The Fifties

by David Halberstam

Streetcar opened in December 1947. The confluence of these three outsiders reflected a changing America and changing sensibilities. It represented a new and more tolerant social order, where words and images once banned were now permitted. Ten years earlier America might not have been ready for Williams’s plays, an immigrant like Kazan might not have been able to have gone to the best colleges and then found his way to Broadway, and Brando might have been rejected by those running the theater. But now they had all arrived at the same place at the same time. The synergy of talents was extraordinary. Each strengthened and amplified the others’ talent: Williams without Kazan might have been too poetic and not sufficiently dramatic; Kazan without Williams might have been too political and raw; and both without Brando might have lacked the star who brought their work to the very center of American cultural life, first in the theater and even more remarkably in Hollywood, which reached far beyond a narrow cultural elite. Each of the three was in his own way rebelling against the puritanism of American life and the conventional quality of the American dream. Thanks to Hollywood, they could now bring it to an audience of millions.