Brando: Role Model for Future Film Greats
By Rick Lyman

Young audiences who knew Marlon Brando as a tabloid curiosity, an overweight target for late-night comics with his own private island off Tahiti, might be surprised to learn that at one time, he was a truly revolutionary presence who strode through American popular culture like lightning on legs.

Certainly among the handful of enduringly great American film actors -- some say the greatest -- he has also been, without question, the most widely imitated. Virtually all of the finest male stars who have emerged in the last half-century, from Paul Newman to Warren Beatty to Robert De Niro to Leonardo DiCaprio, contain some echo of Brando's world-shaking paradigm.

Marlon Brando's powerful portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (with Vivien Leigh) set the stage for a series of blockbuster performances. Simply put: In film acting, there is before Brando, and there is after Brando. And they are like different planets.

Yet, like Orson Welles, another famous prodigy who battled Hollywood only to see himself balloon into a cartoon version of his early brilliance, Brando's legacy is built on a surprisingly small number of roles.

There is his epochal Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," a role he created on Broadway in 1947, at age 23, and then played on film in 1951. And there is his performance as the fatally noble Mexican bandit in "Viva Zapata!" in 1952. Two crucial roles followed in 1954, as the first in a long line of leather-clad mixed-up teenagers in "The Wild One" and in his Oscar-winning turn as Terry Malloy, the boxer who could have been a contender, in "On the Waterfront," which many consider his finest performance.

After that explosion of creative fire, there follows a huge gap of years filled with intermittently compelling but largely unmemorable roles -- and more than a few outright disasters -- before a stunning return to form with "The Godfather" in 1972 and "Last Tango in Paris" in 1973.

Through it all, Brando was an often combative and moody iconoclast, a polarizing and enigmatic figure who generally stayed out of the public eye. When he did speak, about acting, about politics, about genetic engineering, about any of the passions that worked on his rambling mind, he revealed a strange mixture of self-abnegation and egomania.

Marlon Brando portrayed Terry Malloy in "On the Waterfront."

A startling number of the increasingly rare interviews he gave were simply jousting matches between him and the interviewer, all about how much he hated doing it or how he wanted to expose the whole process as a phony, commercial exercise. On the few occasions when he seemed to let loose and speak what was really on his fertile mind, such as in a crushing profile by Truman Capote in the New Yorker in 1957 or in a pair of truly odd appearances on "Larry King Live" in the mid-1990s, he got himself into trouble.

And more often than not, he would express contempt for the craft of acting.

"Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts," Brando once said. "Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we're acting. Most people do it all day long."

He described himself as a lazy man, always looking for ways to make more money for less work. Notoriously lax about learning his lines, he would sometimes have them written on cards just out of camera view. Supporters said this added spontaneity to his performances.

"If a studio offered to pay me as much to sweep the floor as it did to act, I'd sweep the floor," he said. "There isn't anything that pays you as well as acting while you decide what the hell you're going to do with yourself. Who cares about the applause? Do I need applause to feel good about myself?"

Yet, he could be as meticulous and penetrating as anyone when discussing a particular role. And no one was better at finding brilliant touches that brought a character to life. Many have pointed to a scene in "On the Waterfront" during which he delicately put on the dainty lace glove of the young woman he was awkwardly trying to court, a seemingly unconscious gesture that fills the moment with heartbreaking vulnerability.

In preparing for his first film role, as a wounded veteran in "The Men" (1950), he spent weeks living among real soldiers at a veterans hospital, to the point that many of the film's first audiences came away perplexed, thinking that he was an actual war casualty who had been hired to be in the movie.

Marlon Brando brought his powerful brand of Method acting to the role of the seemingly mad Col. Walter E. Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now" in 1979. And for a man who supposedly disdained acting, he could be extraordinarily eloquent on the subject.

"The close-up says everything," Brando once said. "It's then that an actor's learned, rehearsed behavior becomes most obvious to an audience and chips away, unconsciously, at its experience of reality. In a close-up, the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage."

He was not the first actor to bring to the screen the style known as the Method, an internalized acting technique promulgated in Russia by Konstantin Stanislavski in the 1920s and then popularized in New York in the '40s by evangelists such as Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler, Brando's beloved teacher. But Brando was the first to make clear how truly powerful and culture shaking the Method could be, in the right hands.

"His brutish explosions of anger, his displays of vanity on stage were seen by pretentious and unpretentious reviewers alike as having an immediacy new to the theater," wrote Harold Brodkey in the New Yorker in 1994.

Marlon Brando played Don Vito Corleone in "The Godfather."

What made Brando different from previous Method actors like Montgomery Clift, Brodkey wrote, was the way he taunted and unsettled the audience. ("You could write a whole chapter on the ways he could make people feel uncomfortable," said an early acting colleague quoted by biographer Peter Manso.)

To American audiences who first saw him, what was most apparent about Brando was that, compared with other actors of the period, he was brooding, muscular and intense. Detractors called him a slob. He appeared in tight bluejeans and torn T-shirts, grimy with sweat, alternately slack jawed with stupidity and alive with feral cunning. And he was more openly sexual -- in an animal way -- than the actors who immediately preceded him.

Often, Brando was accused of mumbling his lines, but audiences watching those early performances today would notice none of that, so complete has the Brando school of anti-glamour taken root in American acting.

"Brando represented a reaction against the postwar mania for security," Pauline Kael wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1966. "As a protagonist, the Brando of the early '50s had no code, only his instincts. He was a development from the gangster and the outlaw."

MEMORABLE MARLON

Selected filmography "The Men," 1950, "A Streetcar Named Desire," 1951 "Viva Zapata!" 1952. "Julius Caesar," 1953, "The Wild One," 1954, "On the Waterfront," 1954, "Guys and Dolls," 1955, "The Teahouse of the August Moon," 1956, "Sayonara," 1957, "The Young Lions," 1958, "One-Eyed Jacks," 1961 "Mutiny on the Bounty," 1962, "The Ugly American," 1963, "The Godfather," 1972, "Last Tango in Paris," 1972, "The Missouri Breaks," 1976, "Superman," 1978, "Apocalypse Now," 1979, "A Dry White Season," 1989, "The Freshman," 1990, "Don Juan DeMarco," 1995, "The Island of Dr. Moreau," 1996, "The Score," 2001

Notable quotes from characters Marlon Brando played in his career:
"Hey, STELLA!" -- Stanley Kowalski, "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951), Girl: "What're you rebelling against, Johnny?", Johnny: "Whaddya got?" -- Johnny Strabler, "The Wild One" (1953)

"It wasn't him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, 'Kid, this ain't your night. We're going for the price on Wilson.' You remember that? 'This ain't your night!' My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors on the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palooka-ville! You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn't have to take them dives for the short-end money. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it. It was you, Charley." -- Terry Malloy, "On the Waterfront" (1954)

"I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse." -- Don Vito Corleone, "The Godfather" (1972)

"You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill." -- Col. Walter E. Kurtz, "Apocalypse Now" (1979), "The horror. The horror." -- Col. Walter E. Kurtz, "Apocalypse Now"●