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When Marlon Brando went to Hollywood his challenging style of
acting became the controversial symbol of new hopes for American
culture. From the Fifties onwards, he brought to the screen a range of
memorable characters - from Stanley Kowalski to Superman's father
For many years in the 60s and 70s, one approached a performance by
Marlon Brando with a certain trepidation. You would go to see him perform in his latest movie and the questions were thus: will
he have bothered to learn his lines, or will he pin bits and pieces of the
script to the set, so that the problem of
memorization will not, as he claimed, interfere
with the process of creation? Will he be merely
overweight, or will he be completely grossed
out - as he was in Apocalypse Now (1979)? Will
he focus his full concentration on the role, or
will he content himself with what amounts to
self-parody?
It seemed for a short time in the early
Seventies, after The Godfather (1972) and
Ultimo Tango a Parigi (1972, Last Tango in
Paris), that he had not merely returned to
form, but attained a new one - an ability to
literally act his age - and that such tense
questions might finally be rendered moot. Ah,
foolish optimism! How could we have forgotten that the very basis of his screen character,
the source of its fascination, lied in his childishly erratic, entirely anarchical nature.
Brando would not be Brando if you could
count on him. From the beginning we
attended his work not in search of seemless
technical perfection, but as we do a thrill act at
a carnival. We went to see him dive down into the
depths of himself, to see if he surfaced with
some new pearls of existential awareness or a
heap of rusting mannerism or, more likely, a couple of the former mixed with a lot of the
latter. If you could not stand the sometimes
instantaneous alternations between exasperation and exhilaration which he thus induced,
then you had no business at a Brando film -
which was, of course, a position many have
adopted.
About the deepest sources of his wild ways
one can only speculate. But about one of the
matters that drove him crazy, right from
the start of his career, there can be no doubt.
That is his unsought position as a hero of a
special modern sort, a cultural hero, burdened
with the large, if ill-defined, hopes of at least
two generations for the renewal of American
acting, and through it, of the American
theatre, American films, perhaps even of
American culture. It was not a role he sought!
It was, indeed, a role he fought. And yet,
somehow, it settled upon him.
Brando's Method
Brando, a high-school dropout, came more
or less accidentally to acting, and he enjoyed
an early success in it before developing a sense
of vocation. He was thus forced to confront the
personal and public demands of his profession
without an aesthetic or a sense of cultural
tradition. This gap was filled by the 'Method',
that American variation on Stanislavky's
theories, which was very much in the air in New York when Brando was breaking into the
theatre. Emerging from small parts into the
unforgettable glory of his Stanley in A Streetcar
Named Desire, he was seen as the personification of 'Method' principles (though, in truth,
he had passed only briefly through its cathedral, the Actors' Studio). And since his own
instinctive method - a search through
memory for psychological truth, a rejection of
classic manner and technique, squared with
the 'Method', ('You have to upset yourself!
Unless you do you cannot act'), the role of
leader in a generational revolt was imposed
upon him. American provincialism was to be
shaken off: English acting standards would no
longer go unchallenged.
Many in the older generation were appalled,
but if you were young and cared about the
mystery of acting, then Brando's singularity -
there really never had been anyone quite like
him - exercized a powerful symbolic hold on
your imgination. Indeed, some part of you
became his forever. And when he went out to
Hollywood, hope mingled with fear over what
would result. Would he revolutionize the
place, or succumb to it. In the event, he
remained . . . himself. That is to say, volatile
and difficult, brilliant and indifferent. But there
was no gainsaying the impact of his work in
those first films, which were widely variable in
their overall quality: the crippled war veteran
in The Men (1950), the brutal Stanley Kowalski
in Streetcar Named Desire (1951), the Mexican
revolutionary in Viva Zapata! (1952), the
motorbike rebel in The Wild One (1953) and the
ex-boxer in On the Waterfront (1954) - in these
pictures he gave us moments which had never
been seen on the screen before. For young people his sullen, inarticulate rebelliousness
won them to him forever. Even when he was
playing brutes and dummies you sensed his
vulnerability, his tentativeness, and, even, his
underlying sweetness and sense of comedy. He
was the first movie star who showed, right
there on the screen, the truth behind the image
- the insecurity and the nagging, pecuuuuulllllllliarly
American fear that acting may not be suitable
work for a grown-up heterosexual male. He
was exploring what no-one else had explored.
In his first great role, that of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, people identified Brando with the image he played. Few
heard him when he said:
'Kowalski was always right, and never
afraid ... He never wondered, he never doubted. His ego was very secure. And he had that
kind of brutal aggressiveness I hate ... I'm
afraid of it. I detest the character.'
Stanley was crass, calculating and materialist - a type who was a factor in every aspect
of American life in this century. The power of
Brando's performance derives from his hatred
and fear of the character, though manifestly
there is something of Brando's own egotism
and rudeness in Stanley too.
Winds of change
Brando found Hollywood - a town always full
of Kowalskis - in a state of transition. The
reliable mass market was slipping away to
television; the factory system, ruled by a
handful of industry 'pioneers', was losing its
sovereignty to stars and directors who were,
with the help of powerful agencies, creating
their own packages. Brando had a long-term
contract with Fox, but he fought the studio
constantly and, unlike the older generation of
stars, had the option to make independent
films, so he could not be disciplined by suspensions or blacklisting. In addition he did not
dress like a star, could not be coerced into
interviews or publicity gimmicks he found
demeaning. He declared:
'The only thing an actor owes his
public is not to bore them'
The men who ruled Hollywood, quite rightly,
distrusted Brando. They might talk about his
manner and style (or lack of it) but deep down,
they knew he was on to them, was parodying
them on the screen. Still, through On the Waterfront an uneasy truce was maintained
between Brando and Hollywood, if only
because until that picture was finished - and
they rewarded him with an Oscar - he stuck
close to the type they had decided was correct
for him and which was easily saleable -
brooding, capable of brutality, yet gropingly
sensitive and rebelious. Indeed, Terry Malloy,
the ex-boxer, betrayed by his brother in On the
Waterfront, seemed to many at the time a
painfully accurate projection of Brando's own
mood. When he says 'I could have been a
contender . . . instead of a bum', some took
this as an admission that the great roles were
not for him. Others saw it as a generational lament, a declaration of betrayal not merely by
an institution, but by the whole society in
which humane, liberal values now seemed
inadequate to a monstrously complex age.
Nevertheless, he won an Academy Award
for On the Waterfront and continued to maintain himself as his contemporaries hoped he
would-- an inner-directed man in an other-
directed world. There was, however, one big
change in him. He no longer wanted to play
roles that were projections of himself or even of
his earlier image. In Terry Malloy he had
achieved a kind of apotheosis; he now wanted
to prove he could submerge self in characters.
He undertook a staggering variety of roles from
1954 onwards: a Damon Runyon gambler in
Guys and Dolls (1955); Napoleon in Desiree
(1954); Sakini, the Japanese interpreter in The
Teahouse of the August Moon (1956); the Southern soldier fighting his own racial prejudice
in Sayonara (1957): the German soldier undergoing self-induced de-Nazification in The Young
Lions (1958); the vengeful good-bad man in
One Eyed Jacks (1961) and Fletcher Christian in
Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).
Some of these pictures were successful at the
box-office; some were not. There was a steady
muttering about his waste of himself in subjects that, for the most part, were drawn from
the less exalted ranges of popular fiction. In
fact, he was playing a higher risk game than
the critics knew, for his price was now something like a million dollars a picture in return
for which he was supposed, by his presence, to
guarantee a profit. What other actor would
have risked that status in roles which were
deliberately off-type and which caused him to
use weird makeups and strange accents?
Gillo Pontecorvo, who directed him in
Queimada! (1969, Burn), declared:
'I never saw
an actor before who was so afraid of the
camera.'
His hatred of publicity, his desire to
hide-out in roles was based, in part, on simple
shyness. Moreover, the kind of acting he was
now doing demanded less of him emotionally,
if more of him technically. As he said:
'There comes a time in one's life when you
don't want to do it anymore. You know a scene
is coming where you'll have to cry and scream
and all those things, and it's always bothering
you, always eating away at you . . . and you
just can't walk through it ... it would be
disrespectful not to try to do your best.'
So he settled for imitations of life, which was
not only easy for him, but fun. Acting at this
level, he has been heard to say, is:
'a perfectly
reasonable way to make your living. You're
not stealing money, and you're entertaining
people.'
Other pressures came from the financial
expectations of the industry. Directing One
Eyed Jacks, he went way over budget, perhaps
because he thought directing was a way of
making an artistic statement without exposing
so much of himself. The result was a lovely and
violent film but still, to most people, just
another Western.
Mutiny on 'Mutiny'
He might have escaped that set-back unscathed had he not followed it with Mutiny on
the Bounty. There was a certain logic in the
casting - Brando, the famous rebel, playing
Fletcher Christian, the famous rebel. The
trouble was that Brando insisted on playing
Christian, not as a he-man of principle, as
Clark Gable had, but as a foppish idler, with
homosexual overtones, a character whose
previously dormant sense of class difference,
the basis of order in the British navy, turns
torpid under Tahiti's tropical skies. It was not
at all what the producers had in mind for a
multi-million-dollar film on which MGM was
depending for survival.
They claimed it was Brando's temperament
that cost them an extra S10 million, but he
was, in fact, taking the rap for all kinds of
mismanagement, which included sending cast
and crew off to shoot in the rainy season
without a finished script in hand. Of course,
Brando was angry and of course he turned as
mutinous as Christian himself had.
What got lost in the resulting controversy
was the fact that Rrando's Christian was one of
his finest sustained performances, a daring
attempt to blend the humorous with the
heroic, a projection of a modern, ironic sensibility backward into history. There was nothing cool or held back in this
characterization: Brando took it right up to the hot edge of
farce. If he was out of key with the rest of the
players and the square-rigged plot, he actually
did what a star is supposed to do, hold our
interest in a big dumb remake - while risking
comparison with the remembered performance of a beloved actor in a beloved rule.
mutiny on the bounty
(1962)
After Mutiny on the Bounty, came the deluge
- poor parts, not a few of which he wallkkedd out
on. In some of these films one can see the germ
of the idea that attracted Brando: the chance to
confront comedy directly in Bedtime Story
(1964) and A Countess From Hong Kong (1967);
the opportunity to make social comments he
considered worthy in The Ugly American
(1963), The Chase (1966) and>b> Queimada!; even
roles that matched his gift, despite their flawed
context, notably that of the repressed homosexual army officer in Reflections in a Golden Eye
(1967).
There are in these films isolated moments
where Brando shines through. There is the
scene in Sayonara, for example, when he
confesses to his commanding general (and
would-be father-in-law) that he is throwing over his fiance for a Japanese girl. He conveys his anguish over this decision by picking up a cushion and concentrating on it the entire time they talk - a perfectly observed banal gesture. In Reflections in a Golden Eye, there is the scene when he thinks Robert Forster is coming to pay a homosexual call on him and he absurdly pats down his hair and smiles vainly to himself. Then there is The Nightcomers (1971) in which he hides out behind an Irish brogue and spends s lot of time indulging a bondage fetish with the governess, when, in the midst of it, he tells the children a long tall story and suddenly he's alive and playful and inventive, giving himself pleasure and making us share in it.
But it was The Godfather that provided the
long-awaited proof that he could still do
most of it as an actor. He went after the part;
even submitted to the indignity of a test. The
result was a sustained characterization that
depended for its success on more than a raspy
voice and a clever old man's makeup. There
were in his very movements, the hints of
mortality that men in their forties begin to feel
no matter how youthfully they maintain their
spirits. His manner epitomized all the old men
of power who had leaned across their desks to
bend the young actor to their will - their wile
and strength sheathed in reasonableness,
commands presented in the guise of offers it is hard to refuse. It was the culmination of his
second career as a character man.
the godfather
(1972)
What one really wondered, though, was
whether he had it in him to go all the way
down the well again, come out from behind the
masks and show again the primitiveness and
power of his youth. That, quite simply, is what
he did in Last Tango in Paris. Brando was
playing physically what he was psychologically,
an expatriate from his native land. Moreover,
he was playing a man passing through the
'male menopause'. Yet in his sexual brutality
there is something of Stanley Kowalski, and,
like Terry Malloy, he is a one-time boxer,
vulnerable in his mourning for lost opportunities. There is also in him something of the
youthful, public Brando - self-romanticizing,
self-pitying, yet self-satirizing too. All Brando's
character Paul does in the film is have a
restorative affair with a much younger
woman. In the last sequences he is restored to
a handsomeness that can be termed nothing
less than beauty, a vitality, even a romantic
energy, that is both miraculous and moving.
In the brilliant monologue at his dead wife's
bier, perhaps the single greatest aria of his
career, it all comes together, talent and technique, to express the violent ambivalence of his
relationship with not merely this woman, but
with himself and the world at large.
It was Brando's art, not director Bertolucci's, that made the highly melodramatic
ending - in which, for no good reason, the star
must die - a triumph. Brando removes the sting
of death by the simple act of removing his
chewing gum from his mouth and placing it
neatly under the railing of the terrace where
he takes his final fall - the tiny, perfect bit of
actor's business, neatly undercutting the
director's strain for a big finish.
Perhaps only a young director, cognizant of
what Brando had meant to his generation, a
director who self-consiously stripped from his
work all intellectual and artistic traditions
other than that of the cinema, could give his
age's great movie actor this unprecedented
opportunity for self-portraiture.
last tango in paris
(1972)
Since delivering the two milestone performances in The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris, Brando worked less frequently, appearing both in brilliant movies Apocalypse Now (1979) and silly ones Superman (1978); The Formula (1980), based exclusively on a producer's willingness to pay his exorbitant fee. He was again Oscar-nominated in 1989 for A Dry White Season and was been seen in The Freshman (1990, in a comic take off of his Vito Corleone characterization), Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992, as Torquemada), and Don Juan DeMarco (1995).
His private life was as chaotic and restless as his professional. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1924, he was married three times and had nine children from various relationships. His oldest son, Christian, was arrested for murdering his sister's boyfriend in 1990. He was sentenced to 10 years in March 1991 and released in January of 1996. The sister, in question, Cheyenne, committed suicide in 1995. Brando spent a fortune on his son's legal bills.
He fought against weight problems for much of his later life.
Owned a private island off the Pacific coast, the Polynesian atoll known as Tetiaroa, from 1966 until his death. For much of his last years he lived almost reclusively at his mansion in Muholland Drive in Beverly Hills, California. Jack Nicolson was a friend and neighbour.
He died in of pulmonary fibrosis in Los Angeles on the 1st July, 2004. Despite rumours that he was broke by the time he died he in fact left an estate valued at around $20million.
He is considered by many to cinema's greatest actor. Certainly, there was no-one with his impact and his influence on succeeding generations of actors is considerable. Moreover, when he was good, well, no other actor before or since can hold a prayer to him.
But it has to be remembered that between those peaks of greatness there were more bad movies than one cares to remember. The Sixties were a lost decade for Brando. Thus, Brando is rightly considered the greatest actor but the greatest career? No. Others who have come after, who were influenced by him to the very core of their acting being, like DeNiro or Pacino will have more of a claim to that title than the master they owe it all to.
