…Something in the clash of acting styles (Vivien Leigh’s theatricality, Brando’s immediacy) suited the material and brought out the conflict in Williams’s drama: the old world versus the new. Stanley Kowalski may have been a brute, and Brando had access to all his uncouthness and vulgarity, but there was something about Brando’s presence—deeply masculine, strangely feminine, a poetic delicacy always beneath the surface—that seemed if not to subvert the archetype then to co-exist within it. Perhaps it was simply a matter of Brando’s extraordinary physiognomy, combined with casting that was simultaneously ideal and contradictory. For Brando made Stanley interesting and not just physically alluring, which ran counter to the playwright’s intentions. Williams envisaged Stanley as a meathead, comfortable in his own skin, but without a trace of sensitivity or a flicker of poetry in his soul—qualities that Brando had in abundance. And it was these qualities and contradictions that coalesced around Brando’s film appearances in the early 1950s. In his own way, Brando opened the door for a subsequent generation of rebels—James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan. But those genuine American firebrands could never be confused with the biker rebels in The Wild One (1953). Laslo Benedek’s film was dated even before the cameras rolled…
—MM
Running From The Reels 