Three Strange Loves of the Hunter: SEVENTH VICTIM, THE; MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, A; STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, A

During a recent TCM  random catch of the last hour of STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE for the first time in a few years (I'd been turned off last time around by Leigh's mannered hamminess), I was thrown by the power of one performance I'd never really appreciated in full before, Kim Hunter's Stella. Namely it was the scene after the famous "Stella!" moment. Blanche (Vivien Leigh) finds her sister in bed the next morning after Stanley's slunk off to work; playing down her morning post-coital afterglow in ways Leigh's own similarly-Rhett-ravished Scarlett would have overdone with kittenish sighs and dreamy girly smiles in 1939's GONE WITH THE WIND. Blanche is horrified that Stella has forgiven him his brutal outburst and radio smashing of the night before, but for Stella it's just another well-laid morning - sex with an abusive husband when he's feeling deeply ashamed after an outburst is--according to Camille Paglia's research--why so many wives stay with their brutes. High on endorphins from the sting of punches and slaps, they're deeply receptive--nerves enflamed and sensitive--to desire. It's just biology. It goes deep - in all senses.  Next time you see this scene, note the kittenish way Blanche says she was "sort of thrilled" by the way Stanley broke all the lightbulbs on their honeymoon, or the sly fallopian resonance she brings to the line: "only one tube was smashed." Counterbalancing Leigh's southern faded-belle histrionics, Hunter doesn't miss any of the little resonant mythic notes in Williams' dialogue, but--in courtesy to Leigh's strident yammering--lets it seem on the surface as if she's missed them all. Leigh's Blanche is horrified that Stella has forgiven him, that Stanley's rage has been so completely absorbed by Stella's sexual body. Yet we never feel--as we sometimes do when we hear of women going back to their abusive husbands--that she's a pushover. She's in control; we could see in her, after all, the night before - a possessed pagan fertility god-channeling on those stairs the night before, so turned on by Stanley's bestial excess energy her conscious self all but blacks out as if in a voodoo ceremony. She's even able to put Blanche gently into context: "Don't you think your superior attitude's a little out of place?"


Sure, I knew she'd won an Oscar for it, but it's so ingeniously under-the-radar- so truly "supporting" even as it take a dozen viewings to see how she's overflown those borders. As a kid, seeing it I was usually busy rolling my eyes at Leigh's drag queen Scarlett O'Hara impersonator (Blanche is really Scarlett after she becomes a full blown alcoholic - she was already on the way in Gone with the Wind, though--as Rhett points out--she's pretty good about hiding it), or (in later views) drooling in awe at the rippling back muscles of Brando's Kowalski under Harry Stradling's glistening cinematography (now perfectly transferred into the digital age so every sweaty sinew shines like a limestone stalactite under centuries of constant slow cavern drip). But Kim's who really hung me this latest time. As I watched her straddle between Stanley's savage magnetism and Blanche's delusional Southern Gothic narcissist swoon, I found myself thinking back to her in other roles, and realized, almost despite myself, she'd become a kind of positive ideal for me --not the elusive anima but the obtainable girl - a heart-on-her-sleeve romantic of the sort shy guys love, for they tend to play the courtship game very badly, to show their cards right away and tell us they like us far too soon, so that dating them becomes stress-free; we can skip all the tedious date small talk, not even bother pretending we enjoy rock climbing or bungee jumping --go right to the colored lights portion, sex and laying around in a post-coital cocoon all day, drinking whiskey and ginger ale on the rocks, watching the James Bond marathon on TNT or listening to Columbia era Sinatra until the wee wee hours.

There were only ever a few such actresses who could convey all that with the shy open courage of Kim Hunter --nowadays there are none. Heather Graham had it for awhile and wound up subjected to the casting equivalent of Dogville.  Now there are are only hotties who lazy directors think can pass as 'plain' by putting them in a pair of glasses and a nerdy sweater, and girls who are strictly comic relief. In the forties we had Frances Dee in I Walk with a Zombie (watch it sometime and note the way she unreservedly invades Tom Conway's personal space, or blurts out "I love Fort Holland"). And we have Kim Hunter in everything - women who--in keeping with the tenor of wartime and, later, noir, talked softly, so as not to arouse some sleeping Axis neighbor. These girlswore their hair in smart naturally colored curls so as not to get tangled in whatever factory or WAC job they were doing. Their beauty was subservient not to men or childbirth but to their own desires and smarts; they didn't work inordinately towards looking good (1) but just saw what she could do to look pleasant with minimal effort and did it. A man could fall in love with one easily, but he'd had have to be looking close, for a while; she wasn't out there turning heads and exploding milk bottles as she passed by on the street. A man in love with her wouldn't have to be jealous every time she went out, like he would with, say, Marilyn Monroe on his arm, or wincing like he would with Shelly Winters. Girls like Kim Hunter were never bigger than life-size, and felt no need to stand out from the shadows. And so, in their way, provided the right shoulder to lean on - not a pushover but not weak, sympathetic to a man's woes but not dumb enough to fall for a hustler nor maudlin enough to indulge any wussy tantrum of despair. Soldiers saw the type all the time in field hospitals, opiates giving their nurse's white a special halo-like glow, against the their frail mortality's darkening mist they were as angels.

Hunter, in short, is that rarest of actresses --not a narcissist, and instead embodies this quiet, centered grace. She could project an identifiable decency (yet a cool decency, not a square Tom Hanks-style decency) that made her a fixed point of gravity, anchoring all the rotations in a film's constellation like a combination planet Earth and warm-handed juggler. Thus we believe in A Matter of Life and Death that someone could fall in love with her over the radio, simply because she's 'life' and they're 'leaving her.' You believe that love would stick even in person, without any question of a catfish rejection; and you believe the local doctor with a mild crush on her wouldn't bat an eye in transferring his affection purely to being just a friend when she brings home this newly adopted stray. In 7th Victim she can even gently spurn the pathetic advances of a frail 'poet', refuse the milk at a diner, and impress a Mephistophelean ladykiller shrink while refusing his advances all in the same hour.

And you believe too that, even as an ape, she can call Charlton Heston ugly to his face and not have him take offense.
In short, she's electric yet the current is never painful; she's nurturing yet alluring, homey but not homely, a prime example of the center of the Goldilocks zone of hotness and--above all--steady and supportive yet nobody's pushover. Don't patronize her like a child, or try and make any practiced romantic overtures (she'll let you know she's interested - you won't be able to miss it).


Maybe it's really a film about Oscar Jaffe going violently into the good night, raging against the dying of the light as Kazan's Actor's Studio kitchen sink Freudian realism jackboots over Jaffe's overly mannered style of Southern Gothic theater (I keep thinking of Blanche's youth as being excactly like that of Lilly Garland [Mildred Plotka] in TWENTIETH CENTURY, 'ding-a-ling'ing into the chalk line), the exhilarating immediacy of Brando's Stanley, who comes home from work covered in sweat and machine oil, still loud and coiled vs. the fading southern belle airs of Vivien Leigh, robbed of Tara, patriarchal support structure (no Rhett or Kennedy to patiently swoop in and pay the carpetbagger taxes and so forth). Without such a support structure, Blanche falls apart. The well of kind strangers dries up. Though some lewd understanding seems to exist between them, Brando and Leigh grind up against each other like opposing centuries, where one's schizophrenia is another's inheritance of the earth.  Brando's terrifying working class sanity is the new way forward in American acting (and very Marxist for all that, shhhh), operating on the same electric ripple that Clark Gable made in RED DUST in 1932, blowing all the soft-handed 'juvenile' leads (like Gene Raymond) clear back into the category of easily out-gunned naive rivals, the type who bring their hot wives down to savage countries where native drums and monsoons enflame the blood to the point their husband's run away to their separate room in fear of combustion, leaving the way open for men already burning.

Brando's Stanley, susceptible to violent outbursts, never pretends to be better than he is and has a steady job. He might occasionally get drunk and smash a radio and maybe sexually assault a crazy woman, but he'll probably be a fun, fiercely loving father when it's not poker night and he's losing. One can say his hunting down the 'truth' about Blanche's past is mean-spirited, but who can blame him, getting high-hatted in his own kingdom by some penniless hypocrite who alienates his own wife against him while drinking his booze? I'd be furious too, and I too would want to know the truth and not wind up with this vapid broad haunting my parlor every day while her husband and I are off at the plant. It's what any friend would do.

In the midst of this crisis of acting schools and class and alcohol, is the only one who can believably adapt to both the mint julep vapors and the cold beer shouting, Kim Hunter as Stella. She can have a blast at the bowling alley on Tuesdays and make it to the hoity toity jubilee on Saturday;  more earthy than Blanche, more mannered than Stanley; wild about Stanley's animal magnetism, a reflection of the awe she once had for the sophistication of older sister Blanche, used to helping her get tarted up for her ballroom coming-out parties, a kind of divine inheritance that changing circumstances or attractiveness levels, kept Stella from living with the same airy entitlement --except vicariously.

Everyone notes the "Stella! Stella!" scene when doing their Brando imitations, but it's really Kim's scene at least as much as Brando's if not more. Lit unflatteringly but sensually from below (left) as she descends the stairs, she makes no bones about hiding her vaguely plump mammalian herd animal features, the glow sweat and awry hair radiating a halfway reversion to heat-induced savagery, she still radiates such a scornful godlike power, it's as if under voodoo possession by some magisterial fertility goddess; the hungry way her hands explore his Adonis like muscular ripped back is so vivid we can feel his muscles through the screen.

This latest viewing I noticed other interesting termite touches, like the way Brando's "Stella!" shout becomes a musical refrain carried in the far-off music, some singer practicing out his window or selling flores por los muertos. Clearly Stella is right, considering she's a guest in a place paid for by the husband's job, it is out of place, and for all her airs, her snobbery betrays Blanche's provincialism, her lack of nobless oblige. For, as rich snob puts it at the local cantina in Mesa of Lost Women, "the ability to adapt oneself to any situation is the mark of the true sophisticate."

We see the result of clinging to the past and judging and trying to escape while being unable to leave - not living on the 'realistic level' - a common theme in Williams' work (as in Night of the Iguana), that the fantasy life cannot survive in the real world without creating a kind of insane destructive frisson. Consider Blanche in comparison with the Rev. Lawrence T. Shannon in Night of the Iguana
At the end of Iguana, Shannon winds up in the arms of the Stanley equivalent (Maxine - the rough earth mother) rather than taking the long swim (the only way left for remaining in the fantastic level). He's lucky that it's Ava Gardner, and the genders are reversed, because the reverse of his acceptance is the refusal of Blanche -she has taken the long swim; if you're a woman instead of a man, the long swim might be barred by arms less nurturing than Maxine's; if you don't stay voluntarily, they will force you to the realistic level and if you still resist, you'll wind up with a lobotomy (like Mrs. Venable wants to give Katherine in Suddenly Last Summer) permanently shattered, and though no one will force you to the realistic level, your dependence on the kindness of strangers will leave you fluttering in the wind once you no longer have access to a single new face.

That's why Hunter's Stella is such a reassuring character, contextualizing the monstrousness of Stanley into something human (she's the cub lolling in the arms of the king of beasts), and grounding her schizo sister as best she can. She's the 'acceptance' - what ideally Shannon will be like in a few days once he adjusts to the rhythms of hammock living and being shacked up with a horny Mexican broad pushing forty with two maraca-playing cabana boys at her beck and call. It's Hunter's resilience that is the ultimate moral in Streetcar, especially if you ignore the tacked-on ending when she runs upstairs vowing to leave Stanley forever (at least she doesn't think twice about leaving the baby in the carriage unattended outside in the street / courtyard before then - so all who pass may gaze upon it, confident that it won't be swiped - the whole of the neighborhood now the loving tarantula arms of the king of beasts).


If the love between Stella and Stanley is earthy and even lower than earth (the fiery furnace), the WW2 love between Hunter's June--a Bomber Command radio operator-- and RAF bombardier Peter D. Carter (David Niven) is literally airborne, high up in clouds, and fog so thick one might fall to the sea and not even get hurt, merely bounce to shore right into June's bike path, their chemistry the radio waves as strong as any ocean's, their magnetism drawing them together inevitably through the fog of war.

Their chemistry in that opening scene is terrific we believe this long distance/right before dying love is possible. They aren't really in the same scene at all, or even the same altitude, but they convincingly fall in love just the same, over the radio. We fall in love with them too, and we're for them 100% right from the get-go - almost desperate for them to be together, certain it can't be possibly happen and in that certainty, perhaps, able to cherish their spark like few others. His poetry-even-in-the-face-of-certain-death gallant sweetness (he dictates a cable to his mother), the way his British stiff upper lip doesn't crack even in the face of certain death and--when he asks if she's in love with anybody and she notes "I could love a man like you, David," she has tears in her eyes, we don't blame her. "I love you, June," he says. "You're life, and I'm leaving you." - And just like 'that' - they're in love. We see her choking up with tears even while--though we don't see them--we're sure there's dozens of other people in the room around her, dealing with the same issues with other pilots. "I was lucky to get you," he notes. He could have received any other operator monitoring the flight, or none of them. As it is, now they're both in love with a voice, each bathed in Cardiff's Technicolor fire - she in pink-lit womanly underground bunker Bomber Command light and he in the fires going on all around him in the Lancaster bomber, and together theirs is a love which they have only a minute to agree has been struck, and there's nothing to do but for him to say 'see you in a minute' to his dead 'sparks' and jump out of the side without a working parachute.


Well, through some miracle not easily explained by the 'is it all in his imagination?' angle, is this heaven, or some in between holding pattern -- he lives, and they wind up in each other's arms, on that beach. And they both know better than to abandon that love--made when just voices under heavy duress-- to the elements, to throw it back, as it were, into the sea. They both know it's what save him, even if they don't know why or how. This isn't one of those films, thank god, where things get awkward in person. It's not Catfish and Kim Hunter isn't some aloof anima figure like Dietrich nor some soapy martyr like Joan Crawford, but real solid 'girlfriend' material, the sort who won't throw love away on some silly point of honor, like their life/death status or their separate classes or nationalities, or that they barely know each other. She just met him but she's willing to die for him - and it seems perfectly natural. As I wrote in Men Who Are Frozen, in wartime there is no room for waffling and being coy. When love strikes, the victims don't wait to give it their whole selves, confessing their love in great spasms of each-breath-may-be-your-last intensity. Then they're off to the front, maybe to never return.  What could be more intimate that total commitment, intensified by the thought of impending immolation? This is love in wartime --there may not be a second date--for anyone, anywhere, ever--so there is no time for taking it slow. If it clicks, you hold on like a life preserver in a stormy sea. If you happen to stumble on a still walking preacher in a still-standing church, you take it as a sign to get married. Your regiment leaves at dawn, so you better not hesitate when you get your handful of hours in the honeymoon suite.

Hunter as Zora - PLANET OF THE MOTHERFUCKIN' APES!