The French premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1949, adapted by Jean Cocteau, directed by Raymond Rouleau and starring the famous Arletty, went down in theatrical memory as misguided and somewhat scandalous, decried as it was by the majority of reviews. Without contesting the reality of the bad reviews, this article seeks to qualify such a pessimistic assessment of the production through close readings of Cocteau’s adaptation and an analysis of the recording of a performance, remembering that, in France, reviews are not everything, and seeking to more finely define the dramatic and poetic choices made by Cocteau and Rouleau. The intended variations in register and balance, Arletty’s enigmatically toneless intonations, and the shocking exoticizing of the play’s context make this first adaptation a complex and a personal one, the study of which also sheds light, more generally, on the reception of Williams’ plays in Paris.