- Now he is gone at last, what will remain of Marlon Brando
in the public consciousness? Not much, I suspect - though it sounds churlish
to speak ill of the so recently departed. But the date hardly matters.
The fact is, Brando died, for many of his fans, a long, long time ago -
while to many other moviegoers, born in the years following his semi-retirement,
he is a name, connoting some ineffable sort of quality and little more.
Certainly, the figure that appeared every so often on-screen, usually in
films so patently beneath him as to make you wonder why he bothered, bore
scant resemblance to the beautiful and compelling young man from A Streetcar
Named Desire or The Wild One. He was now corpulent, florid, ever-so-slightly
camp. The Brando who had bewitched us was gone; this was entirely another
person.
-
- Sadly, it seems he will be best remembered for his Don
Corleone in The Godfather - one of his worst performances and the point,
historically speaking, at which his mannerisms overwhelmed his method.
It is a crude, grandstanding turn, only saved by the scale of the character
he must inhabit, and of the epic being woven around him. But the years
have not been kind, and viewed today, the role that launched a thousand
impressions - "What have I ever done, to make you treat me so disrespectfully?"
- looks faintly ludicrous, all cotton-wool mouth and imposing posturing:
a caricature rather than a character. Far better was his Fletcher Christian
in Mutiny On The Bounty - his allegiances complex, his motivations ultimately
unknowable. Or his Guy Masterson in Guys And Dolls, which hums with a busy
energy and evinces a rare, dancerís grace. Or, less known, his sexually
ambiguous major in John Hustonís adaptation of Carson McCullersís
novel Reflections In A Golden Eye, in which his shrewd intelligence, his
conflicted sense of self, is apparent in every scene.
-
- Itís ironic, but not surprising, that Brando was
regarded by so many actors as the greatest of their kind . For what he
actually did, more and more patently as the years went by, was to demonstrate
- and thereby legitimise - their worst impulses: their tendencies to grandstand,
to amplify their performance at the expense of their fellow actors and
the script. Brando was a movie star in the classic sense: for good or ill,
the most magnetic thing on the screen at any time. But he rarely sublimated
himself into a role. On the contrary, he was the role, and the viewer was
aware at all times that he or she was watching a performance - immaculately
crafted, perhaps, and usually unforgettable. But a star turn, nonetheless.
-
- Then, of course, there is the weight issue: his shift
from handsome young man to hulking grotesque. Hollywood in the 1950s was
not nearly so body-fascistic as it is today, when even reed-thin young
ingenues are advised to slim down. But the fate that befell both Orson
Welles and Brando was almost without precedent in the American film industry.
No male actors had transformed themselves so radically, and to many observers,
the result was taken to suggest some core of deep self-loathing at work:
a rejection, not only of the system, but of their own persona, their perception
and desirability.
-
- They are alike, too, in another sense: both men bore
the burden of early praise - of being told, at an impressionable age, that
they were geniuses, infinitely more gifted than any of their peers. Such
words cast a long shadow, and often disable their recipient. The result
can be creative paralysis, as in Wellesís case, or a monstrously
inflated sense of ego.
-
- Perhaps to combat this, Brando cultivated a healthy disgust
for his craft and those who practised it. In an industry built on dissembling,
his greatest talent might have been his honesty. He sensed that the films
were beneath him, and did not bother to conceal his contempt. From turning
up late and unprepared to the set of Apocalypse Now (as if provoking Francis
Ford Coppola to reconceive his script), to his decision to refer to Frank
Oz, his director on The Score, his final feature, as Miss Piggy throughout
the entire shoot - a tactic which I canít help but find very, very
funny.
-
- Much like Peter Cook, another talented misfit, what might
be said of Brando in the end is not that he was gifted (and he was - though
not, perhaps, to the extent that people claimed), or that he wasted his
time and squandered his opportunities. The best, and truest, epitaph might
be simply that he did not give a damn.
-
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reserved http://www.sundayherald.com/43099
-
-
- Comment
Alton Raines
6-4-4
-
- I think Brando merely awoke from the hollywood vanity
fantasy and realized there was a hell of a lot more to life and living
-- even acting -- than his mentors had led him to believe. They taught
that ones art should completely engulf and overtake the artist, who is
a mere instrument. The Zen of acting. What crap! Brando saw two doors...
one which would allow him absolute freedom or one leading to complete slavery.
He transcended it all, and in doing so, like Salvador Dali who said he
would 'assassinate art', killed it in order to free it to a higher plane,
a new existence, a resurrection. He could look around at the vanity scared
victims of the hollywood hallucination who would scarcely appear in public
for fear of being seen as human (and aged). He could see the corpse of
John Dean, too... that road was well worn by many before him. And I'm quite
sure he could see the Brando brand name possibility, which surely revolted
him. So he metamorphosed into something only those like him or those operating
in hollywood without the "old covenant" of acting could comprehend.
-
- His early roles were certainly stellar (stellar, not
"Stelllllla!"), by conventional standards. But it was not until
he slipped into the uncomfortable skins of suffering characters like himself,
people who were also on the verge of metamorphosis; like Maj. Weldon Penderton
in John Huston's "Reflections In A Golden Eye," or Paul in "Last
Tango In Paris," or the unforgettable Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse
Now." Even in what appear to be meaningless little films done strictly
for the cash, Brando brought to it something that, without it, would have
left the feature utterly lifeless and hopeless. In "The Island of
Dr. Moreau," he all but mocked every wild tale that had ever been
told about the mysterious "Brando," and toyed with it which such
surrealistic energy that what resulted was truly a masterpiece of modern
acting.
-
- In sum, Brando discovered that acting was a tool to serve
himself, not a religion to whom he would devote service. He was a plumber,
a welder, a butcher who possessed all the knowledge and skills of a neurosurgeon,
an astronaut and a biochemist. You never knew when he'd ply what trade.
I suspect most of the time he did so far from the camera and the public
eye, where real art lives and breathes. For a man who lived the lives of
several thousand men, many of them highly self-indulgent and quite a few
seriously self-destructive, 80 isn't a bad age to fold the cards. Brando
lived an artist's life without falling into admiration for his demon nor
anamoured with his muse. That is a paramount success for any creative soul.
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