Critics raised to believe the acme of great acting was the perfect diction of Olivier or John Gielgud accused Brando of mumbling inarticulacy – though his breakthrough roles came courtesy of diamond-sharp wordsmiths like Williams and Schulberg. It is a measure of how appealing and threatening the young Brando was that comedians instantly started to caricature him – slobbing about in a torn vest yowling, "Stellaaaa!" (Diane Keaton does an especially funny early Brando in a surreal scene from Sleeper), or slouching in a leather jacket and tight jeans snarling defiance at straight society. The film's elevation of stool pigeon to martyr hero is uncomfortable given Kazan, writer Budd Schulberg and Cobb informed not on gangsters but fellow ex-communists before the HUAC hearings, but Brando makes Terry a breathing, bleeding person, not a walking argument for ratting out.Įasy rider: creating an icon in The Wild One Terry takes the kind of battering only macho-masochist 1950s film stars could survive (Kirk Douglas was especially addicted to this kind of punishment), but is on his feet at the finale. Cobb), but he's not a natural rebel or icon of cool – just a beat-up bum who's lost so much that he's run out of other people to blame. Terry finally stands up against the corrupt longshoremans' union bossed by Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Again directed by Kazan, Brando infused tragedy, sensitivity and pathos into what might have been just another racketeering picture. Oscar-nominated in the Best Actor category for four successive years, he finally won (and turned up to accept) the statuette for Waterfront. Brando is the Mexican peasant general in droopy moustache and white pajamas in Kazan's solemn, rarely-revived Viva Zapata! (1952), his first 'accent' performance, and tearaway bike boy Johnny ("What are you rebelling against?"/"What have you got?") in László Benedek's trashier, more fun The Wild One (1953). Then he took a couple of 'rebel' roles, establishing his offscreen persona as a man always against the Establishment. It's not an easy part: without an actor of supreme natural charisma, Stanley is just a monster ("I detest the character," said the actor) with Brando, Stanley is bigger than that, and almost a hero. Hollywood censorship muted the extremes of Tennessee Williams' play and Brando was a powerful antagonist to Leigh rather than commanding centre stage himself – but his Stanley is a classic performance: sweaty, devilish, sexual, crude, cunning, wounded, witty, attractive, repulsive. He had played Stanley Kowalski during a brief but startling stage career, abandoned allegedly because of an unwillingness to learn lines, and recreated the role opposite Vivien Leigh's Blanche. He is already doing the smouldering rage female fans in the 1950s cited as his most attractive mood.īrando was really established as a screen presence by his second film, Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Fred Zinneman's The Men was a solid start, a sincere 'social problem' picture which shows off Brando's brooding, wounded beauty – the character's legs may be dead, but his well-developed arms and torso are displayed by a tight T-shirt. Much publicity fuss was made about the actor's spending time with disabled war veterans in preparation for his screen debut – but, seriously, how else was he supposed to prepare? Filmmakers later complained that devotion to the Method made Montgomery Clift or James Dean almost impossible to direct the young Brando managed an unmatched degree of truth in performance while turning up regularly for work and producing the magic when the camera rolled. The most Method of Brando's film roles came in the first four years of a long career, from the paraplegic in The Men (1950), to ex-boxer Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront (1954). In fact, Brando's most notable acting coach was Stella Adler, mistress of traditional stagecraft and technique, not Lee Strasberg, whose Actors' Studio dictated digging into your soul to find the character. The back-of-a-cigarette-card capsule summation of Marlon Brando's contribution to cinema is as the man who brought the Method to the movies. This article was first published in Empire Magazine Issue #182 (August 2004). the godfather of modern acting, Marlon Brando.~ BY KIM NEWMAN ~ Our bid to find cinema’s greatest actor continues with your second nominee.
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