A '50s Masterpiece for the '90s

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The trims keep turning up in the vaults -- a scene here, a shot there. So a nice little trade in "restored versions" and "director's cuts" of old movies has sprung up. The trouble is that much of this material is of only academic interest. It's hard to work up much passion for Spartacus or El Cid again, no matter how they've been fixed up.

A Streetcar Named Desire is quite a different matter, as masterpieces always are. It's nice that four minutes, cut prior to its 1951 release in order to placate the then powerful Catholic Church's Legion of Decency, have been restored. But the important restoration is of a great film to contemporary consciousness. Indeed, comparing dimmed memories of the 1951 cut with this one, what strikes you is how resistant to censorship Tennessee Williams' work was. In the struggle between poetically yearning Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) and brutally realistic Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando) for the soul of her sister and his wife Stella (Kim Hunter), Williams personified what was for him the essential conflict of modern life. The newfound footage adds a touch of $ evil to Brando's work, makes Blanche a bit more vulnerable and stresses the genteel Stella's sexual thralldom to Stanley. But we're talking emphasis here, not basic reinterpretation.

What the rerelease does is re-establish Streetcar's historical value. You see anew how it opened theater and movies to new realms of psychology and language, gave Brando the showcase that established Stanislavskian subjectivity as the standard for serious American acting and offered director Elia Kazan the chance to develop a style that subtly, hypnotically serves conflicting demands, including the play's for claustrophobia, the actors' for ensemble playing, the movies' for sheer movement. -- R.S.