A ‘roman candle’ who seduced with his craft

Marlon Brando didn’t invent sex, but for many movie lovers he might as well have. Celebrated for his deep-tissue technique, for finding the perfect juncture between the truth of a character and the truth of his being, Brando radically changed the way we looked at men and sex on screen. In the wake of World War II, as America shook off the nightmare of war and embraced its old optimism, he brilliantly embodied the country’s contradictions. He was at once tough and sensitive, masculine and feminine, raw and seriously cooked -- a perfect distillation of an America anxiously, at times desperately in search of itself.

An actor’s roles serve as a kind of shadow biography, particularly when a career stretches out for half a century and with as many perceived peaks, valleys and strange detours as Brando’s. Given this, it’s always been a fascinating and instructive detail of his career that he entered the movies in “The Men,” Fred Zinnemann’s 1950 drama about paraplegic World War II veterans. Just one year earlier, Brando had delivered his last performance in the famous Broadway production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Now this intensely physical actor, whose star-making turn as Stanley Kowalski had turned him into a ripped-T-shirt pinup in the pages of Vogue and Life magazines, was now playing America’s wounded man, searching for a way to reclaim a sense of self and place.

As it happens, Brando had been unsure that he was right for the stage role of Stanley Kowalski, the inarticulate sexual primitive, and director Elia Kazan had shipped the actor off to visit Tennessee Williams in Provincetown, Mass. Brando bewitched the playwright, who would later write that the actor “humanizes the character of Stanley in that it becomes the brutality or callousness of youth rather than a vicious older man.... [Brando] seemed to have already created a dimensional character, of the sort that the war has produced among young veterans.” With Stanley Kowalski, Brando plumbed the depths of male brutality while at the same time offering up a sense of redemption; it was an admixture and a vision of masculinity that surely resonated with a country that had just endured years of soul-crushing war.

“The Men” established Brando’s bona fides as a serious movie actor, not just another beautiful face, and indicated the kinds of screen roles that would follow. After the war, the movies needed new faces and bodies, a new generation of stars who could step up next to aging favorites like James Stewart, who had gone to battle and come back with the experience etched on their faces.

Brando became that apotheosis of that new Hollywood type by representing the new American man. A postwar, bebop kind of man, who, as Jack Kerouac wrote of his friend Neal Cassady in “On the Road,” “are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved ... [who] burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” Brando burned, all right, scorching the screen with his personal demons, Stella Adler training and the restlessness of the age. During the 1950s, he didn’t so much act as search, grope and plunge into roles, bringing to the screen the kind of period unease fomenting in smoky jazz clubs, underground films and howls of poetry. In 1951, he reprised his role as Stanley Kowalski in the film version of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” following that revelation with one signature role after another. Between 1952 and 1955, he solidified his onscreen persona in movies that reaffirmed his seriousness and artistry, while also establishing his sexual heat by baring his beautiful flesh (“Viva Zapata”) as readily as his tortured soul (“Julius Caesar,” among others). He became an icon of bruised masculinity, our holy mumbling saint.

Movies were still an adventure for Brando then, even if they were increasingly absent a comparable sense of adventure. Thereafter were good enough films, bad fits and misfires, and though occasionally something juicy turned up, the crumbling studio system routinely failed to provide him material worthy of his talents. By the mid-1960s, Pauline Kael wondered if Brando was done. “It is clear that for screen artists,” she wrote, “and perhaps not only for screen artists, youth is relatively speaking, the short season: the long one is the degradation after success.” Kael famously changed her views about Brando, first with “The Godfather” (1972), in which he played the aging Don Corleone, and then, more notoriously, with “Last Tango in Paris” (1973).

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, this dark, fascinating story about a middle-aged American widower (Brando) swept up in an affair with a young French woman (Maria Schneider) is perhaps best remembered now for its imaginative use of butter as a sexual lubricant. Norman Mailer was bitterly disappointed that the actors didn’t really get it on, complaining that the lack of real sex impeded cinema’s promise to “embody life.” Brando reportedly admitted that Bertolucci had actually wanted the actors to have sex on screen, but said the actor, very reasonably, that would have meant “our sex organs become the centerpiece of the film.” Mailer of course missed the point. Brando didn’t need to debase his talents or betray his artistry by engaging in some deep-throat high jinks -- he had seduced us already with his beautiful lies.

Central to those lies was, I think, was his extraordinary vulnerability -- the way he presented himself to us like an offering, ripe for the taking. The erotics of his screen performances are legendary, immortal. There he is clutching at Kim Hunter’s legs at the end of “Streetcar,” the brute brought to his knees and back to Mama. There he is martyred in “Zapata,” beaten to a bloody pulp in “On the Waterfront” and sadistically whipped in “One-Eyed Jacks.” More than any other American actor, Brando made masculinity both a beautiful gift and a terrible crucible, and in film after film he suffered for our sins, real and imagined. If by the end of his life, he seemed to turn his back on his beauty and talents, entombing them in corpulence and eccentricities, there is no denying that while it lasted it was very very good for the both of us.