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Five of the most significant movies adapted for the screen from Tennessee Williams’s plays are Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Baby Doll (1956), Richard Brooks’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Joseph Mankiewicz’s Suddenly Last Summer (1960) and John Huston’s The Night of the Iguana (1964). In these brilliant transpositions from one sign system to another, construction and visual grammar seem to be the key to the tragic tensions informing Williams’s both realistic and impressionistic prose. These new filmic conventions and signs somehow re-encode Williams’s protagonists’ profound crises into peculiar and haunting choreographies.