Contender? More Like a Champion

Beyond anything else, Marlon Brando is the towering original who came out of the Midwest 58 years ago and electrified Broadway and then Hollywood with the visceral excitement and veracity of his acting. He exploded propriety and expressed intimate yearnings with unprecedented nakedness and power, only to have studio executives try to cut him down to conventional stardom.

Even now, he seesaws between living legend and butt of late-night jokes. Whenever another maverick is profiled or interviewed, Brando is apt to be invoked as a model or a friend. But Brando is just as sure to be parodied by comedians who mock the way he once fed Larry King a health-food cookie and kissed him on the lips.

Brando’s ability to embarrass as well as to inspire is part of what I admire about him. When he turns interview sessions with King or Connie Chung into showcases for his own eccentricities, he’s being true to his roots. He was at the hub of that generation of artists who viewed the celebrity-fueled media not as allies in the American Success Game but as distorters of their work and invaders of their lives.

Again and again in books on Brando, biographers seize on the real-life scene of Brando testifying in tears on behalf of his son Christian, who shot and killed his half-sister’s lover. They use the broken-lion image as counterpoint to Brando’s masculine potency in movies of the ‘50s. It’s as if they think Brando had embodied some stoic man’s man code that made it unseemly for him to break even under such tragic circumstances.

So I was almost dizzy with delight when I reread this proclamation by the late film critic Pauline Kael: As “the major protagonist of contemporary American themes in the fifties,” she wrote, Brando “had no code, only his instincts. He was a development from the gangster leader and the outlaw. He was antisocial because he knew society was crap; he was a hero to youth because he was strong enough not to take the crap.”

In the course of devouring the recent flood of DVDs that immortalize Brando’s movie roles in pristine digital, I kept looking for coherence in the arc of his career.

For help, I pored through all the available biographies and found occasional insights wrapped up in confusion or abashment or wool-gathering. But the repeated quoting of Kael in several books sent me back to her 1966 essay, “Marlon Brando: An American Hero.” It was a revelation.

Kael’s essay does more to summarize Brando’s blistering appeal and the perilous nature of his acting life than anything written before or since.

In a passage that goes beyond conventional criticism to a personal declaration of values and philosophy, Kael writes: “He was our angry young man--the delinquent, the tough, the rebel--who stood at the center of our common experience. When, as Terry Malloy in ‘On the Waterfront,’ he said to his brother, ‘Oh Charlie, oh Charlie you don’t understand. I could have had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody, instead of a bum--which is what I am,’ he spoke for all our failed hopes. It was the great American lament, of Broadway, of Hollywood, as well as of the docks.”

Still, her realization that Brando represented the first male American protagonist who didn’t have a code, who found new audacity and power from his very lack of mooring, accounts for Brando’s continued power to intrigue us. He moves us like no other actor when his intuition and intelligence connect with our own contradictory feelings.

Brando had a rare potency in movies right from the start--that’s what makes him so ferociously affecting as a World War II paraplegic who doubts his ability to please his wife in Fred Zinnemann’s “The Men” (1950). In Elia Kazan’s film version of his stage triumph, Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951), Brando as Stanley Kowalski brought off a lowdown burlesque poetry, spitting out unintentionally hilarious non sequiturs while parading around in his tight T-shirt and jeans. What’s more, he made it mesh with the heartbreakingly delicate lyricism of Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois.

Brando burned with revolutionary fire in Kazan’s visually exciting “Viva Zapata” (1952)--it’s his most uncomplicatedly stirring, and macho, performance--and he showed his range with his Mark Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” (1953).

It was Brando’s next two films, “The Wild One” (1953) and “On the Waterfront” (1954), that made him a movie idol. Aside from Brando’s performance, “The Wild One” hasn’t aged well. Although its leather and chrome iconography and Brando’s hipsterism inspired biker and rebel cults for decades to come, it fits all too snugly into the musty category of “cautionary tale.” Its story ultimately reduces Brando’s biker to the quintessential crazy mixed-up kid.

“On the Waterfront,” also with Kazan, holds up as one of the best examples of the creative synergy of gifted star and landmark role. For all its muckraking, the drama is based on the growth of a single character, and it makes his transformation as galvanizing as that of Henry V.

The fulcrum of “On the Waterfront” is Terry’s relationship with his brother, Charlie the Gent. It’s a variation on the Cain and Abel theme, with the brainy brother being more destructive than the brawny one. Rod Steiger is brilliant as Charlie, embodying a glib maturity that even Terry sees through at the end. But Brando is the one who makes us see and hear what we never have before. He mixes an odd languor with physical menace, shadowy gestures with sudden decisive actions, and an unconventional stop-and-go phrasing that makes each line his own. He expresses the inexpressible and gets at the core of Terry’s angst--his throttled howl against a world that would label and box him without the love with which he pigeonholes his pigeons.

Post-’Waterfront’ Not an Unblemished Record

For the dozen years after “On the Waterfront,” Brando ping-ponged between wildly various projects, sometimes testing himself and sometimes merely toying with expectations. The roster of these films will defeat the efforts of most Brando-philes to strike through to instances of undiminished brilliance. “Desiree” (1954), “Guys and Dolls” (1955), “The Teahouse of the August Moon” (1956), “Sayonara” (1957)--all are white elephants in widescreen and color.

Trying to play a decent man who became a Nazi officer in the fitfully compelling “The Young Lions” (1958), he tackles ethical conundrums but skews the meaning of the material. “Mutiny on the Bounty” (1962) is probably the most enjoyable of Brando’s mid-career debacles, though neither the two halves of the story nor the two halves of his interpretation of mutineer Fletcher Christian--as dandy and underdog hero--jibe effectively.

And in John Huston’s 1967 “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” Brando once again forges a fully rounded performance in a first-rate movie.

After “Reflections in a Golden Eye” bombed, Brando went slumming again, in his pal Christian Marquand’s ragged film version of the porno classic “Candy” (1968). But as the elusive agent of colonialism in Gillo Pontecorvo’s surging if self-destructive “Burn!” (1970), he wryly articulated imperial capitalism to the delight of campus radicals. He exploded with sexual sadism in Michael Winner’s nasty melodrama “The Nightcomers” (1971). And later in 1971 and ‘72, nearly two decades after Terry Malloy, Francis Ford Coppola gave him the opportunity once again to play a Zeitgeist-defining figure--this time, a massive patriarchal force who ensures both his family’s survival and its moral downfall.

To this day, it’s jolting to see Brando as Don Corleone--the receded hairline, the gray pencil mustache, jowls hanging off a twisted mouth and a voice cracked from years of command. Brando makes the character extraordinarily complex largely through his physical expressiveness. He walks as if his shoulder blades were pinned behind him. But the sensibility beneath the authority is surprisingly agile: the Don can suddenly break into mimicry, or turn his daughter in a waltz with a slight protective bent that catches sentiment in movement.

It’s hard to overestimate the influence Brando’s uncanny acting had on this masterpiece. His sway over the rest of the cast vitalizes the film on every viewing.

Brando had even more influence on his next film, Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris.” Brando poured all his knowledge of life and acting into the role of an American expatriate devastated by his wife’s suicide and determined to have a sex-only liaison with Maria Schneider. And he was working with a director who resolved to take Brando’s and Kazan’s improvisatory, psychodramatic techniques to new peaks in a heightened operatic style.

Brando began to let his burgeoning flab fan out and permit his bent for goofiness to run amok in the sour satiric western “The Missouri Breaks” (1975). How remarkable to see a movie in which Jack Nicholson is the underactor. And Brando’s put-on gravitas in “Superman” (1978) set the pattern for decades of highly paid cameo appearances.

At least working with Coppola again on “Apocalypse Now” promised a return to substance. But it came off as a parody of their collaboration on “The Godfather.” Kurtz, the madman who’s carved out his own kingdom in the Cambodian jungle during the Vietnam War, is seen in half-light and heard in half-whispers. Trying to arrive at a concept of Kurtz that would fit Brando’s newly bloated heroic presence, Coppola and his star make him Christ and satyr, martyr and Manson.

If Brando has gone in and out of focus ever since “Apocalypse Now,” it’s not entirely his fault. Moviemakers often don’t know what to do with him even after they cast him. Most recently, Frank Oz, the director of the hollow 2001 heist film “The Score,” lamented that he tried to challenge Brando instead of listening to him--and the result is listless.

The next time we see Brando, it may be in an instructional acting video he is producing called “Lying for a Living.” Brando has already taped Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, and Jon Voight improvising with non-actors for this video.

The intersection of raw reality and superb training reflects Brando’s own expansive aesthetic. He calls what he does lying for a living. But he’s actually turned movie acting into the art of telling the truth.

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Michael Sragow is film critic for the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune company.