Marlon Brando’s 100th Birthday 3rd April 2024

It is time to celebrate the centenary of a true American icon. He may have died at the age of 80 but the legacy of Marlon Brando in the American theatre, onscreen and the wider culture is incalculable. From the intensity of the early stage performances aided by the Stanislavski-inspired training he received with Stella Adler to his redefining of masculine representation and the translation of that acting power to the big screen, to his rumbustious private life, his activism and the decline of his later years, Brando’s persona dominated American film from 1950. The simplifying of his approach to his art as ‘The Method’ has caused decades of misunderstanding and misappropriation. He described what lay behind it in his memoir: I’ve always thought that one benefit of acting is that it gives actors a chance to express feelings that they are normally unable to vent in real life. Intense emotions buried inside you can come smoking out the back of your head, and I suppose in terms of psychodrama this can be helpful. In hindsight, I guess my emotional insecurity as a child – the frustrations of not being allowed to be who I was, of wanting love and not being able to get it, of realizing that I was of no value – may have helped me as an actor, at least in a small way. It probably gave me a certain intensity that most people don’t have. It seemed he came to despise his craft and didn’t even bother learning lines, relying instead on cue cards which might perhaps have lent some spontaneity to performance but reflected a deep-seated reluctance to do the job for which he was idolised. The early beauty and alarming impact of that much-satirised mumbling delivery would eventually give way to physical disintegration and a withdrawal into fleshy monstrousness but after his attempt to escape the Fifties rebel he personified he expanded his repertoire, making occasionally good films interspersed with silly ones, taking risks with The Chase and Last Tango in Paris, rejecting the Academy Award for The Godfather and finally letting it all hang out in Apocalypse Now. He wasn’t even 60 years old. He never returned to the theatre after his seismic arrival in the Forties. His parodic dislocation was crystallised by the tapering off of a great career into minor comedies in which he still contrived to hit grace notes. Personal tragedies came to dominate perceptions of this once-great actor but the work is indisputably magisterial. The problem was not that Brando didn’t care, he cared too much. We may have lost the last years of a career that consistently held so much promise but look how much we gained. Happy birthday Marlon Brando.

The Appaloosa (1966)

This horse ain’t for sale. Mexican-American buffalo hunter Matt Fletcher (Marlon Brando) returns home only to have his beloved horse stolen by a powerful bandit, Chuy Medena (John Saxon), ending his dream of owning a stud farm. Matt begins to hunt down the bandit to recapture the horse but finds matters more complicated than expected when he meets Chuy’s girlfriend Trini (Anjanette Comer) in the border town of Ojo Prieto. Trini was sold by her impoverished father to Chuy at the age of 15 but has been brutalised and discarded. Fletcher is subjected to torture and humiliation by Chuy and his gang. A foray into Medina’s camp results in a brutal arm wresting match in a bar between Fletcher and the bandido. Fletcher loses and is stung on the arm by a scorpion.  Fletcher is rescued by Trini, who despises Chuy. They get help from a kindly old peasant, which later costs the old man his life. Fletcher is then forced to choose between Trini and his beloved Appaloosa … Chuy’s not just one man – Chuy’s an army. Adapted from Robert McLeod’s novel by James Bridges and Roland Kibbee, this stately drama directed by Sidney Furie and lensed by Russell Metty retreads Brando’s slightly eccentric One-Eyed Jacks characterisation and blocks out the action with obvious obstacles forcing a psychological perspective in every scene. Pauline Kael may have christened it ‘a dog of a movie about a horse’ but it has other interesting qualities, not least in the performances, with Saxon a standout as the sadistic bandit and Comer (who would be in the later, fabulously perverse The Baby) offering wonderfully precise contrast to Brando’s masochistic rebel with a cause. And what about Mexico’s finest,  Emilio Fernandez as Lazaro and Alex Montoya as Squint Eye!  They sure had faces then. I don’t want no more trouble. I just want a peaceful life

 

On the Waterfront (1954)

Some people think the Crucifixion only took place on Calvary. They better wise up! Hoboken dockworker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) had been an up-and-coming prize-fighting boxer until powerful local mob boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) persuaded him to throw a fight. His older brother Charley (Rod Steiger) is Friendly’s right hand man and lawyer. When longshoreman Joey Doyle is murdered before he can testify about Friendly’s control of the Hoboken waterfront, Terry teams up with the dead man’s sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint) and the streetwise priest Father Barry (Karl Malden) to do something about the violent gangsters controlling the dock. Terry finally figures out it was Charley getting him to throw a fight at Madison Square Garden that put him in this jam. He decides to go against his advice and testify … Conscience. That stuff can drive you nuts. This classic film can never be separated from its origins:  Arthur Miller wanted to write about the infiltration of the dockers’ unions by the Mafia and his project The Hook was brought to Columbia with Elia Kazan as director but Harry Cohn insisted the criminals be called communists instead. Sam Spiegel took it on and Frank Sinatra was tapped to play Terry initially. Miller gave up on it completely when Kazan testified and named names at the HUAC (if he hadn’t his career was dead, he named people whose names were already known); and fellow friendly witness Budd Schulberg’s screenplay could be partly attributed to a series of articles based on a true story about a longshoreman who tried to do something about union corruption. It didn’t work. (A series of lawsuits arose with the studio because Schulberg had talked to a number of individuals about racketeering and they recognised their story onscreen).  The original ending was rejected because of the censors:  crime could not win. So there is a brutal fight.  Brando’s was not the only influential acting in this film, which is a hymn to mid-century Method style, a kind of heightened reality with actors finding ‘business,’ like the accidentally dropped glove that Brando picked up and stroked, an unplanned incident that adds to the film’s text. And that legendary taxi scene between Brando and Steiger? Brando was a soft guy. He hated the cold. He wanted to be back in his hotel all the time when they were on the docks. This particular scene was shot in the studio and he wouldn’t do the decent thing and do the reverses for Rod Steiger after Steiger had acted his ass off for Brando’s shots. Steiger had to emote to a stage hand reading the script. Brando won the Academy Award and the film got Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Supporting Actress (for Saint), Art Direction, Editing and Cinematography (for Boris Kaufman.) Leonard Bernstein should have won for Best Score because he makes the big dialogue scenes work with his innovative composition. Turns out you can justify anything.  I’m standing over here now. I was rattin’ on myself all those years. I didn’t even know it