Cut Blanche

A before and after comparison of what was cut out  by Hollywood censors from the 1951 film of A Streetcar Named Desire. 

A FILM & COMMENTARY  

Presented in PROVINCETOWN, MA 

Written by Jeremy Lawrence, based on the book  When Blanche Met Brando by Sam Staggs 

Produced by the Provincetown Tennessee Williams  Theater Festival 

Bas Relief Park 

106 Bradford St. 

Provincetown, MA 

Making a film out of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951  was asking for trouble. The adaptation of the 1947  Broadway hit needed approval from the Motion Picture  Production Code office. Williams and the film’s director,  Elia Kazan, who staged Streetcar on Broadway, skillfully  managed negotiations over matters they had known in  advance would be problematic: a gay character spoken of  off-stage, a woman who enjoyed sex outside of marriage,  rape. 

Kazan and Williams wheedled, compromised, and some times persuaded the representatives of the Code to bal ance artistic considerations with moral concerns. After the  film was completed, further cuts were demanded by the  Catholic Legion of Decency. Kazan and Williams refused  to participate further.  

The final edit was supervised behind their backs by a  co-author of the Code, Martin Quigley, who guided editor  David Weisbart. Weisbart did as ordered but kept what he  had cut, made notes on where it came from, and secretly  stored what had been censored with a copy of the original  nitrate version. 

In 1989, Michael Arrick, then Warner Brothers Director of  Preservation, stumbled over the clips in a mismarked can  in a storage vault. In 2005, author Sam Staggs compared  

the two versions while preparing for his exhaustively re searched book When Blanche Met Brando.  

Working from Sam Staggs’ notes and video collection,  actor and Tennessee Williams scholar Jeremy Lawrence  shows the before and after, and how the cuts to Streetcar  are at the center of the Festival’s 2015 focus on Tennessee  Williams and Censorship. 

“I have the same right to say that moral  considerations have a precedence over artistic  considerations as you have to deny it.” 

– Martin Quigley, co-author of the Motion Picture Production  Code, to Elia Kazan, the director of A Streetcar Named Desire