| MND COMMENTARY |
by Nicholas Stix Marlon Brando: Contender, Champ, Bum I once wrote that Frank Sinatra was for approximately 12 years one of the world’s great movie actors, until he was felled, in his late forties, by the world’s longest mid-life crisis. I was wrong. Brando’s midlife crisis began when he was still in his thirties; with each passing year, he acted more childishly. The earliest example of Brando’s professional deterioration that I know of, was during the filming, ca. 1961, of the remake of The Mutiny on the Bounty, in which Brando played Lt. Fletcher Christian. Bounty went way over budget and was late. Some Brandoists claim that this was due to their patron saint’s “perfectionism.” More credible-sounding stories are that Brando caused production delays and cost overruns, such as through the prank, in which during a scene shot on board the Bounty during a tropical storm, the actor shouted, “Mary had a little lamb …” When the rushes came back, it immediately became clear that the recording of the actual script could not possibly be matched to Brando’s lip movements, and the entire, expensive scene had to be re-shot. The 1960s saw Brando’s stock as an actor plummet, as he made one poor choice after another. And he was unlucky, too. Even when he made a good movie, as he did with Sophia Loren, in Charlie Chaplin’s swan song, The Countess from Hong Kong (1967), the comedy bombed with audiences and critics alike. I seem to be the only person who likes this movie! By the early 1970s, when he was given the chance to star as mob patriarch “Don Vito Corleone” in The Godfather, which was being directed by a young man named Francis Ford Coppola, he had to take a screen test to get the role, an indignity he never had to put up with during the 1950s or ‘60s. But it was a blessing; the challenge invigorated him. According to Brando’s own story, Brando put tissues in his cheeks for the screen test, to give the impression of an aging, Italian-born gangster. The picture earned the actor his second Oscar for best actor, provided a new generation with a new image of him, and indirectly made him millions through his revived fame. (One could argue that in the ultimate ensemble production, Brando’s Don Corleone character wasn’t on screen enough to justify a lead actor Oscar.) The Godfather was based on Mario Puzo’s runaway bestseller, which was the hottest book in America for two years running. The movie smashed all box office records. Brando earned himself some additional notoriety (read: publicity) through elaborately staging his refusal to accept the Oscar he’d won for The Godfather. Reportedly, he’d applied just two years earlier for the replacement of his Oscar for On the Waterfront, which he claimed had been stolen. Brando sent an unknown, American Indian/white actress named Maria Cruz, got up in Indian garb, and using her stage name, Sacheen Littlefeather, to the 1973 Academy Awards ceremony, with a speech decrying Hollywood’s treatment of American Indians. (At the time, the politically correct romanticization of the Indians was already well under way. In 1970, Arthur Penn’s brilliant anti-western, Little Big Man, portrayed the Indians variously as victims of vicious white men, and righteous victors over them. Ever since, we have heard about how Hollywood viciously “stereotyped” the Indians, but I don’t know of anything of the sort. If you watch the work of the most successful director of “cowboy-and-Indian” movies, John Ford, you will see Indians portrayed both as rapine, murderous, cut-throats (e.g., The Searchers, Sergeant Rutledge), and as honorable men who were betrayed by powerful white men (e.g., Fort Apache, Cheyenne Autumn). Both characterizations happen to have the virtue of being true to the facts.) The same year as The Godfather, Brando starred in the then revolutionary Last Tango in Paris, by Bernardo Bertolucci. Last Tango was rated X (since replaced by NC-17) for sex scenes that were considered to be of pornographic quality. At the risk of sounding like a libertine, when I finally saw Last Tango, in both the American and German versions, I suspected that material I’d read about had been edited out of it. Or else, the original stories about the picture were exaggerated. In any event, the story of a man who has just lost his suicidal wife, and who embarks on a narcissistic, anonymous, purely sexual relationship with a girl half his age whom he has just met, was an international sensation. “Paul” (Brando) insists that “Jeanne” (Maria Schneider) not fall in love with him, not even tell him her name. But she does fall in love with him, and ultimately kills him, when he stalks her. What would have been tawdry, softcore pornography in less talented hands, became, through Bertolucci and Brando, and Gato Barbieri’s brilliant score, an epitaph for the budding sexual revolution (though I don’t recall anyone saying so at the time). Sex Without Love = Death. Brando would have done well to pay heed to Last Tango’s message. Although released in 1972, Last Tango qualified as a 1973 release, in terms of Oscar eligibility, and got Brando another best actor Oscar nomination. It would be his last. As the years wore on, and I learned more about Brando, I wondered whether, in Last Tango, I had seen a great performance of a role, or Brando simply playing himself. Brando is supposed to have said that the performance emotionally destroyed him. If he really said that, so much the worse for him. In my college acting textbook, Respect for Acting, the great <a href= http://ibdb.com/person.asp?id=43654>Uta Hagen</a> argued that an actor should, by virtue of his work, be psychologically healthy. One gets to play act, and enjoy emotional catharsis on a regular basis. A real actor would have felt stimulated, refreshed, by a tour de force performance. The Brando who claimed to be ravaged by a movie performance, spoke not as an actor, but as a narcissist. The narcissist must always take from others, and feels that by giving anything to the audience, he is impoverishing himself. Had Brando written a book on acting, it would have to have been entitled, Contempt for Acting. (Hagen was the original star of Clifford Odets’ The Country Girl and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and replaced Jessica Tandy in Streetcar.) The latter half of Brando’s life was characterized by narcissism, laziness, and greed. His bizarre, occasional utterances on politics and other subjects were designed to draw maximum attention to himself, to remind directors that he was still around. He would then demand incredible salaries for minimal work, playing roles where he would refuse even to learn his lines. And his conduct was at times so unprofessional, as to ruin movies. The man who in his twenties and early thirties had been a blessing to the acting profession, became a curse, the nihilistic Anti-Actor. It was as if the young Brando had made a deal with the Devil to quickly attain greatness, but Lucifer had now exacted his price, which required that Brando continually disgrace himself and his profession, and become a porcine parody of his formerly handsome self. In The Missouri Breaks (1976), an Arthur Penn western in which the horse thief played by Jack Nicholson is the “good guy,” Brando gave the sort of hammy, bizarre performance, playing an assassin that would become a recurring theme in his later work, in which he often would be poison for directors’ careers. The movie signaled the decline of Arthur Penn as a director. Then Brando was signed by Coppola to star in Apocalypse Now, one of the most star-crossed productions in Hollywood history. While the Philippines production suffered monsoons, the near death of co-star Martin Sheen (then only 37) due to a massive heart attack, and the cost overruns and general indiscipline that would become associated with the middle-aged Francis Ford Coppola, the initial problem was Brando. He showed up for his role as a Special Forces colonel 100 pounds overweight, and according to reports at the time, the script had to be re-written so that Brando would appear on the screen only for a few minutes. Thus did the star vehicle become a cameo role. His next movie role, in 1980’s The Formula, opposite George C. Scott and Marthe Keller, resulted in his being nominated for a Razzie Award as the year’s worst supporting actor. (Brando would again be nominated for Razzies for Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996).) Brando would not make another movie for nine years. In A Dry White Season (1989), he phoned in another bizarre, hammy performance, this time as a South African barrister, but since the movie was an anti-apartheid screed, and Brando was helping the “good guys,” he was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar. The following year, a much more relaxed Brando played a parody of his Godfather character, in the entertaining comedy, The Freshman. And yet, as soon as the production wrapped, he badmouthed the movie and his colleagues. In 1995, Brando teamed up with Johnny Depp in Don Juan DeMarco. Depp played a psychiatric patient from Queens who insisted he was the great lover, Don Juan. Brando played the psychiatrist who had to figure out whether Depp’s character was delusional. The chemistry between Depp and Brando was marvelous, and Brando turned in a performance that was uncharacteristic in its delicacy and whimsy. (Unfortunately, there was no screen chemistry between Brando and Faye Dunaway, as his wife.) And yet, the following year saw Brando up to his old tricks again. On the set of The Island of Dr. Moreau, he reportedly sabotaged the production, inducing his younger, undisciplined, narcissistic co-star, Val Kilmer, into joining him in his shenanigans. The crippled movie was savaged by critics and shunned by moviegoers. During Brando’s last movie, a small role in The Score (2001), he reportedly made a point of insulting and humiliating director Frank Oz, and demanded that Oz be off the set during Brando’s few scenes. Since Brando’s death, we have been told that he somehow gave actors “permission” to be emotionally authentic. We have also heard, from Brando-apologist Richard Schickel, that it was the movies that let Brando down, beginning in the 1960s, rather than the other way around. Baloney! A more intense acting style was coming into fashion after World War II, before Brando’s arrival on the Hollywood scene. Witness Kirk Douglas’ driven performances as boxer “Midge Kelly” in Champion (1949), as “Det. Jim McLeod” in Detective Story (1951), and as Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956). And already in 1946, in It’s a Wonderful Life, note the embittered, emotionally raw quality of so much of Jimmy Stewart’s performance as “George Bailey,” a quality that characterized much of Stewart’s best 1950s’ work with directors Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock. Something was in the air. The Parents of the Angry Anti-Hero Perhaps the greatest irony of Marlon Brando’s decent into narcissism, is the reason why the cult of narcissistic, “anti-authoritarian” celebrity arose in the first place. With the end of World War II, the circumstances which had contributed to studios making largely upbeat movies changed in two radical ways. The Great Depression was over, and The War was won. During the Depression, Hollywood studios felt obliged to churn out uplifting, escapist entertainment which was either carefree, or which presented clear choices between “good guys” (white hats) and “bad guys” (black hats), in which good always prevailed over evil. With so much misery on the streets and the farms, there was no need to rub audiences’ noses in what they were already enduring. Besides, theatergoers would have stayed away in droves from such punishment. But when times are flush, people feel less of a compulsion to see upbeat stories, and many even obsess over the dark side of human existence. The other development was the destruction of the old studio system, thanks to studio player Olivia De Havilland. In 1945, De Havilland launched, and eventually won, a lawsuit that broke up the studios’ absolute power over moviedom. Prior to De Havilland’s lawsuit, the same studio that produced movies also owned the theater chain that presented them. The verdict in the lawsuit forced the studios to divest their control of theater chains, which meant that they were no longer guaranteed profits from most of their pictures. And prior to the De Havilland lawsuit, movie stars were much like major league baseball players, who under the “reserve clause” belonged to the same team forever, unless it chose to trade or release them. Olivia De Havilland won for actors their independence, but this was a mixed blessing. For one thing, it made movie production more expensive and risky, with big stars paid much higher fees for each picture, rather than being tied to long-term contracts, in which they appeared in several movies per year. Thus, the new Hollywood cost a lot of low-level actors and craftsmen their jobs, and reduced the number of movies made. (And accelerated the movies’ decline, under the onslaught of TV.) Under the old system, the studio heads decided what roles would be offered to a performer (which was what prompted De Havilland to sue). They also exerted considerable control over performers’ private lives. Big stars tended to hate both aspects of studio control, and yet many performers could not cope with their new-found freedom. For instance, under the old system, stars did not have to read through dozens of submitted scripts, and choose the one great role in the batch; the studio told them what role they’d be playing. And previously, actors did not get to deal with the media. The studios told them what to say and where to say it. Studio publicity departments largely controlled the press, whom they fed a steady diet of phony stories about the stars, in exchange for reporters not hounding performers. Under the new dispensation, many movie stars made poor script choices. And the notion that a movie star could create his own public persona proved to be fool’s gold, as the newly empowered media descended upon the uncontrolled, unarmed narcissists (see Seberg, Jean). With time, the cannier movie stars, such as Tom Cruise, employed their lawyers and publicists to reinvent the studio publicity system, whereby they would contractually control every aspect of their publicity campaigns, with only those media organizations getting puff interviews that got every question cleared in advance, and that promised in writing not to engage in journalism. What we call “celebrity culture,” I believe, comprises the media and both the out-of-control narcissists and the control freaks. In her Brando obituary, Suzanne Fields wrote of a dinner she attended with the actor in a restaurant during the mid-1970s. Brando loudly criticized everything about the restaurant, making a spectacle of himself, and then loudly complained that other diners, who no doubt recognized him, were looking at him. Had other diners not noticed him, he might have stroked out. In a sort of poetic justice, the lazy media of celebrity culture couldn’t even bother getting their Brando stories right. The day after Brando’s death, the TV show Extra “reported” that Brando’s film debut was in Streetcar (rather than in Fred Zinnemann’s The Men, the previous year), and that he had appeared in “both” of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather movies (Coppola made three Godfather movies; Brando only appeared in the first). And on Nightline, big-deal movie critic Roger Ebert said that, based on Brando’s revolutionary influence, movie history could be divided into pre and post-1947 films. The only problem is, Brando didn’t make his first movie until 1950. Ebert confused Brando’s 1947 Broadway performance as Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar, with his movie performance of the same role four years later. Media sycophants also belabored the effects of Brando’s son Christian’s 1990 murder of daughter Cheyenne’s boyfriend, Dag Drollet, and Cheyenne’s 1995 suicide on Brando. The fact is, that if anything, such tragedies were the effects, rather than the causes of a dissolute lifestyle that Brando had embarked on while still a young man. (But note how media camp followers were less concerned with the people who were directly harmed, than with the feelings of The Star.) He left behind three ex-wives, 14 or more surviving children born in and out of wedlock, and reportedly, thousands of ex-lovers, few if any of whom achieved as much intimacy with him as the fictional Jeanne achieved with “Paul” in Last Tango. Some have referred to Brando as America’s greatest actor, and even as the greatest actor of the 20th century. I have to disagree. Brando may have possessed the greatest talent of any American actor of the past 100 years, but for most of his career, he wasted that talent. The specifically American aspect of Brando’s story, is that in America, movie actors are more closely identified with the roles they play, than in say, the United Kingdom. With the sort of classical theater training performers like John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, and Alec Guinness received at the Old Vic and Central (and that German great, Gustaf Gründgens, received in Düsseldorf), an actor who was seen as indistinguishable from a certain role or type would have been seen as a dramatic failure.Brando’s case reminds me of baseball player Dwight Gooden, the most talented pitcher of the past twenty years. However, after tremendous early success and adulation, Gooden destroyed his body with drugs, alcohol, and even sexual hijinks. And so, Gooden’s success was eventually matched or exceeded by many of his less gifted contemporaries. In the field of acting, Gene Hackman may not be Brando’s equal in raw talent, and certainly hasn’t had the sort of scripts sent to him that Brando did. Hackman (1930-), the plain-looking, balding, quintessential late-bloomer, who as an acting student flunked out of the Pasadena Playhouse, where he was considered the worst student in its history, got his first role after his thirtieth birthday. And yet, Hackman has had the more brilliant career, fully exploiting his gifts, and making the most of every role he has played. (For my money, Fredric March (1897-1975) also had a greater career than Brando.)The Marlon Brando story is a cautionary tale. For most of the last 40 years of his life, Brando was a bum, and he died a bum, but unlike Terry Malloy, he had no one to blame but himself. And yet, we will always have On the Waterfront, Viva Zapata, Sayonara and The Godfather, when he was beautiful. New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix has written for Toogood Reports, Middle American News, the New York Post, Daily News, American Enterprise, Insight, Chronicles, Newsday and many other publications. His recent work is collected at www.geocities.com/nstix and http://www.thecriticalcritic.blogspot.com. |
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