| MND COMMENTARY |
Marlon Brando: Contender, Champ, Bum July 13, 2004 by Nicholas Stix Charley Malloy: Look, kid, I - how much you weigh, son? When you weighed one hundred and sixty-eight pounds you were beautiful. You coulda been another Billy Conn, and that skunk we got you for a manager, he brought you along too fast. Terry Malloy: It wasn't him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, "Kid, this ain't your night. We're going for the price on Wilson." You remember that? "This ain't your night"! My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors in the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville! You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn't have to take them dives for the short-end money. Charley: Oh I had some bets down for you. You saw some money. Terry: You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it. It was you, Charley. Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, and Rod Steiger, as his brother, Charley, in the taxicab scene from On the Waterfront (1954). At different times in his career, Marlon Brando exemplified the best and the worst of the American acting profession. Brando died on July 2, at the age of 80, of pulmonary failure. Let’s take a look, with clear eyes, at his life and work. The best came mostly at the start. Brando made his name as an actor in December, 1947, starring as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. He became a Broadway legend, playing the role for two solid years (800+ performances), but the provinces of Manhattan’s West Side being what they are, most Americans still didn’t know him from Adam. Streetcar was Brando’s fifth Broadway show, and his last. Marlon Brando burst onto the movie scene in 1950, in Fred Zinnemann’s The Men, playing an angry, wheelchair-bound veteran. “Angry” became him. The next year, Brando became “Brando,” the screen legend, in the film version of Streetcar. Elia Kazan, who had directed the stage version, directed the film adaptation, which included most of the stage cast (Kim Hunter, Karl Malden, Rudy Bond, Nick Dennis, Ann Dere, Richard Garrick, Peg Hillias and Edna Thomas). The major change from the stage to the screen version, was in replacing Jessica Tandy with Vivien Leigh for the role of “Blanche DuBois.” Stanley Kowalski is a brute, as arrogant and overbearing as he is stupid. And yet, for all his abuse, his wife, Stella, loves him. Indeed, Stella loves the animal in Stanley. But Stella is secondary in Streetcar. The story revolves around the confrontation between Stella’s older sister Blanche, who comes for a visit, and Stanley. The delicate Blanche, who has always depended upon “the kindness of strangers,” is contemptuous of Stanley, and he knows it. (So, for that matter, is Stella.) And yet, Blanche is fascinated with him, and attracted to him. Ultimately, Stanley rapes Blanche, and she mentally disintegrates, like a flower whose petals fall off. The movie depicts Stanley as a monster, and Blanche as his helpless victim, yet I don’t think that’s how the author, Tennessee Williams, saw things. Williams saw in Blanche … himself. The homosexual Williams was drawn to brutes like Stanley, and dreamed of being ravished. (But what do I know? According to the tenured, white feminists at the City University of New York’s York College, Williams was a feminist, and Streetcar was a feminist statement. Granted, to my knowledge there is no record of Tennessee Williams as a feminist, and the tenure-holders’ claims have no connection to Williams’ life, but hey, they’ve got tenure, so they must know what they’re talking about, right? In 1998, after a workshop performance of scenes from Streetcar at York, the tenured feminists were running a discussion. And I mean running it. When I, the only white male present in the small group, sought to contribute my take, they ignored my raised hand. Fortunately for me, the gifted, young black actress who had played Blanche, and who was also a splendid writer, was one of my literature students, which was why I was there in the first place. My student – whose name I unfortunately can no longer recall -- ignored the feminists, and called on me. So, at least my student heard my theory.) Passionate, raw masculinity was to be the young Brando’s trademark. Imagine a white, heterosexual actor being permitted to perform that way today. His character would have to be the heavy, a comic foil, or a repressed homosexual. (Some might see irony in Stanley Kowalski having been written by a homosexual, but when one considers that the role is a caricature of heterosexual masculinity, by a writer who was not trying to do caricature, all irony evaporates. Tennessee Williams did not take his irony supplements.) For four years in a row, Brando was up for the best actor Oscar: For Streetcar, Viva Zapata, Julius Caesar and On the Waterfront. Some observers think it is an “enduring mystery” that Brando lost to Humphrey Bogart (for The African Queen) in 1952, but it was Bogart’s turn, and it just wasn’t Brando’s time yet. Heck, at that point, Hollywood was so infatuated with Brando, that he was even nominated for his mumbling Marc Antony in Joseph Mankiewicz’ Julius Caesar (1953). (I know Hollywood is terribly inconsistent in such matters, but a great many Oscars have been awarded to performers for relatively mediocre work, who had been passed over for their best performances, while other awards have been given for purely sentimental or political reasons. Think Harold Russell in 1947, for The Best Years of Our Lives; Helen Hayes in 1971, for Airport; Paul Newman in ’87, for a lousy performance in The Color of Money; Jessica Tandy for Driving Miss Daisy in ’90; and radical lefty Susan Sarandon in ’95 for a flat performance in Dead Man Walking, instead of merely Democrat activist Meryl Streep, who in The Bridges of Madison County gave a performance that, to my mind, was the equivalent of Vivien Leigh’s standard-setting work in Gone with the Wind and Streetcar.) In 1954, Brando gave his greatest performance, as washed-up prizefighter “Terry Malloy,” who gets by, by performing little favors and doing “show-no” longshoreman jobs for waterfront mob boss “Johnny Friendly,” in On the Waterfront. The dramatic blockbuster, like Streetcar and Zapata directed by Elia Kazan, would be nominated for 12 Oscars, and win eight. As more than a few observers have pointed out, Brando’s Terry Malloy combined brutishness and sensitivity. It also needs to be pointed out that Brando thrived on working with Kazan, a tough, demanding director who had made his mark on the New York stage. After On the Waterfront, Brando would no longer enjoy the sort of success during the 1950s that he did at the beginning of the decade. And yet he continued to do excellent, often daring work. In 1955, he starred in the film version of the musical Guys and Dolls as “Sky Masterson,” opposite Frank Sinatra’s “Nathan Detroit.” In 1956, a physically unrecognizable Brando played a Japanese interpreter in the comedy set in occupied Japan, The Teahouse of the August Moon, opposite Glenn Ford. Brando was marvelous in the sort of role that actors used to fight for, in order to spread their wings, but which now are largely off limits to whites, due to political correctness. Ethnic hustlers demand instead that such roles be given to mediocre members of their respective groups. In 1957, Brando played military pilot “Ace Gruver” in the interracial James Michener romance, Sayonara, set in Japan during the Korean War and at the end of the American occupation. The movie was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Brando as Best Actor, and won four. The awards were dominated that year by David Lean’s brilliant World War II story of the clash of civilizations, The Bridge on the River Kwai, which won seven of the statuettes. Brando lost out to Alec Guinness, who had given a towering performance as “Col. Nicholson” in Kwai. Whaddya Got? Girl: What're you rebelling against, Johnny? Johnny: Whaddya got? Brando, as Johnny Strabler, to Mary Murphy, in The Wild One. All the talk about Brando’s “sensitivity” is so much rot. The sycophantic “experts” who say that he played “sensitive” brutes are confusing emotional neediness with sensitivity. In other words, they can’t tell a narcissist from a saint. The role that contributed the most to Brando’s mystique, was that of motorcycle gang leader “Johnny Strabler,” the title character of The Wild One (listed variously as 1953 or 1954). The movie is entertaining trash, which owes a good deal of its attraction to the scenery-chewing work of a young Lee Marvin as “Chino,” the leader of a rival gang. (In the big fight scene, Johnny gives Chino a pasting; in real life, the 5’10” Brando would never have had a chance with Marvin, a hard-drinking brawler who stood five inches taller than him.) In The Wild One, in the face of a weakling sheriff, Strabler’s gang takes over and lays waste to a small California town. Eventually, some civilians take matters into their own hands, and beat the hell out of Johnny. Director László Benedek suggested, ludicrously, that the townsmen were as brutal as the motorcycle gang, and in a view that would become widespread in the 1960s, but then as regards black thugs, that what Johnny really needed was “understanding.” Hell, in such a situation, the townsmen would have been perfectly justified in lynching Johnny. I got your “understanding” right here! Johnny Strabler was one of the early versions of what became the ultimate 1960s Hollywood cliché: The “anti-hero.” During the mid-1950s, in his brief career, James Dean would specialize in this type, in East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause (the ultimate anti-hero movie title), and Giant, before dying in an automobile accident in 1955. Another then-famous anti-hero role was Paul Newman’s performance as Billy the Kid, in Arthur Penn’s The Left Handed Gun, in 1958. (Though I admire much of Arthur Penn’s work, when I saw the movie on The Late Show about thirty years ago, I found it so dreadful, that I shut it off after a few minutes.) In the 1960s, the anti-hero became the dominant shtick in Hollywood, as Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, Newman and Redford, (and a few years later) Charles Bronson, and countless other actors would earn millions of dollars portraying anti-hero crooks and cops alike. (On TV, for a producer to sell a cop series, it had to be about an “unorthodox” cop.) However, the anti-hero shtick did not help Marlon Brando. Brando’s problem was that, rather than seeing the playing of anti-heroes as a calculated career move, he adopted the anti-hero as his personal shtick. But if you really act like an anti-hero (i.e., a juvenile delinquent) in your personal and professional life, you become a source of grief to all who depend on you. |
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