Player's Dispassion: The
Style of Marlon Brando
By Robert Brustein
The death of Marlon Brando at the age of
eighty signifies the end not only of a great screen icon, but
of an entire era of American realism. Brando famously broke upon
the American consciousness playing Stanley Kowalski in the Broadway
production of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947. It was
a stunning demonstration of naturalistic acting that left an indelible
mark on everyone who saw it. In a role Tennessee Williams designed
as a brute beast slouching towards Bethlehem, Brando leavened
his character's violent outbursts with a glowering sensitivity
that tipped the sympathies of the audience away from Blanche towards
Stanley (when Anthony Quinn replaced him in the role, we saw a
lesser performance but one more faithful to the author's vision
of a selfish lout swatting a helpless moth).
Stanley Kowalski was not Brando's first
part on stage, but it was to be his last. Hollywood beckoned,
first with The Men, a film about paraplegics, then with
the screen version of Streetcar, then with Viva Zapata!,
and soon with On The Waterfront for which he won his
first Oscar in 1954. Eighteen years later, he rejected his second
Oscar, for his groundbreaking performance in The Godfather,
through the agency of a Native American woman who took the occasion
to read his statement protesting Hollywood's treatment of American
Indians.
By
this time, Brando had become both the Peck's Bad Boy of Hollywood
and the Maserati Radical of Beverly Hills, lending his name to
causes as far afield as Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement
and the Black Panther Party. Although he earlier had supported
Israel and denounced the plight of Soviet Jewry, he later raised
some hackles by saying that Hollywood was controlled by greedy
Jews who failed to show enough social conscience. Meanwhile, he
was extorting huge sums from these moguls for every movie he made.
He married three times and had innumerable mistresses, mostly
non-Caucasians, though his Indian wife (Anna Kashfi) embarrassed
him by turning out to be Irish. He named some of his eleven children
after Native American tribes or after his movie parts, and suffered
the pain of seeing one of them (his son Christian) get convicted
for murder, and another (his daughter Cheyenne) die a suicide.
Physically, he had transformed from the
graceful loping Terry Malloy of Waterfront into the elephantine
hulking Kurtz of Apocalypse Now, ballooning into a figure
so huge that he could only be photographed in shadows. Like Marilyn
Monroe, he became notorious for his delinquent artistic behavior--cutting
up on the set, showing up late, and failing to learn his lines
(much of his deliberate pacing with certain characters was a result
of his reading his cues off idiot cards). The great actress and
teacher, Uta Hagen, once wrote a book called Respect For Acting.
Brando's autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, would
have been more accurately called Contempt for Acting.
F. Scott Fitzgerald regretted that he had
been "a poor caretaker of my talents." Brando was a really slobbish
janitor of his own. He never recognized that his mighty acting
gift was his only by sufferance. He was, by nature, a lazy man
who preferred hanging out on beaches in Tahiti to developing his
craft and sullen art ("The only reason I'm here," The New
York Times quotes him as saying, "is that I don't yet have
the moral courage to turn down the money"). Surely that same laziness
was responsible for what I consider Brando's greatest artistic
delinquency, his failure ever to return to the stage.
Being
in a position to pick any role he wanted, he could have single-handedly
revolutionized the American theatre. Alas, Brando's mutinies remained
confined to the Bounty. Actors were following Brando's example
not only by imitating his partly deliberate, half-improvised vocal
mannerisms (you can see his influence on Paul Newman, Steve McQueen,
Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, James Dean, Ben Gazzara, and a
host of others). They also imitated him by neglecting a crucial
obligation of the actor, which is to preserve the great roles
of the classical and modern repertory. (Brando did attempt to
play Marc Antony once in John Houseman's movie version of Julius
Caesar about which John Gielgud, playing Cassius, wrote loftily:
"Marlon looks as if he is searching for a baseball bat to beat
his brains with.") I do not mean to underestimate Brando's genuine
achievements as a movie actor, or those of his gifted imitators.
His Vito Corleone may be the single greatest performance ever
filmed. But Brando did not have a sufficient sense of the actor's
calling to help advance the cause of theatrical art, which may
be why he became embroiled in so many causes he knew little about.
Perhaps he was trying to compensate for
his non-verbal style of acting. Brando virtually invented a type
that many years ago I called "the inarticulate hero in American
life." Whereas, in the 1930s, American dramatic characters--typically
those of Odets and Barry and S.N. Behrman--were essentially talkers,
by the late '40s the mumbling, steaming, explosive figure Brando
first created as Stanley Kowalski had become the archetypal American
dramatic hero (O'Neill's Hairy Ape was the prototype). Unlike,
say, Ralphie Berger in 
Awake
and Sing, who was able to find a political voice with which
to air his grievances, the new hero was less inclined to describe
an injustice than to stomp on it. That these characters sometimes
had a gentle side to their nature made them no less threatening.
Like Melville's stammering Billy Budd, who could respond to slander
only by killing his defamer, the inarticulate hero was always
primed to erupt into violence.
But for all his artistic and moral failings,
regardless of his behavior on and off the set, there is no question
that Brando was an acting genius. His contribution is often described
as having brought American naturalism to its ultimate conclusion.
But looking at any of Brando's performances now, it is possible
to see how highly stylized they are. Take his Stanley Kowalski,
which, at the time, seemed so spontaneous and intuitive one thought
he was making it up as he went along (Brando did, indeed, improvise
a lot of his own lines but not those). His approach to that character
now seems almost as mannered to the present generation as, say,
Barrymore's snorting Hamlet did to the generation of the '40s.
Every age believes it has reached the ultimate truth in acting
when it has only achieved the ultimate in its own style. It is
a shame that this great actor only applied his extraordinary style
to a limited number of contemporary movie roles, brilliant as
some of them were. Inside that huge prodigal body was imprisoned
a supreme artist too seldom permitted to serve the actor’s calling.
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