Marlon Brando

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

In Zapata, Brando confronts the dilemma of an individual torn between spontaneous rebellion against injustice versus a full scale revolution to promulgate an abstract ideal. His Zapata is a contradictory character; on one hand full of zeal to right the wrongs that the government has done to the people and fighting for agrarian land reform; on the other, ill at ease with the larger issues of social reform and the institution of a new system of government. The character's inner naiveté is revealed in one particularly sensitive scene preceding Zapata's meeting with President Madero in which he confides to his new bride that he is ill at ease because he does not know how to read. The two sit on the edge of the bed and she begins to teach him in one of the most emotional moments in the film. This scene is reminiscent of Johnny's attempt at making love to Kathie in The Wild One in which he displays a conflicted vulnerability and allows the woman to take charge.

This fundamental contradiction in Brando's characters is evident in his depiction of Don Corleone in The Godfather, in which he presents a Mafia chieftain who is comfortable killing men who oppose him and yet can express the deepest tenderness toward the downtrodden and those that he loves. Corleone is no less of a rebel than Zapata. Living on the outskirts of a system that he routinely circumvents for profit and, in a strange way, to achieve justice for the lower echelons of society, he is still, at heart, a rebel. Brando carries this portrayal a step farther in Last Tango in Paris when his depiction of Paul not only reveals a man's internal conflicts but actually questions the idea of animal masculinity that typified his characters in the 1950s.

Yet, between his dominant performances in the 1950s and what many consider to be his re-emergence in 1972, his career was sidetracked, in the opinion of many critics, by some dubious roles during the 1960's. Such films as One Eyed Jacks (1961), Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), The Ugly American (1962), The Chase (1966), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), and A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), however, still indicate his concern for social injustice and display his characteristic shaping of his characters to reveal the basic conflicts inside all men.

In what a number of film scholars consider to be Brando's real renaissance, 1969's Quemada! (Burn), directed by Italy's revolutionary filmmaker Gilo Pontecorvo, he gave what may arguably be his finest performance as a conflicted anti-revolutionary. In his previous film, Battle of Algiers (1965), Pontecorvo established a film tantamount to a textbook both for initiating and defeating terrorism. But in Burn, through the character of British Governor Sir William, Pontecorvo establishes the premise and the practice for effecting a revolution and at the same time shows why it could never succeed. Brando's performance as a man who, as a youth, shared the idealism and concepts of social freedom promulgated by the revolutionaries, but who now knows why such movements must necessarily fail, is a tour de force. He comes across as a man who is still a rebel but who is also aware of the path of military history. Emotionally he is storming the barricades but intellectually he knows what the inevitable outcome will be. On the latter level, his manner reflects the attitude of his earlier character, Major Penderton (in Reflections), but on the former level he is the emotional voice crying out to the deaf ears of imperialists as in 1963's The Ugly American.