A Tennessee Williams Named John Paul

When Tennessee Williams wrote the story for the 1982 Bharathan movie, Paalangal (Railway Tracks), World War II had already been fought, won and lost but not forgotten, India was on the verge of becoming a free state and the mutilated body of Elizabeth Short, a Hollywood starlet who would later inspire many stories and movies under the name, Black Dahlia, had been found at a lonely Los Angeles courtyard. A Street Car Named Desire, a Pulitzer Prize winning play, originally written for Broadway before the close of the decade, had already been conceptualized on stage by Elia Kazan; it would take another four years for Kazan to bring out the silver screen version. It was in 1951, when Margaret Roberts, the later day Margaret Thatcher, was preparing to lose her first election contest, the movie was released in the USA.

The story line was simple. A young woman, Blanche, takes a streetcar named "Desire" to arrive at a shanty American town to stay with her sister, Stella, who is married to Stanley, a street character with many rough edges. Stanley is not amused by the arrival of his sister in law and starts bullying her at the slightest of provocations, which, at one time, ends in a rape. Mitch, a friend of Stanley, is enamored by Blanche, and in due course, proposes to her. Stanley intervenes, sabotages the marriage and digs up Blanche's past to find out that she is not mentally stable. The film ends with Blanche taken to the mental asylum where she was once a patient.

A Street Car Named Desire opened to critical acclaim, offering a new experience to the viewer. The main character of Blanche was played by Vivien Leigh, and not Jessica Tandy (we would later fall in love with her in Driving Miss Daisy) who acted the part in the Broadway play as the producers believed Leigh bested Tandy in appeal. Leigh had handled the part for the 1949 London production by Laurence Olivier and was an instant hit there. Kazan carried on with his stage experiments with method acting, a new genre of acting style propounded by Constantin Stanislavski, popularized by Lee Strasberg and followed later by some of the notable Hollywood stars like Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Daniel Day Lewis. Kazan's message was best grasped by Marlon Brando, establishing his Hollywood presence with the movie (his debut was with Men, a Fred Zimmermann film released a year earlier), whose portrayal of Stanley, a down to earth character with negative shades, human frailties and masculine good looks in a custom-made T shirt, was a novel experience for the viewers. Karl Malden (Mitch) and  Kim Hunter (Stella) excelled in their roles while Vivien Leigh, with her fragile beauty, appealed to the viewers and won their sympathy; Leigh is said to have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder towards the end of her life and used to mistake herself for Blanche on many occasions. The three won Oscars too, and, quite surprisingly, the one who missed the boat was Brando. The film still holds the record for maximum number of major acting Oscar honours for a film.

The film had an opening sequence where Leigh alighting a train and slowly appearing from amidst the steam emitting from the engine but the connection the film had with train and railway and tracks ends there. However, this beautiful opening seems to have influenced John Paul and Bharathan to place their offering near a railway station, Shornur Junction to be precise. Passing years transformed the original story and when John Paul modified it for Paalangal three decades later, he left out certain elements alien to Malayali psyche but retained the four major characters and their interactions with each other. The film was shot at and in the periphery of the railway junction, barely moving out elsewhere, and gives us a relatively true depiction of the lives of railway workers. Gopi, another method actor, did not lag far behind Brando in terms of performance quality and the duo of KPAC Lalitha and Adoor Bhavani fulfilled their parts well. Bharathan who did magic in making Zarina Wahab, an average looking actress with unconventional looks, appear beautiful in Chaamaram a couple of years before, repeated the trick here, succeeding to a considerable measure. The let down came from the normally reliable Nedumudi Venu whose Ramankutty, with his ill-defined portrayal, was almost a caricature of the role carried well by Karl Malden years ago.

Bharathan arrived the Malayalam film scene at a time when the industry was undergoing a radical transformation from the melodramas of the 60s, with Swayamvaram of Adoor Gopalakrishnan inaugurating the movement. The so called Art Film movement was taking root, generating enough enthusiasm state-wide, tempting even a movie manufacturing personality like Kunchacko to venture into making one, Neela Ponman, a cinematic blunder of Himalayan proportions. Prayaanam, Bharathan's debut movie promised to carry the trend forward but his subsequent films, Aaravam and Thakara progressively witnessed a breach of promise and an eagerness to join the mainstream bandwagon. Yet, it is to his credit that he stayed with a set of filmmakers who tried to tread a middle path, thus cementing his position in Malayalam film history.

An attempt to compare the films of Elia Kazan and Bharathan is a futile one; the Hollywood classic, rated as one of the 100 greatest Hollywood movies of all time on a number of movie portals which it may or may not be, was a trendsetter in more ways than one while the Malayalam flick, a critical and commercial failure. Still, both the movies were a fair reflection of the cinematic cultures they represented and paraded some of the most exciting acting talents of their times. The turnout is that while the Kazan movie is more than the sum total of its components, the Malayalam version taught us it need not be the case always.