BOOK REVIEW : A Simpatico Look at Brando’s Lifework : BRANDO: A LIFE IN OUR TIMES<i> By Richard Schickel</i> Atheneum $21.95, 256 pages

For moviegoing boys in their teens in the early ‘50s, the on-screen Marlon Brando was the confused but compelling young man they wished to be. As Richard Schickel puts it, a Brando hero was “rude and sensitive, inarticulate but painfully aware.”

A boy at the movies couldn’t help but be moved by Brando’s kind of hero--the brutal but needy Stanley of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the agonizingly sexy coulda-been-contender of “On the Waterfront” and the sweet-guy-underneath-the-black-leather gang leader of “The Wild One.”

Schickel, Time magazine’s movie reviewer since 1972, was one of the boys who idolized Brando. Now that Brando is eligible for Social Security, and Schickel not far behind, the critic wonders: What happened to the actor since that string of good movies in the 50s?

Schickel is sensitive and painfully aware. But he’s rarely rude (only once does he refer to Brando as “a weirdo”) and, with an abundance of “as it weres” and “if you wills,” he’s articulate to a fault. His book is a consistently interesting look at Brando’s lifework and, along the way, at the work of the movie business.

(Schickel’s “Brando” contains no direct interviews with the actor; Brando is saving his observations for his autobiography, due in 1993.)

Schickel quickly sketches Brando’s middle-class, WASP childhood in Evanston, Ill., and Omaha. Brando’s mother acted occasionally at the Omaha Community Playhouse where Henry Fonda trained; his father sold unglamorous stuff like chicken feed.

The actor’s mother was an indiscreet alcoholic and his father a discreet one. For his psychological evaluation of their son, Schickel depends--in a way that is soon going to seem very dated--on the children-of-alcoholic-parents syndrome. To Schickel, Brando fits the profile: “a man who learned early to tread warily and speak ambiguously, so as not to stir the unpredictable emotions of the most powerful figures in his life.”

Can we just presume from now on that, unless otherwise noted, every actor is the child of an alcoholic parent? Ronald Reagan, Suzanne Somers, Ali MacGraw, Brando--alike as peas in a pod.

After dropping out of military school, Brando moved in with his sister in New York and began an apprenticeship with prima acting teacher Stella Adler. Small parts in various productions led to the role on Broadway of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.” (Jack Palance was Brando’s “Streetcar” understudy.)

The movie version of Streetcar began a five-year run of good parts in good films, including “Julius Caesar,” “Viva Zapata!” “The Wild One” and, in 1955, “On the Waterfront.”

One of the reasons we read film biographies is to be reminded how much the creation of a movie depends on chance. What gets made depends on the emotional and financial state of producers. Casting depends on who’s free that month. Tyrone Power, Schickel reveals, was in line for the lead in “Viva Zapata!” and Frank Sinatra was Elia Kazan’s first choice for the hero of “On the Waterfront.”

The way was eased for “Julius Caesar” when producer Dore Schary realized he could use the columns and togas left over from “Quo Vadis?” Brando’s commitment to finish one of his bad ‘60s movies, “The Fugitive Kind,” prevented him from taking the lead in “Lawrence of Arabia.”

And until Brando begged for the role of Don Corleone in “The Godfather,” the producer had been thinking about Danny Thomas in the part. (Look, it might have changed the way we think of Danny Thomas, and he certainly would have showed up to accept his Oscar.)

After 1954, Technicolor and Cinemascope inspired a bevy of epic, inspirational, color-drenched pictures that overshadowed gritty movies like “On the Waterfront.” That year Brando played Napoleon in “Desiree,” in which Jean Simmons makes an effort to act while Brando says every line as if he would rather be any place else.

Schickel discerns interesting patterns in Brando’s work--for example the repeated ritual beatings the Brando character suffers. Schickel sees the beatings as “punishment for being an outsider and sensitive.”

But the reader wonders what the actor contributed to the pattern. Did Brando ask to be dragged by a rope around his neck in “Zapata” or beaten to a pulp in “Waterfront” or dragged under a cold shower by Karl Malden in “Streetcar”? Or did something about Brando bring out the punishing impulse in his directors or fellow actors?

In the ‘60s Brando sustained some critical beatings, with 14 commercial failures in a row, including painful flops like “The Countess From Hong Kong.” Much of his energy went to supporting the civil rights movement and staging fund-raisers for American Indians.

The series of flops led somehow to Brando’s starring role in “The Godfather”--the biggest hit since “Gone With the Wind.”

Critical success followed commercial success within months with the release of “Last Tango in Paris,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s near-porn. Schickel defends “Tango” in an unconvincing way, admitting that you had to say you loved it at the time in order to fight censorship.

Brando is not so difficult to work with, Schickel says, when he has the right director, a Francis Coppola or an Arthur Penn. Schickel convincingly argues that the media bear much of the blame.

“A simple story about an actor on a star trip,” he writes, “plays more conveniently for journalists and readers than complicated tales involving technical problems, in which there are not clear-cut villains.”

It’s tougher to defend the cynicism of Brando’s post-Tango screen appearances, in which he made as much as $2 million for a few days’ work.

Schickel’s sympathy for Brando stems from a sense of identification: Schickel, like the actor, is a WASP, a Midwesterner, a sometime drummer, a shy person.

Of more interest to the reader than Brando and Schickel’s shared shyness is the question of Brando’s talent. The question that this experienced critic is qualified to answer is whether Brando is acting or behaving when he’s at work on a movie. The meaning of an actor’s work, as Schickel defines it, is “the search for truthful behavior, authentic emotion and the means of vividly imparting it.”

Schickel excuses Brando for sometimes straying from the search, saying that the actor “lurched from unstable adolescence to destabilizing fame.” He concludes that Brando’s work is valuable because he has “kept faith with incoherence.” Most of us would say that keeping in touch with incoherence is something we do pretty well without expert help.

Next: Amy Wallace reviews “Theo and Matilda” by Rachel Billington (HarperCollins).