However, there is one movie which seemed to really capture a true feeling of this unique city in a particular slice of time and one which still reverberates to the present day, and that was the landmark production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).
Rather faithfully adapted from the original stage play by Williams himself in partnership with screenwriter Oscar Saul, the movie unfolds as background to the story of smoldering sexuality and growing madness a portrait of an everyday New Orleans populated by a mixture of ordinary people going about their lives the same as in any other city in America. It's not Mardi Gras, everybody isn't drinking like a fish, there are more than just French people or Tobacco Road hicks amongst the population, and bayou country isn't just a five minute drive away from the Vieux Carre. The New Orleans of Streetcar is a living, breathing place with its Kowalskis, Hulls, Mitchells, Gonzalezes, milling about the streets, the bars, the shops and the walk-ups and downstairs apartments of the Quarter, conducting their everyday business. This is a real New Orleans with real people who work, shop, bowl, fight, love, and struggle to make sense of things just as people do everywhere.
The stage play takes place entirely in the Kowalski apartment, whereas the movie had to create an external New Orleans to fully establish setting. The first shots were filmed on location as Blanche (Vivian Leigh) arrives at the old Louisville & Nashville station which once occupied the foot of Canal St. at the ferry landing many years ago. These first scenes depict a long shot of the train pulling in past the Bienville St. Wharf to the station. Blanche gets off the train to find herself across from the neutral ground where the streetcars turned. It is there of course that she boards the Desire streetcar to then transfer to the Cemeteries car to take her to Elysian Fields and the residence of her dear sister and her rough-hewn husband.
The rest of the movie takes place on a soundstage, but the French Quarter created for the sets is quite realistic (though taking some degree of artistic license of course). The street set looks quite authentic, right down to the flagstone, the wrought iron galleries and the masonry peeling away from the buildings to expose crumbling brick, and everywhere there exists the ambience of decay characteristic of a poor, run-down neighborhood.
The French Quarter today is a trendy tourist mecca, with the effects of commercialization and gentrification evident throughout the district. Back when Tennessee Williams lived in New Orleans and at the time the movie was produced, the Quarter was very much the way it was depicted in the movie. It was a poor decaying neighborhood, populated by largely forgotten minority people: blacks, Italians, Mexicans, a wide variety of ethnicities in fact. Rents were cheap and the houses and apartments were run-down tenements. It was common to see the wash hanging from the galleries in those days, kids running in the streets dodging the cars, and ragged street vendors desperately selling their cheap wares.
It's a New Orleans that doesn't quite exist anymore and hasn't for many years now. However, it was every bit as real in the movie as it was in actuality back then thanks to the very careful craftwork of art directors Richard Day and Bertram Tuttle as well as set director George James Hopkins, who either must have actually visited New Orleans to be able to properly visualize the city as it existed then, or poured over whole collections of photos, or were guided by Tennessee Williams in recreating the Quarter for the movie. As can be seen in this snapshot from the late 1940s when that rattletrap streetcar still ran down Dauphine and up Royal as part of its route, the recreation was quite authentic.
But while that New Orleans of a bygone era is no longer real, its ghost still lingers in the present day city despite the changes wrought over the years. Many is the time I've walked those very streets while growing up in that special place at the bend of the Mississippi River, where history is felt at every turn if one is sensitive to it. And in point of fact, the French Quarter was still something like the French Quarter of the movie when I was a lad, before the Moonwalk and Woldenberg Park, when Jax Brewery was still a working brewery and not a shopping center and you could smell the scent of the malt permeating the air. The district was in transition even then, but the poor residents hadn't yet been pushed out by skyrocketing rents and T-shirt shops had yet to appear in the storefronts which had once been mom-and-pop enterprises.
Not everything has changed about the Quarter. There is still evidence of decay even despite the commercialization which has transformed the original city. Mainly, however, there very much remains that same easy pace of life as can be experienced in the course of a long rainy afternoon in which an hour stretches into an eternity. New Orleans is still a place which rejects realism for magic, and like Blanche tends to misrepresent things and not tell truths but what ought to be the truth instead. And in that aspect, A Streetcar Named Desire is about the most true movie about the Crescent City that was ever made.
