Charley
Malloy: Look, kid, I -- how much you weigh, son? When you weighed one hundred
and sixty-eight pounds you were beautiful. You coulda been another Billy
Conn, and that skunk we got you for a manager, he brought you along too fast.
Terry Malloy: It wasn't him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in
the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, "Kid, this ain't
your night. We're going for the price on Wilson." You remember that? "This
ain't your night!" My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens?
He gets the title shot outdoors in the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way
ticket to Palookaville! You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out
for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I
wouldn't have to take them dives for the short-end money.
Charley: Oh I had some bets down for you. You saw some money.
Terry: You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender.
I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face
it. It was you, Charley.
-- Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, and Rod Steiger, as his brother, Charley, in the taxicab scene from On the Waterfront (1954).
At
different times in his career, Marlon Brando exemplified the best and the
worst of the American acting profession. Brando died on July 2, at the age
of 80, of pulmonary failure. Let’s take a look, with clear eyes, at his life
and work.
The best came mostly at the start.
Brando made his name as an actor in December, 1947, starring as “Stanley Kowalski” in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.
He became a Broadway legend, playing the role for two solid years (800+ performances),
but the provinces of Manhattan’s West Side being what they are, most Americans
still didn’t know him from Adam. Streetcar was Brando’s fifth Broadway show.
Marlon Brando burst onto the movie scene in 1950, in Fred Zinnemann’s The Men, playing an angry, wheelchair-bound veteran. “Angry” became him.
The next year, Brando became “Brando,” the screen legend, in the film version of Streetcar.
Elia Kazan, who had directed the stage version, directed the film adaptation,
which included most of the stage cast (Kim Hunter, Karl Malden, Rudy Bond,
Nick Dennis, Ann Dere, Richard Garrick, Peg Hillias and Edna Thomas). The
major change from the stage to the screen version, was in replacing Jessica Tandy with Vivien Leigh for the role of “Blanche DuBois.”
Stanley Kowalski is a brute, as arrogant and overbearing as he is stupid.
And yet, for all his abuse, his wife, Stella, loves him. Indeed, Stella loves
the animal in Stanley. But Stella is secondary in Streetcar. The story
revolves around the confrontation between Stella’s older sister Blanche,
who comes for a visit, and Stanley. The delicate Blanche, who has always
depended upon “the kindness of strangers,” is contemptuous of Stanley, and
he knows it. (So, for that matter, is Stella.) And yet, Blanche is fascinated
with him, and attracted to him.
Ultimately, Stanley rapes Blanche, and she mentally disintegrates, like a flower whose petals fall off.
The movie depicts Stanley as a monster, and Blanche as his helpless victim,
yet I don’t think that’s how the author, Tennessee Williams, saw things.
Williams saw in Blanche … himself. The homosexual Williams was drawn to brutes
like Stanley, and dreamed of being ravished.
(But what do I know? According to the tenured, white feminists at the City
University of New York’s York College, Williams was a feminist, and Streetcar
was a feminist statement. Granted, to my knowledge there is no record of
Tennessee Williams as a feminist, and the tenure-holders’ claims have no
connection to Williams’ life, but hey, they’ve got tenure, so they must know
what they’re talking about, right?
In 1998, after a workshop performance of scenes from Streetcar at York, the
tenured feminists were running a discussion. And I mean running it. When
I, the only white male present in the small group, sought to contribute my
take, they ignored my raised hand. Fortunately for me, the gifted, young
black actress who had played Blanche, and who was also a splendid writer,
was one of my literature students, which was why I was there in the first
place. My student -- whose name I unfortunately can no longer recall -- ignored
the feminists, and called on me. So, at least my student heard my theory.)
Passionate, raw masculinity was to be the young Brando’s trademark. Imagine
a white, heterosexual actor being permitted to perform that way today. His
character would have to be the heavy, a comic foil, or a repressed homosexual.
(Some might see irony in Stanley Kowalski having been written by a homosexual,
but when one considers that the role is a caricature of heterosexual masculinity,
by a writer who was not trying to do caricature, all irony evaporates. Tennessee
Williams did not take his irony supplements.)
For four years in a row, Brando was up for the best actor Oscar: For Streetcar, Viva Zapata, Julius Caesar and On the Waterfront. Some observers think it is an “enduring mystery” that Brando lost to Humphrey Bogart (for The African Queen)
in 1952, but it was Bogart’s turn, and it just wasn’t Brando’s time yet.
Heck, at that point, Hollywood was so infatuated with Brando, that he was
even nominated for his mumbling Marc Antony in Joseph Mankiewicz’ Julius Caesar (1953).
(I know Hollywood is terribly inconsistent in such matters, but a great many
Oscars have been awarded to performers for relatively mediocre work, who
had been passed over for their best performances, while other awards have
been given for purely sentimental or political reasons. Think Harold Russell
in 1947, for The Best Years of Our Lives; Helen Hayes in 1971, for Airport; Paul Newman in ’87, for a lousy performance in The Color of Money; Jessica Tandy for Driving Miss Daisy in ’90; and radical lefty Susan Sarandon in ’96 for a flat performance in Dead Man Walking, instead of merely Democrat activist Meryl Streep, who in The Bridges of Madison County gave a performance that, to my mind, was the equivalent of Vivien Leigh’s standard-setting work in Gone with the Wind and Streetcar.)
In 1954, Brando gave his greatest performance, as washed-up prizefighter
“Terry Malloy,” who gets by, by performing little favors and doing “show-no”
longshoreman jobs for waterfront mob boss “Johnny Friendly,” in On the Waterfront. The dramatic blockbuster, like Streetcar and Zapata directed by Elia Kazan, would be nominated for twelve Oscars, and win eight.
As more than a few observers have pointed out, Brando’s Terry Malloy combined
brutishness and sensitivity. It also needs to be pointed out that Brando
thrived on working with Kazan, a tough, demanding director who had made his
mark on the New York stage.
After On the Waterfront, Brando would no longer enjoy the sort of
success during the 1950s that he did at the beginning of the decade. And
yet he continued to do excellent, often daring work.
In 1955, he held his own, starring in the film version of the musical Guys and Dolls as “Sky Masterson,” opposite Frank Sinatra’s “Nathan Detroit.”
In 1956, a physically unrecognizable Brando played a Japanese interpreter in the comedy set in occupied Japan, The Teahouse of the August Moon, opposite Glenn Ford. Brando was marvelous in the sort of role that actors used to fight for, in order to spread their wings.
In 1957, Brando played military pilot “Ace Gruver” in the interracial James Michener romance, Sayonara,
set in Japan during the Korean War and at the end of the American occupation.
The movie was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Brando as Best
Actor, and won four. The awards were dominated that year by David Lean’s
brilliant World War II story of the clash of civilizations, The Bridge on the River Kwai,
which won seven of the statuettes. Brando lost out to Alec Guinness, who
had given a towering performance as “Col. Nicholson” in Kwai.
Whaddya Got?
Girl: What're you rebelling against, Johnny?
Johnny: Whaddya got?
-- Brando, as “Johnny Strabler,” to Mary Murphy, in The Wild One.
All the talk about Brando’s “sensitivity” is so much rot. The sycophantic
“experts” who say that he played “sensitive” brutes are confusing emotional
neediness with sensitivity. In other words, they can’t tell a narcissist
from a saint.
The role that contributed the most to Brando’s mystique, was that of motorcycle
gang leader Johnny Strabler, the title character of The Wild One (listed variously as 1953 or 1954).
The movie is entertaining trash, which owes a good deal of its attraction
to the scenery-chewing work of a young Lee Marvin as “Chino,” the leader
of a rival gang. (In the big fight scene, Johnny gives Chino a pasting; in
real life, the 5’10” Brando would never have had a chance with Marvin, a
hard-drinking brawler who stood five inches taller than him.)
In The Wild One, in the face of a weakling sheriff, Strabler’s gang
takes over and lays waste to a small California town. Eventually, some civilians
take matters into their own hands, and beat the hell out of Johnny. Director
László Benedek suggested, ludicrously, that the townsmen were
as brutal as the motorcycle gang, and in a view that would become widespread
in the 1960s, but then as regards black thugs, that what Johnny really needed
was “understanding.” Hell, in such a situation, the townsmen would have been
perfectly justified in lynching Johnny. I got your “understanding” right
here!
Johnny Strabler was one of the early versions of what became the ultimate
1960s Hollywood cliché: The “anti-hero.” During the mid-1950s, in
his brief career, James Dean would specialize in this type, in East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause (the ultimate anti-hero movie title), and Giant,
before dying in an automobile accident in 1955. Another then-famous anti-hero
role was Paul Newman’s performance as Billy the Kid, in Arthur Penn’s The Left Handed Gun,
in 1958. (Though I admire much of Arthur Penn’s work, when I saw the movie
on The Late Show about thirty years ago, I found it so dreadful, that I shut
it off after a few minutes.)
In the 1960s, the anti-hero became the dominant shtick in Hollywood, as Steve
McQueen, Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, Newman and Redford, (and a few years
later) Charles Bronson, and countless other actors would earn millions of
dollars portraying anti-hero crooks and cops alike. (On TV, for a producer
to sell a cop series, it had to be about an “unorthodox” cop.)
However, the anti-hero shtick did not help Marlon Brando. Brando’s problem
was that, rather than seeing the playing of anti-heroes as a calculated career
move, he adopted the anti-hero as his personal shtick. But if you really
act like an anti-hero (i.e., a juvenile delinquent) in your personal and
professional life, you become a source of grief to all who depend on you.
I once wrote that Frank Sinatra was for approximately twelve years one of
the world’s great movie actors, until he was felled, in his late forties,
by the world’s longest mid-life crisis.
I was wrong. Brando’s midlife crisis began when he was still in his thirties; with each passing year, he acted more childishly.
The earliest example of Brando’s professional deterioration that I know of, was during the filming, ca. 1961, of the remake of The Mutiny on the Bounty, in which Brando played Lt. Fletcher Christian. Bounty
went way over budget and was late. Some Brandoists claim that this was due
to their patron saint’s “perfectionism.” More credible-sounding stories are
that Brando caused production delays and cost overruns, such as through the
prank, in which during a scene shot on board the Bounty during a tropical
storm, the actor shouted, “Mary had a little lamb …” When the rushes came
back, it immediately became clear that the recording of the actual script
could not possibly be matched to Brando’s lip movements, and the entire,
expensive scene had to be re-shot.
The 1960s saw Brando’s stock as an actor plummet, as he made one poor choice
after another. And he was unlucky, too. Even when he made a good movie, as
he did with Sophia Loren, in Charlie Chaplin’s swan song, The Countess from Hong Kong (1967), the comedy bombed with audiences and critics alike. I seem to be the only person who likes this movie!
By the early 1970s, when he was given the chance to star as mob patriarch “Don Vito Corleone” in The Godfather,
which was being directed by a young Francis Ford Coppola, he had to take
a screen test to get the role, an indignity he never had to put up with during
the 1950s or ‘60s. But it was a blessing; the challenge invigorated him.
According to Brando’s own story, he put tissues in his cheeks for the screen
test, to give the impression of an aging, Italian-born gangster. The picture
earned the actor his second Oscar for best actor, provided a new generation
with a new image of him, and indirectly made him millions through his revived
fame. (One could argue that in the ultimate ensemble production, Brando’s
Don Corleone character wasn’t on screen enough to justify a lead actor Oscar.)
The Godfather was based on Mario Puzo’s runaway bestseller,
which was the hottest book in America for two years running. The movie smashed
all box office records.
Brando earned himself some additional notoriety (read: publicity) through
elaborately staging his refusal to accept the Oscar he’d won for The Godfather. Reportedly, he’d applied just two years earlier for the replacement of his Oscar for On the Waterfront,
which he claimed had been stolen. Brando sent an unknown, American Indian/white
actress named Maria Cruz, got up in Indian garb, and using her stage name,
Sacheen Littlefeather, to the 1973 Academy Awards ceremony, with a speech decrying Hollywood’s treatment of American Indians.
(At the time, the politically correct romanticization of the Indians was
already well under way. In 1970, Arthur Penn’s brilliant anti-western, Little Big Man,
portrayed the Indians variously as victims of vicious white men, and righteous
victors over them. Ever since, we have heard about how Hollywood viciously
“stereotyped” the Indians, but I don’t know of anything of the sort. If you
watch the work of the most successful director of “cowboy-and-Indian” movies,
John Ford, you will see Indians portrayed both as rapine, murderous, cut-throats
-- e.g., The Searchers, Sergeant Rutledge, and as honorable men who were betrayed by powerful white men -- e.g., Fort Apache, Cheyenne Autumn. Both characterizations happen to have the virtue of being true to the facts.)
The same year as The Godfather, Brando starred in the then revolutionary Last Tango in Paris, by Bernardo Bertolucci. Last Tango
was rated X (since replaced by NC-17) for sex scenes that were considered
to be of pornographic quality. At the risk of sounding like a libertine,
when I finally saw Last Tango, in both the American and German versions,
I suspected that material I’d read about had been edited out of it. Or else,
the original stories about the picture were exaggerated. In any event, the
story of a man who has just lost his suicidal wife, and who embarks on a
narcissistic, anonymous, purely sexual relationship with a girl half his
age whom he has just met, was an international sensation. “Paul” (Brando)
insists that “Jeanne” (Maria Schneider) not fall in love with him, not even
tell him her name. But she does fall in love with him, and ultimately kills
him, when he stalks her.
What would have been tawdry, softcore pornography in less talented hands,
became, through Bertolucci and Brando, and Gato Barbieri’s brilliant score,
an epitaph for the budding sexual revolution (though I don’t recall anyone
saying so at the time). Sex Without Love = Death. Brando would have done
well to pay heed to Last Tango’s message.
Although released in 1972, Last Tango qualified as a 1973 release,
in terms of Oscar eligibility, and got Brando another best actor Oscar nomination.
It would be his last.
As the years wore on, and I learned more about Brando, I wondered whether, in Last Tango,
I had seen a great performance of a role, or Brando simply playing himself.
Brando is supposed to have said that the performance emotionally destroyed
him. If he really said that, so much the worse for him.
In my college acting textbook, Respect for Acting, the great Uta Hagen
argued that an actor should, by virtue of his work, be psychologically healthy.
One gets to play act, and enjoy emotional catharsis on a regular basis. A
real actor would have felt stimulated, refreshed, by a tour de force
performance. The Brando who claimed to be ravaged by a movie performance,
spoke not as an actor, but as a narcissist. The narcissist must always take
from others, and feels that by giving anything to the audience, he is impoverishing
himself. Had Brando written a book on acting, it would have to have been
entitled, Contempt for Acting. (Hagen was the original star of Clifford Odets’ The Country Girl and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and replaced Jessica Tandy in Streetcar.)
The latter half of Brando’s life was characterized by narcissism, laziness,
and greed. His bizarre, occasional utterances on politics and other subjects
were designed to draw maximum attention to himself, in order to remind directors
that he was still around. He would then demand incredible salaries for minimal
work, playing roles where he would refuse to learn his few lines. And his
conduct was at times so unprofessional, as to ruin movies. The man who in
his twenties and early thirties had been a blessing to the acting profession,
became a curse, the nihilistic Anti-Actor. It was as if the young Brando
had made a deal with the Devil to quickly attain greatness, but Lucifer had
now exacted his price, which required that Brando continually disgrace himself
and his profession, and become a porcine parody of his formerly handsome
self.
In The Missouri Breaks (1976), an Arthur Penn western in which the
horse thief played by Jack Nicholson is the “good guy,” Brando gave the sort
of hammy, bizarre performance as an assassin, which would become a recurring
theme in his later work, in which he often would be poison for directors’
careers. The movie signaled the decline of Arthur Penn as a director.
Then Brando was signed by Coppola to star in Apocalypse Now, one of
the most star-crossed productions in Hollywood history. While the Philippines
production suffered monsoons, the near death of co-star Martin Sheen (then
only 37) due to a massive heart attack, and the cost overruns and general
indiscipline that would become associated with the middle-aged Francis Ford
Coppola, the initial problem was Brando. He showed up for his role as a Special
Forces colonel 100 pounds overweight, and according to reports at the time,
the script had to be re-written so that Brando would appear on the screen
only for a few minutes. Thus did the star vehicle become a cameo role.
His next movie role, in 1980’s The Formula, opposite George C. Scott
and Marthe Keller, resulted in his being nominated for a Razzie Award as
the year’s worst supporting actor. (Brando would again be nominated for Razzies
for Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996).)
Brando would not make another movie for nine years. In A Dry White Season
(1989), he phoned in another bizarre, hammy performance, this time as a South
African barrister, but since the movie was an anti-apartheid screed, and
Brando was helping the “good guys,” he was nominated for a best supporting
actor Oscar.
The following year, a much more relaxed Brando played a parody of his Godfather character, in the entertaining comedy, The Freshman. And yet, as soon as the production wrapped, he badmouthed the movie and his colleagues.
In 1995, Brando teamed up with Johnny Depp in Don Juan DeMarco. Depp
played a psychiatric patient from Queens who insisted he was the great lover,
Don Juan. Brando played the psychiatrist who had to figure out whether Depp’s
character was delusional. The chemistry between Depp and Brando was marvelous,
and Brando turned in a performance that was uncharacteristic in its delicacy
and whimsy. (Unfortunately, there was no screen chemistry between Brando
and Faye Dunaway, as his wife.)
And yet, the following year saw Brando up to his old tricks again. On the set of The Island of Dr. Moreau,
he reportedly sabotaged the production, inducing his younger, undisciplined,
narcissistic co-star, Val Kilmer, into joining him in his shenanigans. The
crippled movie was savaged by critics and shunned by moviegoers.
During Brando’s last movie, a small role in The Score (2001), he reportedly
made a point of insulting and humiliating director Frank Oz, and demanded
that Oz be off the set during Brando’s few scenes.
Since Brando’s death, we have been told that he somehow gave actors “permission”
to be emotionally authentic. We have also heard, from Brando-apologist Richard
Schickel, that it was the movies that let Brando down, beginning in the 1960s,
rather than the other way around. Baloney!
A more intense acting style was coming into fashion after World War II, before
Brando’s arrival on the Hollywood scene. Witness Kirk Douglas’ driven performances
as boxer “Midge Kelly” in Champion (1949), as “Det. Jim McLeod” in Detective Story (1951), and as Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956). And already in 1946, in It’s a Wonderful Life,
note the embittered, emotionally raw quality of so much of Jimmy Stewart’s
performance as “George Bailey,” a quality that characterized much of Stewart’s
best 1950s’ work with directors Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock. Something
was in the air.
The Parents of the Angry Anti-Hero
Perhaps the greatest irony of Marlon Brando’s decent into narcissism, is
the reason why the cult of narcissistic, “anti-authoritarian” celebrity arose
in the first place.
With the end of World War II, the circumstances which had contributed to
studios making largely upbeat movies changed in two radical ways.
The Great Depression was over, and The War was won. During the Depression,
Hollywood studios felt obliged to churn out uplifting, escapist entertainment
which was either carefree, or which presented clear choices between “good
guys” (white hats) and “bad guys” (black hats), in which good always prevailed
over evil. With so much misery on the streets and the farms, there was no
need to rub audiences’ noses in what they were already enduring. Besides,
theatergoers would have stayed away in droves from such punishment. But when
times are flush, people feel less of a compulsion to see upbeat stories,
and many even obsess over the dark side of human existence.
The other development was the destruction of the old studio system, thanks
to studio player Olivia De Havilland. In 1945, De Havilland launched, and
eventually won, a lawsuit that broke up the studios’ absolute power over
moviedom.
Prior to De Havilland’s lawsuit, the same studio that produced movies also
owned the theater chain that presented them. The verdict in the lawsuit forced
the studios to divest their control of theater chains, which meant that they
were no longer guaranteed profits from most of their pictures.
And prior to the De Havilland lawsuit, movie stars were much like major league
baseball players, who under the “reserve clause” belonged to the same team
forever, unless it chose to trade or release them.
Olivia De Havilland won for actors their independence, but this was a mixed blessing.
For one thing, it made movie production more expensive and risky, with big
stars paid much higher fees for each picture, rather than being tied to long-term
contracts, in which they appeared in several movies per year. Thus, the new
Hollywood cost a lot of low-level actors and craftsmen their jobs, and reduced
the number of movies made. (And accelerated the movies’ decline, under the
onslaught of TV.)
Under the old system, the studio heads decided what roles would be offered
to a performer (which was what prompted De Havilland to sue). They also exerted
considerable control over performers’ private lives. Big stars tended to
hate both aspects of studio control, and yet many performers could not cope
with their new-found freedom. For instance, under the old system, stars did
not have to read through dozens of submitted scripts, and choose the one
great role in the batch; the studio told them what role they’d be playing.
And previously, actors did not get to deal with the media. The studios told
them what to say and where to say it. Studio publicity departments largely
controlled the press, whom they fed a steady diet of phony stories about
the stars, in exchange for reporters not hounding performers.
Under the new dispensation, many movie stars made poor script choices. And
the notion that a movie star could create his own public persona proved to
be fool’s gold, as the newly empowered media descended upon the uncontrolled,
unarmed narcissists (see Seberg, Jean). With time, the cannier movie stars,
such as Tom Cruise, employed their lawyers and publicists to reinvent the
studio publicity system, whereby they would contractually control every aspect
of their publicity campaigns, with only those media organizations getting
puff interviews that got every question cleared in advance, and that promised
in writing not to engage in journalism. What we call “celebrity culture,”
I believe, comprises the media and both the out-of-control narcissists and
the control freaks.
In her Brando obituary, Suzanne Fields
wrote of a dinner she attended with the actor in a restaurant during the
mid-1970s. Brando loudly criticized everything about the restaurant, making
a spectacle of himself, and then loudly complained that other diners, who
no doubt recognized him, were looking at him. Had other diners not noticed
him, he might have stroked out.
In a sort of poetic justice, the lazy media of celebrity culture couldn’t
even bother getting their Brando stories right. The day after Brando’s death,
the TV show Extra “reported” that Brando’s film debut was in Streetcar (rather than in Fred Zinnemann’s The Men, the previous year), and that he had appeared in “both” of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather movies (Coppola made three Godfather movies; Brando only appeared in the first). And on Nightline,
big-deal movie critic Roger Ebert said that, based on Brando’s revolutionary
influence, movie history could be divided into pre and post-1947 films. The
only problem is, Brando didn’t make his first movie until 1950. Ebert confused
Brando’s 1947 Broadway performance as Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar,
with his movie performance of the same role four years later. Media sycophants
also belabored the effects of Brando’s son Christian’s 1990 murder of daughter
Cheyenne’s boyfriend, Dag Drollet, and Cheyenne’s 1995 suicide on Brando.
The fact is, that if anything, such tragedies were the effects, rather than
the causes of a dissolute lifestyle that Brando had embarked on while still
a young man. (But note how media camp followers were less concerned with
the people who were directly harmed, than with the feelings of The Star.)
He left behind three ex-wives, 14 or more surviving children born in and
out of wedlock, and reportedly, thousands of ex-lovers, few if any of whom
achieved as much intimacy with him as the fictional Jeanne achieved with
“Paul” in Last Tango.
Some
have referred to Brando as America’s greatest actor, and even as the greatest
actor of the 20th century. I have to disagree. Brando may have possessed
the greatest talent of any American actor of the past 100 years, but for
most of his career, he wasted that talent. The specifically American aspect
of Brando’s story, is that in America, movie actors are more closely identified
with the roles they play, than in say, the United Kingdom. With the sort
of classical theater training performers like John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier,
and Alec Guinness received at the Old Vic and Central (and that German great,
Gustaf Gründgens, received in Düsseldorf), an actor who was seen
as indistinguishable from a certain role or type would have been seen as
a dramatic failure.
Brando’s
case reminds me of baseball player Dwight Gooden, the most talented pitcher
of the past twenty years. However, after tremendous early success and adulation,
Gooden destroyed his body with drugs, alcohol, and even sexual hijinks. And
so, Gooden’s success was eventually matched or exceeded by many of his less
gifted contemporaries.
In the field of acting, Gene Hackman
may not be Brando’s equal in raw talent, and certainly hasn’t had the sort
of scripts sent to him that Brando did. Hackman (1930-), the plain-looking,
balding, quintessential late-bloomer, who as an acting student flunked out
of the Pasadena Playhouse, where he was considered the worst student in its
history, got his first role after his thirtieth birthday. And yet, Hackman
has had the more brilliant career, fully exploiting his own considerable
gifts, and making the most of every role he has played. (For my money, Fredric March (1897-1975) also had a greater career on stage and screen than Brando.)
The Marlon Brando story is a cautionary tale.
For most of the last 40 years of his life, Brando was a bum, and he died
a bum, but unlike Terry Malloy, he had no one to blame but himself. And yet,
we will always have On the Waterfront, Viva Zapata, Sayonara and The Godfather, when he was beautiful.
New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix has written for Toogood Reports, Middle American News, the New York Post, Daily News, American Enterprise, Insight, Chronicles, Newsday and many other publications. His recent work is collected at The Critical Critic.
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