Here is an enthralling and audacious three-hour television adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 play by Tennessee Williams.
Jessica Lange won a Golden Globe for her incredibly nuanced portrayal of Blanche DuBois, a lonely and faded beauty who slowly descends into madness.
This former schoolteacher, who was raised in the family's mansion, arrives for a visit with her sister Stella (Diane Lane) who lives in a rundown two-room apartment in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
Blanche immediately dislikes Stella's Polish-American working-class husband Stanley Kowalski (Alec Baldwin) who drinks a lot and knocks Stella around. Stanley despises Blanche's superior attitude and her pretenses to virtue. The clash between the realist and the romantic is a fuse that burns brightly throughout the play.
When one of Stanley's friends (John Goodman) falls in love with Blanche, Stanley sabotages her chance for happiness by revealing the skeletons in her closet. "A Streetcar Named Desire" is a powerful example of American theater at its best.