Marlon Brando and his reputation were the mountains almost every later movie actor wanted to climb, the models of offhand excellence they all wanted to equal or surpass. He was the great rebel of acting who became a great icon of the movies.
His incendiary, joltingly sexual presence, super-realistic acting style and revolutionary performances on-screen in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Viva Zapata!” “On the Waterfront,” “The Godfather” and “Last Tango in Paris” truly changed his profession forever and strongly influenced the vast majority of the actors who followed him.
But he was a reluctant champion, a conflicted virtuoso, a monarch of his profession who often acted as if his kingdom were a jail and celebrity a prison. Never fully happy in his role as a god of the movies, he often behaved as if movie acting was a job of many disappointments and few artistic rewards, Hollywood a joke and he, himself, merely another jokester.
All those conflicts, doubts, questions and fears came out in his performances — which were among the most naked, intimate and relentlessly self-exposing in the history of his profession.
When you see Brando, who died Thursday at age 80, at his best — as the brutish, sensual Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” as washed-up pug and longshoreman Terry Malloy in “On the Waterfront,” as magisterial Cosa Nostra boss Don Vito Corleone in “The Godfather” or as the tormented hedonist landlord Paul in “Last Tango in Paris,” you see, as much as any actor can possibly give you, a living, breathing and, above all, feeling human being.
He was also unafraid of exposing frailty or failure, or courting tragedy. When, as ex-boxer Terry, he cried out, “You don’t understand. I coulda had class! I coulda been a contender! I coulda been somebody!” to his mob-lawyer brother Charley (Rod Steiger) in “On the Waterfront,” he spoke so forcefully for the failed dreams and anguish of generations of Americans (and of many all around the world), that the shock of recognition stays with us a half century later.
At that instant, he spoke also (unconsciously) to the aspirations to glory of his acting colleagues, most of whom wanted to create their own “I coulda been a contender” moment of transcendence as well, wanted to move and magnetize audiences as Brando had — seemingly without trying.
Dean, De Niro, Nicholson, Hackman, Pacino, Streep, Newman, Cassavetes, Norton, Depardieu — all the best movie actors who followed Brando (and most of the best stage actors and even comedians and pop singers) became, in a way, Brando’s artistic children.
“How does he do it?” generations of young actors marveled, as they studied his work: his freshness, magnetism and spontaneity and the way he crawled into the skin of everyone he played. And they studied, sometimes as well, the Actors’ Studio “Method” which was famously Brando’s artistic routine — to try to learn his secrets.
The Method, developed in Russia by Konstantin Stanislavsky and popularized here by Kazan, Lee Strasberg and other members of the Depression-era Group Theatre and the postwar Actors Studio, was ultimately a way of acting on stage or screen by “being” instead of just orating or declaiming. It was a method of experiencing emotions instead of merely expressing them, of speaking lines (even full Shakespearean arias) as if they were real everyday speech, occasionally full of mumbles, slurs and pauses, instead of projecting to the back of the house or the microphone.
Brando was the “Method’s” great progenitor — and definitely the greatest mumbler — and he was also the great teacher-by-example, with thousands of young actors and actresses following his style. But, as with all great originals, Brando’s secrets were ultimately safe: mostly locked up inside him, body and soul. He could be imitated, but never equaled.
One secret he did like to reveal, though, was his basic vulnerability.
Embraced ambivalence
Brando could superbly incarnate the primal, instinctual, sometimes bestial male in such movies as “Streetcar” and “The Wild One,” but he was great in these parts because of an innate gentleness and boyish charm under those tantrums and rages. Gentleness and ambivalence were trumps of actor Brando’s performances — which explains why he was drawn to epicene roles, as in his fop Fletcher Christian in 1962’s “Mutiny on the Bounty,” his imperialist aristocrat William Walker in “Burn!” or his closeted Major Penderton in “Reflections in a Golden Eye” — or why, in later years, he suggests a kind of modern Sydney Greenstreet in “The Island of Dr. Moreau” and “The Score.” Brando embraced ambivalence: When he published his memoirs in 1994, he called them “Songs My Mother Taught Me.”
Acted less and less
Hamlet was the role everyone thought he was born to play; Falstaff was the part he seemed to grow into (but also never played). Yet, though he abandoned the stage early on, few movie actors were ever in his company — and that sadly includes, in his later years, Brando himself. For the last three decades of his career, after the zenith of 1972’s “The Godfather” and “Last Tango in Paris,” Brando acted less and less and sometimes in movies we’d rather not have watched. Seeing him as Torquemada in “Christopher Columbus: the Discovery” is a sad experience but not as sad as never seeing him at all.
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Now, the Godfather of all those later acting generations is dead, with few good movies in his recent past and a mountain of debts that were said to be crushing him — as sad a last act for the great American movie actor of the 20th Century as the 1985 finale for that century’s great American moviemaker, Orson Welles.
Like Welles, he was a Midwesterner. Born in Omaha, Neb., and raised for a while in Libertyville, he became the archetype of the small town rebel actor who conquered the city.
But he also became a template, like Welles, for the film artist diminished or destroyed by the compromised world of the movies. They were two men of huge appetites and seemingly effortless genius who died sadly but left us, even at the last, begging for more.
What do we say of the melancholy last scene for the man now justly described and remembered as our greatest actor? That he could have been a contender? He was. That he could have had class? He did. That he could have been somebody? He was. And yet still life and circumstance (and his own flaws) rose up to strike him: to take away the one actor most of his colleagues believe was irreplaceable.
But, as always in the movies, acting well is its own revenge. Life, we know, can never take away Terry Malloy — as he plays with his pigeons or with Edie’s glove in the park. Or Stanley Kowalski — as he howls “Stella!” or drenches himself with beer. Or Emiliano Zapata — as he tenderly pets his white horse. Or Paul, as he breaks into his last tango. Or Col. Kurtz as he murmurs “The horror, the horror!” Or Don Corleone, as he stares into the darkness (the world’s and his own) and mumbles, “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
Brando describes himself above as a con man and, in a way, that’s what he was, what all actors to some degree are.
He was a guy who persuaded us, brilliantly and beautifully, that he was someone he really wasn’t.
And he kept convincing us, over and over again. He’ll never be able to convince us, however, that he’s gone.
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“You don’t understand! I coulda had class! coulda been a contender! I coulda been somebody! … Instead of a bum — which is what I am.” — Marlon Brando, as Terry Malloy in Elia Kazan and Budd
Schulberg’s “On the Waterfront” “If I hadn’t become an actor, I’ve often thought I’d have become a con man or wound up in jail. Or I might have gone crazy.”
— Brando, “Songs My Mother Taught Me” (1994)