So much talk, but so little said

THE lost art of talk show conversation is an old complaint, but it’s one you’re reminded of watching “brando.,” a fascinating two-part documentary on the iconic actor airing in 90-minute installments tonight and Wednesday night oncable’s Turner Classic Movies.

In Part 1 (the more engrossing half, which covers Brando’s life and career from Midwestern farm boy through the 1960s), lots of his costars and proteges break down the Brando mystique with aplomb, including Al Pacino, Edward Norton, Sean Penn and John Turturro.

But it’s the vintage talk show clips that look so oddly abashed, beamed from an era when Brando was on the cusp of becoming “Brando,” and TV was in its infancy as an evil and great, or greatly evil, mitigating force in the culture.

There is Brando in 1955, age 30, on Edward R. Murrow’s “Person to Person,” two days after winning the best actor Oscar for “On the Waterfront.” He’s sitting in a living room with his stern father.

“I imagine you’re just a bit proud of your son right now, aren’t you?” Murrow’s voice booms to Marlon Sr.

“Well, as an actor, not too proud, but as a man, why, quite proud,” the father allows.

A chill blows through the room: Brando’s father has allowed us to see, in real time, a reluctance to reach out to his son, and the son in turn is giving us a window into how, in this fierce man’s shadow, he can be instantly transformed back into a boy starved for approval.

Half a century later I happened to catch one of our current movie stars, Nicolas Cage, on Letterman last week; he was seeing if he could hold his breath for two minutes while a clip of his latest movie played (“Why did you make this movie?” Letterman didn’t ask. “Because I don’t know who I am if I’m not making a movie, Dave,” Cage didn’t say).

I have plum run out of reasons to watch the late-night guys: Leno, Letterman, Ferguson, Conan, that Kimmel guy. These are comedy shows at heart, of course, relatively easy to make, engines of profit for all concerned. Even the panels on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher,” with its aura of “Playboy After Dark” meets “Meet the Press,” have been something of a disappointment this season, more often in recent weeks a forum for mouthing easy applause lines on the folly of the Iraq war, Maher as a conversation-starter too often unwilling to go deeper than his neatly constructed bon mots of outrage against Bush.

True, it’s the mood we’re in, and it’s Maher’s sandbox, his “Rules.” If “Real Time,” half the time, isn’t so much intellectual as intellectual-seeming, at least the show holds out the hope of a conversation, though rather than book new panels each week, the show ought to switch to a tighter, rotating clique of conversationalists who get to know each other better, week by week (Christopher Hitchens, I believe you know Bradley Whitford).

The late-night industry actually has an established space for talk show talking; you go into a very dark room and are handed a glass of water, and then a man named Charlie Rose comes out and is terrifyingly interested in what you have to say. For, like, an hour.

But you have to be beyond naive to think a movie star goes on a talk show to talk. Last week, while Cage was holding his breath on Letterman, Alec Baldwin held his breath even longer on “The View,” conducting a two-segment PSA on the scourge of “parental alienation.”

He’d been stung by the leak of a voice-mail tirade at his daughter and was now attempting to use the media back to clear his name. The talk-show-as-quickie-rehab is actually a burgeoning, if not always useful, growth industry -- Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe and Michael Richards all quickly availed themselves of the privilege of free air time to win our love back.

Never mind that they did or didn’t receive it. We are all post-knowing the talk show is a charade, anyway, pre-produced and packaged, waiting for the next iteration of one of TV’s oldest, and most profitable, formats. Why not use it as a panic room beyond whose walls exist mean, invasive people on the Internet?

One of the only real talk shows left is a parody of one, “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central. Here the guest has to adapt to the host -- in this case Stephen Colbert as a right-wing blowhard. Going on “Colbert” is like going on “Real Time”: More than usual, it looks like work. But Maher has the almost-uncanny inflection of Carson when he’s telling a joke, and he laughs sometimes to placate guests (as in the manic, disruptive appearance April 13 by Dana Carvey).

On “Colbert” the guest must hear the host’s bone-dry satire, translate it and come up with a response on the fly. It’s one of the reasons the show books so many writers of nonfiction, though the Brando-esque Sean Penn appeared a few weeks ago in a “metaphor-off” with the host, an exceedingly well-written bit that was more “SNL” sketch than talk show appearance.

There is much discussion in “brando.” of what Method acting is and how Brando came to represent it; the interview clips of him equally convey Brando’s gift at self-mythologizing in a way that never seems phony or careful.

The documentary shows clips of Brando the deft womanizer in the 1966 documentary “Meet Marlon Brando,” which chronicled the press junket for his film “Morituri.”

Watch as he compares a female interviewer’s soothing voice to “pulverized walnuts.” Hear him say to another: “How old are you, about 23?”

“No, I’ll be 21 in March,” she tells him.

“Twenty-one in March,” Brando says, smiling. Today, that moment could produce a freak-out, spun as a sign of his misogyny, requiring the young Brando to go on “Oprah” and explain himself. Possibly he would bring his father along.

paul.brownfield@latimes.com

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‘brando.’

Where: Turner Classic Movies

When: 8 tonight; also 8 p.m. Wednesday

Rating: TV-MA L (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17 with advisory for coarse language); Part 2 TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14)