kazan’s 1951 film of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois and Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski. A boringly directed film, it doesn’t make much of a case for the play (adapted for the screen by Williams himself). Leigh has the air of a performer at work, to an extent not quite justified by Blanche’s being a player of roles. In comparison, Brando’s naturalism is all the more forceful. His snarling performance — surprisingly funny in places — is by far and away the main reason to see the movie.

12A, 126 mins

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