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Remembering Brando

The original ‘method’ man was definitely a contender. By John Hartl

From the beginning, audiences and critics weren’t always sure what they were getting with Marlon Brando. Some praised his originality immediately, others dismissed him as a sloppy mumbler, while still others felt they weren’t prepared for what he had to offer: the shock of the new.

When the late Pauline Kael first saw him in one of his mid-1940s plays, “Truckline Café,” she thought he was having a seizure on stage: “Embarrassed for him, I lowered my eyes, and it wasn’t until the young man who’d brought me grabbed my arm and said ‘Watch this guy!’ that I realized he was acting.”

In the early 1970s, when Kael reviewed his revelatory performance as an obsessed widower in “Last Tango in Paris,” she cautioned people who might “make my old mistake” or those who might even prefer to make that mistake “so they won’t have to recognize how deep down he goes and what he dredges up.”

A mediocre student who was expelled from a military academy when he was in his late teens, Brando went to New York in 1943 to study acting, first at the Dramatic Workshop, then at the Actors Studio, where Elia Kazan and others encouraged a naturalistic style of acting.

Widely simplified and ridiculed as “The Method,” it was also quite influential, informing the performances of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Warren Beatty and, perhaps most of all, Brando. By the mid-1950s, he was generally regarded as the greatest actor of his generation, capable of performing everything from Shakespeare to Shaw to Damon Runyon to Tennessee Williams.Beginning an acting revolutionBorn to an actress and a salesman on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, Brando revolutionized American acting, first on stage, most spectacularly with his 1947 performance in Kazan’s production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” as the brutal Stanley Kowalski in Williams’ sensational play about a sexily dysfunctional couple and their visiting relative.

He then abandoned Broadway for film, beginning with an intense starring performance as a paraplegic war veteran in “The Men.” He was paid only $40,000, the film flopped, but the director, Fred Zinnemann, who had helped discover the similarly gifted Montgomery Clift, demonstrated that Brando was made for movie cameras.“Out of stiff and frozen silences he can lash into a passionate rage with the fearful and flailing frenzy of a taut cable suddenly cut,” wrote The New York Times’ critic, Bosley Crowther. “Or he can show the poignant tenderness of a doctor with a child.”The picture’s producer, Stanley Kramer, gave Brando a much more iconic role in “The Wild One,” as a motorcycle-gang leader who questions the conformity of the 1950s. The irresistible poster image of Brando on a cycle would outlast many of the more prestigious films he made.So would one of his lines. When asked what he was rebelling against, he answered, “Whatta you got?” Nevertheless, Brando despised the picture and the compromises he had to make to finish it.He was nominated for best-actor Oscars for recreating Kowalski in Kazan’s 1951 film of “Streetcar,” then for playing a Mexican rebel in Kazan’s “Viva Zapata!,” then for demonstrating his versatility as a non-mumbling Marc Antony in MGM’s all-star version of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” Brando finally won the top prize on his fourth try, for playing the conscience-stricken dock worker, Terry Malloy, in Kazan’s “On the Waterfront.”A true contenderThere may be no more familiar film clip than the poignant scene between Terry and his brother, played by Rod Steiger, who had sold him out by fixing the fights that might have led to a boxing career outside the docks. “I coulda been a contender,” Terry tells him, inadvertently inspiring a million Brando impersonations.Brando at first balked at doing the film because Kazan had named names during the anti-Communist investigations of the period, and the Malloy character was widely interpreted as representing Kazan’s defense of  becoming a “stool pigeon.” It was the last work they would do together.For some Brando detractors, that was pretty much the end of it. Once he decided to walk through the role of Napoleon in the empty historical pageant, “Desiree,” and to flirt with Oriental stereotypes by playing an Okinawan comic-relief character in “The Teahouse of the August Moon,” they’d had it. Many didn’t bother to see him struggling through such now-forgotten vehicles as “The Appaloosa,” “Morituri” and Charles Chaplin’s unfortunate last film, “A Countess From Hong Kong.”

Actor Marlon Brando is seen as Terry Malloy in a scene of the motion picture drama \" On The Waterfront\" in this 1954 photograph. (AP Photo)
Actor Marlon Brando is seen as Terry Malloy in a scene of the motion picture drama \" On The Waterfront\" in this 1954 photograph. (AP Photo)

Still, Brando fans found much to admire in this middle period: his amiable attempt to sing and dance in “Guys and Dolls” (the No. 1 box-office hit of 1956), his Oscar-nominated turn as a Korean war veteran who falls for a Japanese woman in “Sayonara” (which turned out much soapier than he had intended), and his eccentric performances as a sympathetic Nazi in “The Young Lions” and as another Tennessee Williams rebel in “The Fugitive Kind” (perhaps his most underrated work).In the early 1960s, Brando was accused of self-indulgence when “One-Eyed Jacks” and “Mutiny on the Bounty” went over-budget, yet his work in both of these films is quite witty and assured. “Jacks” has true grandeur (it’s the only film he directed), while “Bounty” deliberately shatters the legend that the chief mutineer, Fletcher Christian, was the simple hero Clark Gable had portrayed in the 1930s.Both movies cost much more than they earned, like so many Brando vehicles that would follow in the 1960s. He would not attract large audiences again for another decade. In 1963, when he starred in “The Ugly American,” an earnest early-warning drama suggesting future troubles in Vietnam, hardly anyone was listening.Political leaningsBy this point, Brando himself seemed less interested in acting and more concerned with political causes. Even when he won a second Academy Award, for his biggest blockbuster, “The Godfather,” nearly two decades after “Waterfront,” he failed to show up. Instead, he sent an actress masquerading as “Sacheen Littlefeather” to the Oscar ceremony, where she refused the award and tried to read a speech attacking Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans.

Brando’s attempt to make an all-star movie addressing the situation, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” went nowhere. He did, however, make several effective political films, among them “Burn!,” a fact-based drama about British meddlers in a Caribbean slave revolt, and “A Dry White Season,” an anti-apartheid story for which he received his last Oscar nomination -- in the supporting category. As a South African barrister battling racial prejudice, he was delightfully charismatic.While Brando fans responded to his fine work in these movies, neither was a box-office hit, and many moviegoers grew up watching him collect gargantuan paychecks for phoned-in performances in such costly productions as “Superman,” “Candy” and “Christopher Columbus: The Discovery.” In a rare late-1970s television appearance, he had a featured role as the American Nazi, George Lincoln Rockwell, in “Roots: The Next Generations.”While his late-1960s performances in “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” “The Chase” and “The Night of the Following Day” sharply divided critics, some argued that he was at his best playing these lost characters. Pauline Kael thought his work as Elizabeth Taylor’s homosexual husband in “Reflections” represented “one of his most daring performances,” though others found it merely grotesque.A few applauded his attempt at slapstick comedy in “Bedtime Story,” but almost no one found good things to say about his “Turn of the Screw” remake, “The Nightcomers,” in which he played the ghostly corrupter, Peter Quint. He camped it up in “The Missouri Breaks,” “The Score” and “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” succeeded at romantic comedy in “Don Juan DeMarco,” and spoofed his own “Godfather” performance in the charming comedy, “The Freshman.”

Off-screen lifeTo anyone under 30, Brando is probably most recognizable as the bloated, demented Col. Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now” -- or as the bloated, reclusive father of Christian Brando, who spent five years in prison for murdering the boyfriend of his half-sister, Cheyenne, who later killed herself. It marked the first time Brando’s off-screen life became a real issue; for the most part, he’d avoided the tabloids early in his career.

Not that he didn’t have an eventful personal life. He was married to actresses Anna Kashfi, Movita (aka Maria Castaneda) and Tarita Teriipaia (his love interest in “Mutiny on the Bounty”) and had affairs with Katy Jurado, Rita Moreno and, according to Kashfi, the actor-director Christian Marquand. But he made it clear to the leading gossip columnists of the 1950s that he wouldn’t play their game. He insulted Sheila Graham, made fun of Hedda Hopper’s hats, and called Louella Parsons “the fat one.”One Brando pal, quoted in an early Life magazine profile, claimed that the actor once told him, “I put on an act sometimes and people think I’m sensitive. Really, it’s like a kind of armor because I’m too sensitive. If there are 200 people in a room and one of them doesn’t like me, I’ve got to get out!”His mentor, Stella Adler, claimed that “he’s the most keenly aware, the most empathetical person alive.”He spent a lot of time with psychiatrists, trying “to learn to be happy,” and blurted out his problems to Truman Capote, who wrote a revealing New Yorker piece after visiting him on the set of “Sayonara.”“The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, to develop scabs,” he told Capote. “Never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much. Analysis helps. It helped me. But, still, the last eight, nine years I’ve been pretty mixed up, a mess pretty much...”Worth a second lookFor many Brando fans, almost everything he did rewards a second look. “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” which seemed merely sensationalistic when it was released in 1967, now reveals a strain of dark comedy, especially in the scenes in which Brando obsesses about a surly soldier (Robert Forster), following him and picking up the candy wrappers he discards on the street.His foppish mutineer, Fletcher Christian, widely rejected as a mistake in the early 1960s, now seems the most energetic and consistently interesting aspect of an overblown epic. Trevor Howard is properly starchy as the tyrannical Capt. Bligh, but it’s Brando who dominates their scenes, particularly when Christian loses all control and assails Bligh as “you remarkable pig!”While “Dr. Moreau” was widely trashed at the time of its 1996 release, it’s become a so-bad-it’s-fun classic, largely due to Brando’s over-the-top performance -- and Val Kilmer’s hilarious impersonation of Brando playing a mad scientist. It’s a fitting tribute from one rebel actor to another.

Brando had an instinct for finding humor in the most unlikely moments. It’s well-known that he improvised his own death scene in “The Godfather,” bringing a goofy tone to the episode by stuffing orange peels in his mouth as his character, a Mafia don, plays in a garden with his grandson. When he collapses from a stroke and stops breathing, the moment seems so true because there has been no conventional setup, no telegraphing of what is about to happen. It’s a Kodak moment suddenly spoiled by death.His Kowalski may be boorish in “Streetcar,” but Brando plays with the Neanderthal comedy of the part, winning the audience over to him even when the script seems so protective of Vivien Leigh’s fragile Blanche DuBois. It seems an unfair duel, but perhaps it’s not that unbalanced. Kowalski has to win in the end, and Brando prepares us for that chilling conquest.What would Brando have been like in the leading role in “The Egyptian,” if he hadn’t walked off the set after one day of rehearsals? Would he have undermined its pretentious pageantry by joining his co-star, Peter Ustinov, and looking for laughs in the sedate courts of Hollywood’s ancient Egypt? It’s one of several tantalizing what-if projects in Brando’s career. What if he had not turned down “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Defiant Ones” or the Robert Redford role in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”? What if he’d had the clout to fire the director of “The Wild One,” and made the film he wanted? How would his career have played out if he’d followed Kazan’s advice and made his film debut in the John Garfield part in “Gentleman’s Agreement”?But he did get much of what he wanted, personally and professionally. He could never have complained that he “coulda been a contender.”

John Hartl is the film critic for MSNBC.com.