Marlon Brando

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Steve Hanson

Marlon Brando remains unchallenged as the most important actor in modern American Cinema, if not the greatest of all time. Though a number of mainstream critics were initially put off by his slouching, brooding "method" style, he was nominated for an Academy Award in only his second film, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and went on to repeat the accomplishment with each of his next three performances: Viva Zapata (1952), Julius Caesar (1953), and On The Waterfront (1954), with the latter performance finally resulting in the Oscar for best actor.

Handsome enough to be a leading man and gifted enough to lose himself in his characters, Brando brought an animalistic sensuality and rebelliousness to his portrayals unseen in Hollywood before. Not content with simply learning his lines and playing the character as written or directed, the actor became the author of his portrayals. He maintained the view throughout his life that actors cannot achieve greatness without holding a point of view about society, politics, and personal ethics. This has been reflected both in the characters that he has chosen to play (rebels on the fringes of society) and in the shadings that he has brought to them (ethical conflicts about living within or outside the law).

This philosophy was initially ingrained in Brando through his stint at New York's Actor's Studio where he studied with Elia Kazan and Stella Adler, who taught him "The Stanislavsky Method," a style of acting in which the performer internalizes the character he is playing to literally become one with his subject. This was considered a major revision of classic acting styles during the 1950s. Before The Actor's Studio, performers externalized their characters, merely adopting the physical features and gestures conducive to portraying them. Up-and-coming actors including Brando, Paul Newman, and James Dean shocked traditional actors and theater critics with the new style, but there was no argument that it was effective, as Brando was selected Broadway's most promising actor for his role in Truckline Café (1946).

As early as his first motion picture acting stint in Fred Zinneman's war film The Men (1950), Brando prepared for his part as a wheel chair-bound veteran by spending a month in a hospital viewing first hand the treatment and experiences of paraplegics. Based on his observations, he played his character as an embittered social reject straining against the restraints of his daily existence. From this point on, his performances came to symbolize the frustrations of a postwar generation of Americans trying to come to terms with a society that had forgotten them.

His subsequent characters, including Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar and Terry Molloy in On the Waterfront, to cite two, were literally drawn from the ash heap of society. Brando's interpretation of the two men's speech patterns--though decried by critics as mumbling--actually conveyed a hint of innate if not animalistic intelligence as well as a suppressed power which threatened to erupt in violence. The force of this power is best seen in The Wild One, in which Brando plays Johnny, the rebellious leader of an outlaw motorcycle gang that takes over a small town in Northern California. Based on an actual 1947 incident in which a gang vandalized the town of Hollister, California, over the Fourth of July weekend, the story was the perfect vehicle for Brando to display his menacing, barely-controlled rage. When Brando is asked what he is rebelling against, he responds with the now famous, "What have you got?"

His rage seems more compelling when played against the overt violence of the other bikers because he appears to be so angry that he can't find the words. The audience dreads what will happen when he finally lets go. The interesting thing about the characterization is the fine line that Brando is walking. He is at once the protagonist of the film and, at the same time, potentially the villain, reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart's ambivalent Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936). As long as the violence bubbles beneath the surface, it is possible for the Brando character to be both sympathetic and menacing at the same time, as was Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar and the young Nazi officer in The Young Lions (1958).

Brando's interpretation marked a turning point in American films and effectively launched the era of the "rebel." Following the film's 1954 release, a succession of young outlaws appeared on the screen: James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955); Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock (1957) and a string of low budget biker films. Even Peter Fonda's hippie rebel character in 1969's Easy Rider and Charlie Sheen's rebel pitcher in 1989's Major League can trace their roots back to Brando's performance.

In his more finely modulated performances, the violence is translated into a brooding passion that is inner directed and reflects his characters' disillusionment with having whatever idealism and ideological purity they began with tempered by a reality that they are powerless to control. This is the Brando of Viva Zapata, The Godfather (1972), Last Tango in Paris (1972), and Quemada! (1969). In the first three, he is a man living outside the system who is battling in his own way to preserve his manhood and to keep from being ground beneath mainstream society's rules. In the final film, he is a man who has lost whatever idealism and freedom he once maintained and has learned that in order to survive he must not only play by but enforce the rules even though he is unhappy doing so.