Word: brando
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...ELVIS AND BRANDO...
...Dean; he saw Dean's signature movie, which he called "Rebel Without a Pebble," a dozen times. He was touched by Dean's sensitivity, stricken by Dean's early death (in September 1955, about the time Parker bought Elvis' contract from Phillips). In fact, though, Elvis was the Marlon Brando of pop. Everyone saw this; I did, and I was 11. Brando and Elvis both had sullen good looks: hooded eyes and full, sensuous mouths that easily formed a sneer-smile. They semaphored their menace in their movement: Brando the prowling predator, Presley the sex machine. Most important: both...
...Pauline Kael wrote that changes in art almost always seem at first a mistake. The new initially looks like the old, done poorly. The status quo, when affronted, thinks it's watching some that wants to be the status quo, but can't. Brando didn't mean to talk in that mumbling, meandering way, did he? And Elvis, windmilling his legs and unleashing those pelvic spasms that were all his - purely Elvic - what the heck was he doing...
...they were present for a cultural sea change; and their animosity was a necessary impediment for the invader to overcome. Exactly the same abrasion is evident in the 1951 film of "A Streetcar Named Desire," in the moment when Vivien Leigh's fluttery Blanche duBois is first confronted with Brando's brutish Stanley Kowalski. It is the instant, epochal collision of old and new, of refinement and feral energy, of a sensibility on the way out and an attitude crashing through, ready to take over...
...suspect that Brando's mannerisms were thought out, an expression of the Stanislavski Method, while Presley's were symptoms of his nervous energy and naivete. To look at the young Elvis exposed, and exposing himself, on national TV (they can be seen in Alan and Susan Raymond's 1987 documentary "Elvis '56") In his first TV shows, he puts the mask of insolence on his stage fright. He rarely smiles. He seems simultaneously determined and stricken. While introducing a song, he audibly cracks his knuckles. His singing voice, so at home in the recording studio, shivers audibly behind...