An actor apart

Marlon BRANDO dead. It doesn’t seem possible. But Marlon Brando alive at 80, reclusive and overweight, doesn’t seem possible either.

Given his genius and his charismatic vitality, it would have made more sense if he’d burnt out as young as the rest of the troika -- James Dean, gone at 24; Montgomery Clift, dead at 45 -- that redefined male screen acting in ways that still reverberate in Hollywood and around the world.

But that was part of Brando’s gift -- to stand apart, to do the unexpected, to be at the head of the class. He was the preeminent actor of his generation, but he set the bar high not only on screen but off it as well.

For the paradox of Brando was that along with his supreme ability went a heroic ambivalence, an uncertainty as to whether being an actor was an acceptable way to live your life. Like Jonah fleeing from his mission, he seemed always in flight from what was expected of him. No actor this brilliant ever squandered his talents on such forgettable trash, or made us cherish those squandered moments like tears of the sun, indisputable evidence of his greatness.

So Brando got involved both personally and culturally in Tahiti after making “Mutiny on the Bounty” there in 1962. He famously sent an actress in Native American dress on stage to refuse his Oscar for “The Godfather” to protest how Hollywood treated indigenous peoples on screen. This wasn’t an actor being politically active; this was an actor saying that acting and its rewards were not serious enough to make up a life.

Maybe he got this way in part because so much of what he believed in as an actor was met with disdain. An early member of New York’s Actors Studio, he had unswerving faith in its Method acting philosophy, a belief that truthful performances came not from polished technique but from the work of digging out and sifting through deeply emotional experience. Yet instead of respect, his acting often earned him mockery as an inarticulate mumbler and worse.

Like much of what he did, Brando’s epochal performance in 1951’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” is a triumph against odds. Yes, he’d done the play on Broadway, where director Elia Kazan had pushed for the 23-year-old actor, who only three years before had played a 14-year-old in the stage version of “I Remember Mama.” But he only got the part of Stanley Kowalski on stage after John Garfield and Burt Lancaster had been considered for it.

When it came to the film version, Brando’s inability or unwillingness to rein himself in, to make allowances for other performances, created problems for his collaborators. Costar Vivien Leigh complained to Kazan, “You never know what he’s going to do next, where he’s going or what he’s going to say.” And the director, himself a former actor, admitted that Brando “had mannerisms that would have annoyed the hell out of me if I’d been playing with him. He’d not respond directly when spoken to, make his own time lapses, sometimes leaving the other actors hung up.”

Still, seen today, the results are overpowering. Though Brando once told an interviewer that in being “aggressive, unpremeditated, overt, and completely without doubt about himself” Stanley was “the direct antithesis of what I am,” his antiheroic performance, totemic sweaty T-shirt and all, is one of the most completely realized, overtly sexual ever put on screen, memorable as much for its sensuality and its regret as its display of naked power. Only Humphrey Bogart, the sentimental favorite for “The African Queen,” was to stand between him and an Oscar.

Brando did win the acting Oscar for his other indelible Kazan-directed performance, as the young longshoreman Terry Malloy in 1954’s “On the Waterfront,” a classic example of one of the things he did best, creating heartbreaking inner lives for painfully inarticulate men.

Brando played beautifully with Eva Marie Saint, famously using the actress’ accidentally dropped glove to help create emotional empathy between their characters. And his taxicab tete-a-tete with his brother Charley, played by Rod Steiger, awed even Kazan. “Who else could read, ‘Oh, Charley,’ in a tone of reproach that is so loving and so melancholy, and suggests that terrific depth of pain?” the director wrote in his autobiography. “I could never have told him how to do that scene as well as he did it.”

But the acclaim, the awards, the lionization seemingly did nothing for Brando except make him increasingly unhappy, make him feel like it was all some terrible and destructive mistake. Viewing the actor in the Maysles brothers’ little-seen 1966 cinema verite short, “Meet Marlon Brando,” is to see a remarkable portrait of man who is as trapped and frustrated as he is smart and aware. The walls, even if he didn’t know it, were starting to close in.

Perhaps because he was in hiding from himself and his career, many of Brando’s roles found him in some sort of cultural disguise. He played Napoleon in “Desiree,” a German officer in “The Young Lions,” a British officer in “Bounty.” There seemed to be no telling what would attract him to a film, though some of his most memorable work was done on projects -- the South Africa-themed “A Dry White Season” and the ill-fated and underappreciated “Burn!,” which dealt with a slave revolt in the Caribbean -- that had the political resonance he craved.

More and more, his roles began to resemble a series of vaudeville stunts, parts he took on because there was something about them that amused him. He did a parody Mafioso in “The Freshman,” chewed scenery with Val Kilmer in “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” enjoyed himself immensely as a fence in the Robert De Niro-starring “The Score.” Another such Brando trifle was grandly announced at Cannes a few months ago; nobody much cared.

Yet such was his greatness as an actor that no sooner had detractors counted Brando out and insisted he was in absolute decline than he came up with a pivotal performance in a formidable, significant film. His work in “The Godfather,” the way he held the screen just by caressing a kitten or playing with a grandson, was an acting lesson in itself; he went deep into his own privacy for “Last Tango in Paris” and into the jungles of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam for “Apocalypse Now.”

If there is a sadness about Marlon Brando’s life, aside from the sense that his enormous talent seemed as much of a burden to him as anything else, it’s that his public image, like that of Orson Welles at the end, had gone from being a great creative artist to being larger-than-life in all the wrong ways.

This was terribly unfair to Welles, and it is even more unfair to Brando.

Now, in death, we should try to remember him when he was most alive, when he burned up the screen with performances the likes of which no one had ever seen. They ignited a generation, and they’ve still not cooled down.

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TV schedules shuffled

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A handful of cable TV channels moved quickly Friday to add programs about Marlon Brando to their weekend schedules.

A&E; will present a “Biography” about the late actor at 8 tonight. CNN said it will pay tribute on “Larry King Live” at 6 and 9 p.m. Sunday. And IFC will show “Apocalypse Now Redux” at 7 p.m. Sunday.

More Brando films will be rolled out next weekend.

AMC will kick things off Friday at noon with “The Young Lions” (1958), starring Montgomery Clift and Hope Lange. Turner Classic Movies will follow on Saturday with back-to-back showings of “On the Waterfront” (1954), “The Wild One” (1953), “Superman: The Movie” (1978), “The Teahouse of the August Moon” (1956) and “Julius Caesar” (1953), beginning at 5 p.m.