The New Pictures

A Streetcar Named Desire (Charles K. Feldman; Warner) is an impressive adaptation of Tennessee Williams' prize-winning 1947 Broadway hit about a fate-battered Southern belle in the last agonies of degradation. Though the movie has its flaws, it can claim a merit rare in Hollywood films: it is a grownup, gloves-off drama of real human beings.

The cinema version reunites the play's author, who worked on the script, its director, Elia Kazan, and most of the original principals, including Marlon (The Men) Brando as the tormented heroine's brutish brother-in-law, Kim Hunter as her well-balanced sister and Karl Maiden as her mama's-boy suitor. Even in casting Vivien Leigh in the leading role, thus brightening the marquee with a star more familiar to moviegoers than Broadway's Jessica Tandy, Director Kazan has chosen an actress who grew into the part in the London production of the play.

Within the limits of Hollywood's self-censoring Production Code, the movie follows the play's story faithfully. Again Blanche Du Bois moves into her sister's squalid New Orleans flat, the last stop on her alcoholic, nymphomaniac flight from a tide of troubles: a long siege of family deaths, the withering away of family fortune, the suicide of her young husband, the loss of her home, her job, her reputation. She still clings to a pretense of genteel propriety. But when she crosses Stanley Kowalski, her roughneck brother-in-law, he drags out her past, and thus strips the illusion from the gullible suitor she has all but hooked. Finally, while his wife is in the hospital having a baby, Kowalski brutally ravishes Blanche and pushes her completely over the edge of sanity.

To get the rape episode by the censors, Director Kazan had to agree to change the play's ending to punish Kowalski, though the "punishment"--his wife's refusal to have anything more to do with him--seems not only mild but temporary. Elsewhere the movie's changes are more subtle. The play took no sides between Blanche and Kowalski; the film softens her into a more sympathetic figure, turns him into more of a loudmouthed heel. The new script also muffles the undertone of sex that accompanied the hostility between the two characters in the play.

At its high points, Streetcar is observant, moving and exciting. Unhappily, despite Director Kazan's efforts to get movement inside the cramped settings, the movie too often seems stagebound and slow. It also has stretches of talk that go better in the theater than on the screen.

In her first movie in four years, and her first in Hollywood since 1941's That Hamilton Woman, Vivien Leigh seems overshadowed by the skilled actors around her. Among her handicaps: a somewhat watered-down characterization, and most of the movie's talkiest passages. The brilliantly lifelike playing of Actor Maiden and Actress Hunter is even better than it was on the stage. As the hulking, animalistic Kowalski, Marlon Brando fills his scenes with a virile power that gives Streetcar its highest voltage.

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A Streetcar Named Desire is the latest picture to suggest that Hollywood Censor Joseph Breen has been stretching the Production Code to let more of the facts of life reach the screen. The reason, according to Hollywood observers: to help producers strengthen their movies for the competition with TV. Other recent examples: A Place in the Sun, in which a character tries to get an abortion; People Will Talk, whose broad-minded hero marries a girl pregnant, out of wedlock, by another man; The Prowler, which turns on a wedding-night discovery that the bride is an expectant mother.

People Will Talk (20th Century-Fox). After looking askance at suburbia (A Letter to Three Wives) and show business (All About Eve), Writer-Director Joseph Mankiewicz now turns a critical eye on one of the nation's most revered sacred cows: the medical profession. In the third installment of his continuing probe of U.S. manners & morals, Mankiewicz argues that medicine needs more physicians like eccentric Gary Grant, whose lavish clinic is run on the theory that the sick are guests, not inmates, and should never be wakened at 6 in the morning for compulsory baths and breakfasts.

Physician Grant is a doctor to warm any patient's heart. In his lecture courses at the university, he scandalizes such colleagues as dandruffy Hume Cronyn by suggesting that a sympathetic bedside manner is as important as the study of anatomy. A disciple of broad-gauged living, Grant also finds time to conduct the school orchestra, play with model trains and fall in love with Jeanne Grain, a young student whose antisocial acts and attitudes include unmarried pregnancy, attempted suicide, and a tendency to faint at the sight of a cadaver. For good measure, Grant's constant companion is a dull-witted giant (Finlay Currie), who not only looks like a murderer but is one.

Based on a 1933 German movie by Curt Goetz called Dr. Praetorius, People goes fairly deep for Hollywood into such questions as witch hunts, illegitimate babies, medical ethics and income-tax exemptions. Mankiewicz gets a full measure of help from his cast, each of whom has at least one big scene to put his teeth into. Gary Grant, whether being intimidated by a collie or bearding a board of examiners, plays to perfection the man who refuses to worry about anyone's opinion but his own. In the difficult role of a girl who keeps falling in & out of love (and bed), Jeanne Grain displays both intelligence and charm. Hume Cronyn's crabbed and envious pedant is relieved by flashes of grade A academic humor, while Finlay Currie, who threw a chill into moviegoers as the convict in Great Expectations, manages to be very funny in his set piece explaining how he became a murderer.

With People Will Talk, Producer Darryl Zanuck has broken a lot of Hollywood's old rules, and borrowed a few new ones from two of theater's greats. He tests Bernard Shaw's theory that audiences will listen to anything so long as it is amusingly said, and adapts from Chekhov the technique of having an actor, when necessary, move down to the footlights and explain to the audience what kind of man he is. One neat touch: the dedication "to that one who has inspired man's unending battle against Death, and without whom that battle is never won . . . the patient."

His Kind of Woman (RKO) is a somewhat lumpy blend of slapstick comedy and dead-serious melodrama. Gambler Robert Mitchum, after being alternately wooed and walloped by gangsters, finds himself in an isolated Mexican resort trying to cope with a plot that defies analysis. While awaiting the arrival of the criminal mastermind (Raymond Burr), Mitchum patches up a newlyweds' quarrel; exchanges terse dialogue and melting looks with bosomy Jane Russell; plays straight man for Vincent Price, a hammy Hollywood star.

Director John Farrow, apparently as puzzled by the script as any moviegoer, ends the film with a comedy rescue involving a band of Mexican Keystone cops. Jane Russell, looking woodenly decorative, works her throaty way through a couple of songs (Five Little Miles from San Berdoo and You'll Know), while Mitchum manages his undemanding part with an air of stoical resignation.

The People Against O'Hara (MGM) deals with dipsomania and murder against the background of Manhattan's Fulton fish market. Lawyer Spencer Tracy, withdrawn from criminal practice because he was becoming involved emotionally in the struggle for clients' lives, reluctantly agrees to defend a neighborhood boy accused of murder. As the pressures mount, Tracy places more & more reliance on alcohol, ineptly bribes a state's witness, and fumbles his attempt to pin the crime on Waterfront Boss Eduardo Cianneili.

Based on a better-than-average crime novel by Eleazar Lipsky, the film is played as though everyone concerned enjoyed making it. Director John Sturges draws a distinctive gallery of urban types, with zoot-suited William Campbell as a gabby delinquent, John Hodiak as a district attorney torn between ambition and pity, and Jay C. Flippen as a Scandinavian sailor out to make a quick buck. Tracy generates considerable sympathy as the unstable lawyer, makes understandable the willingness of both the police and the underworld to help him out of a tough spot.

Iron Man (Universal-International) seems bent on proving that if a man has a bad enough temper, he can become heavyweight champion of the world. Jeff Chandler, a coal miner whose only real ambitions are to marry Evelyn Keyes and own a radio store, has a nasty habit of going efficiently berserk when anyone mocks him. Egged on by his sweetheart and ne'er-do-well brother (Stephen McNally), Chandler soon bowls over all the local heavyweights and moves on to the big city. Booed by the fans as a dirty fighter and damned by the newspapers as an inept one, Chandler nevertheless bulls his Neanderthal way to the championship. With none of the authentic prize-ring flavor of Champion, Iron Man has a hollow ring, and badly dents the laws of probability by having Chandler dethroned by an old pal from the same tiny mining town.

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