Old Play in Manhattan

A Streetcar Named Desire rumbled into Manhattan's City Center with Tallulah Bankhead on board. On hand to greet it were a good many first-nighters who plainly expected Alabama Bankhead's playing to make a comic football of Tennessee Williams' play. They could not have been more wrong; it was the audience that acted up, not the star.

But in her serious effort at portraying Blanche Du Bois's neurotic downhill journey, did Tallulah herself sweep onward and upward in triumph? Unfortunately, no. Such a result belongs to the dream world that Blanche inhabits, not to the real world that Tallulah evokes. Too often frustrated, tremulous Blanche was one thing, leopard-like Tallulah another; and they could not exchange their spots. Instead of genteel make-believe, there was a kind of barbaric grand manner.

All the same, Tallulah was not only, in her own way, often remarkable, but she never really distorted the sense of the play. There was about her something not just Southern, but stricken: the horror aroused by the past, the clutched hope for the future, the crumbling desperation of the moment. If she missed pathos, she was fumbling, at least, after tragedy. The whole performance, indeed, might have come off a real tour de force--except that Tallulah's inherent force was the one thing alien to the part.

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