Marlon Brando

I watched the TCM documentary on Marlon Brando this week. It was loaded with clips and information, and many interviews with those who knew him. It was more informative than captivating, but any chance I get to think about movie stars of the past is a good thing.

I don't know if Marlon Brando is the greatest movie actor to ever live. I do know that in my opinion, his performance in On the Waterfront is the greatest piece of film acting I've ever seen, and that in Last Tango in Paris he gives the most emotionally naked performance anyone is likely to give. It is also very evident that he changed the nature of film acting. As one person said during the documentary, "There is before Brando, and after Brando."

Brando seems to have had a complicated relationship with his father. By all accounts he hated him, but also employed him in his production company. There is a priceless clip when Brando Junior and Senior are on the Ed Murrow program, and Senior says some disparaging thing about Junior. Young Marlon gives his dad a look that would wither a cactus, and then a supposedly playful grab of his dad's foot, when it is likely he would have rather strangled him by the neck.

As a young man, Brando took New York City by storm with a series of Broadway performances, highlighted by Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar Named Desire. As many have put it, he wasn't acting, he was behaving, and this was a revelation. He studied under Stella Adler, who taught Stanislavsky's method, but what exactly does that mean? Al Pacino, when asked, can't define what the method is. All I remember about it from my acting classes was that it uses one's own memories and experiences to illustrate the character. It sought to blur the line between pretending to be someone and actually being them.

Brando then made the switch to films. His first six films--The Men, Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata, Julius Caesar, The Wild One, an On the Waterfront, are considered by some to be the best six films anyone has ever made in a row. His performances in Streetcar and the Wild One are iconographic (I was told that Tennessee Williams hated that a paperback edition of the play had Brando's picture on it--he thought the play was about Blanche). Even before I knew who Brando was, I knew that there was a famous line from a movie in which a guy yells "Stella!" In The Wild One, he seems to be summing up a whole generation as the biker who replies, when asked what he is rebelling against, with "Whatdya got?"

Even Shakespeare couldn't conquer him. The idea of him doing the Bard was amusing to some, who couldn't imagine this "mumbler" mouthing the poet's great words. But Brando was mesmerizing as Mark Anthony, holding his own against the likes of John Gielgud. Gielgud wanted to direct him doing Hamlet on stage, but Brando was done with trodding the boards.

Then came On the Waterfront. Just thinking about it now I can conjure up so many magnificent moments. Of course, the best remembered scene is the cab ride with Rod Steiger, in which he says "I coulda been a contender," but there's so much more, such as the way he fiddles with Eva Marie Saint's mitten, or the way he tells off Lee J. Cobb: "You're nothing but a cheap, lousy, dirty, stinking mug!"

After that, Brando's performances were wildly inconsistent. The consensus from those who knew him was that he hated acting, or at least didn't take it seriously. After he became a megastar he could just phone in some performances, but occasionally he still shone. It was interesting to hear Martin Scorsese relate that DeNiro's "You looking at me?" scene from Taxi Driver was inspired by Brando's mirror scene in Reflections of a Golden Eye.

It's hard to realize now how much of a comeback it was, then, for him to do The Godfather. He was back in prime form. Just watch him in the opening scene, playing with the cat while hearing favors asked of him, or his weary tearful shrug when given the news of Sonny's death. His co-stars, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Pacino, were all awed by him. He then provided Academy Award watchers years of talk by sending an Indian woman to refuse the Oscar he won. Sacheen Littlefeather, the woman in question, was interviewed for the documentary, probably the first time in ages she's been on television.

Brando's private life was a mess. He was involved with a series of Polynesian woman, fathered a slew of children, and bought a Tahitian island. After The Godfather and Last Tango he was reduced to making expensive cameos that ranged from brilliant (his turn in Roots as Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell) to ridiculous (Superman, The Island of Dr. Moreau). He made many friendships with the new generation of actors, though, who revered him (Johnny Depp, John Travolta, Edward Norton).

I think his friend Quincy Jones said it best, in considering him a great artist of the 20th century. Jones compares him to Pablo Picasso and Miles Davis, because they all broke the rules. He didn't add, though, that they were all very difficult men, and very larger than life.