As Stanley Kowalski in the original stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, Marlon Brando forever altered the landscape in American theatre and film. Often cited as the leading exponent of “the Method”, the acting system derived from the teachings of Stanislavski, and promulgated in America by Lee Strasberg, what Brando had—or possessed—could not be schooled. Even though he had studied with acting coach and Group Theater breakaway Stella Adler, the nature of Brando’s gift was too large, too poetic, and ultimately too mysterious to be attributed to any one movement. David Mamet was right to surmise that a talent like Brando would have succeeded anyway—regardless of the gurus who sought to claim his success a result of their expertise as opposed to his.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1924, Brando was educated at Shattuck Military Academy, where he was expelled for insubordination—an early warning—though not before impressing in a school production. There had already been intimations as to where his future might lie: Brando’s older sister had moved to New York to pursue an acting career; his mother had been a member of the Omaha Community Playhouse, where she had appeared onstage with Henry Fonda. After expulsion from Shattuck, Brando briefly returned home before joining his sister in New York, where he attended Erwin Piscator’s Drama Workshop at the New School. It was here, in a class that included Rod Steiger and Shelley Winters, that Brando met Stella Adler. On seeing Brando for the first time, Adler is reported to have said: “Who’s the vagabond?” As first responses go, Adler’s is remarkable in that seemed to intuit what future audiences would feel—or a variation thereof—whenever Brando appeared on stage or on screen. In her review of Last Tango in Paris (1972), Pauline Kael writes fondly of seeing Brando in what was only his second Broadway production, Truckline Café, in 1946: “…the young man who brought me grabbed my arm and said “Watch this guy!…” We’ve been watching him ever since.
He made his screen debut with The Men (1950), as a returning war veteran and paraplegic. In what was considered unusual practice at the time, Brando spent weeks at a veterans’ hospital in an attempt at understanding as well as verisimilitude. His performance was warmly reviewed, but the film was a disappointment at the box office. Still, Brando had made his mark. He followed with the movie version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), directed by Elia Kazan, the play’s original director and Brando’s most vital collaborator. Tennessee Williams’s poetic masterpiece was always too florid for the screen, but Brando is still electric. And as the closest thing we have to a record of his famous Broadway performance, it should be cherished. Something in the clash of acting styles—Vivien Leigh’s theatricality, Brando’s immediacy—suited the material and brought out the conflict in Williams’s drama: the old world versus the new. Stanley Kowalski may have been a brute, and Brando had access to all his uncouthness and vulgarity, but there was something about his presence—deeply masculine, strangely feminine, a poetic delicacy always beneath the surface—that seemed if not to subvert the archetype then to co-exist within it. Perhaps it was a matter of Brando’s extraordinary physiognomy, combined with casting that was simultaneously ideal and contradictory. For Brando made Stanley interesting and not just alluring, which ran counter to the playwright’s intentions. Williams envisaged Stanley as a meathead, comfortable in his own skin, but without a trace of sensitivity or a flicker of poetry in his soul—qualities that Brando had in abundance. And it was these qualities and contradictions that coalesced around Brando’s film appearances in the early 1950s. In his own way, Brando opened the door for a subsequent generation of rebels—James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan. But those genuine American firebrands could never be confused with the biker rebels in The Wild One (1953). Laslo Benedek’s film was dated even before the cameras rolled, though its iconography remains potent, if only for t-shirts and bedroom walls.
Viva Zapata (1952) and Julius Caesar (1953) saw Brando extend his range, doing John Steinbeck and Shakespeare respectively. But in On the Waterfront (1954), and back with Kazan, he gave one of his greatest performances. As ex-fighter and longshoreman Terry Malloy, Brando exemplified “the Method” at its most poetic. Two scenes in particular are justifiably lauded: Brando picking up Eve Marie Saint’s glove and putting it on his hand—a moment of improvisatory genius; while his “contender” speech in response to his brother’s betrayal remains one of the most moving and memorable scenes in cinema: “It was you, Charlie. It was you.” Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro would pay tribute to this scene in Raging Bull (1980), though they refrained from the emotion so evident in Brando’s delivery. Pauline Kael called Brando’s speech “the great American lament…” after she’d been quick to claim him as “our most powerful young screen actor, [and] the only one who suggested tragic force…” In hindsight On the Waterfront can be seen as the culmination of Brando’s genuine engagement with Hollywood, and the precise moment he delivered on the promise of his Broadway arrival. After three successive Academy Award nominations (1952-1954), he won Best Actor, as though anyone needed to be told.
Brando himself became indifferent towards acting and ambivalent about fame. He made some poor choices, though he was still capable of a surprise like Guys and Dolls (1955). He directed himself in One-Eyed Jacks (1961) after falling out with—and firing—Stanley Kubrick. But directors who fit the Kazan mould, such as Sidney Lumet and Arthur Penn, and who had come up through the theatre and live television, elicited something like his best work: The Fugitive Kind (1959), and The Chase (1966).
But then in the early 1970s, Brando made a spectacular comeback. The Godfather (1972) reaffirmed his status as America’s greatest actor, while forever linking him to the generation he had inspired—Al Pacino, James Caan, and, by way of his young Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II (1974), Robert DeNiro. Last Tango in Paris (1972) saw Brando at his most naked and personal before he withdrew from public life altogether, aside from the occasional cameo or supporting role in films such as The Missouri Breaks (1976), Superman (1978), A Dry White Season (1989) and The Freshman (1990). His final film was The Score (2001), with DeNiro and Edward Norton. But his last great film was Apocalypse Now (1979), where Brando’s rogue colonel anticipated the actor’s self-imposed exile from the profession he had done so much to redefine.
—Mick McAloon
Running From The Reels 