So this is obviously a movie that I’ve heard of, but here’s what I knew about it before watching it for AFI list reasons: 1) “STELLA!”, and 2) “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

Turns out that it’s a Tennessee Williams play turned movie, and boy howdy is it ever Tennessee Williams. It’s very Southern, very stagey, and very melodramatic, with all kinds of heightened relationships and heightened dark secrets and heightened monologues and what-not.

I feel weirdly conflicted about this movie, because part of me thinks it’s surprisingly nuanced and subtle, with these psychologically realistic portrayals of characters with hidden depths; and then the other part of me thinks it’s just silly melodrama, with every knob dialed to eleven — the tragic backstory knob, the shitty abusive relationship knob, the family secrets knob, etc.

I think maybe my synthesis is that the script itself is absurd — ol’ Tennessee does it again — but that it’s elevated by the acting. This was apparently Marlon Brando’s first film role, and boy, he just jumps off the screen as a Movie Star, even as he’s playing this lowkey loser character. (Not hurt by him being young and completely ripped in a way most people weren’t back then and just basically super-hot in general.) But beyond Brando, you’ve got Karl Malden doing his thing, Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois, and it’s just basically an actor’s showcase.

As a movie, though… I guess I’d say it’s pretty decent, but is it great? I don’t think so. What it most reminds me of from the AFI list is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — another melodramatic play turned into an actor’s showcase but where all the sound and fury doesn’t add up to quite as much as it maybe seems like it should. I think I like that movie better — it’s a little more subtle, with more of a bite — but at the same time, it’s not doing quite the same thing.

Where I end up is that I think there’s room on this list for a movie set in a hot and sweaty underbelly of New Orleans, and a tale of wilted Southern grandeur, and this is interesting enough, so hey, let’s keep it on there.

(Oh, also: It’s always surprising to me to find out the context of the Oscar-clip soundbite, and neither of these were what I imagined. I thought “Stella!” was a young Romeo shouting at his would-be beau, and “kindness of strangers” a Southern belle at a ball to a gallant gentleman. Nope, and double nope!)