Word: brandos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Streetcar's Stanley Kowalski, as Brando conceived him, was a man to match the blast furnaces and the man-killing mines of an industrial age-"one of those guys who work hard and have lots of flesh with nothing supple about them. They never open their fists, really. They grip a cup like an animal would wrap a paw around it. They're so muscle-bound they can hardly talk. Stanley didn't give a damn how he said a thing. His purpose was to convey his idea. He had no awareness of himself...
...talents were brought by the current On the Waterfront to a deep-burning focus in the characterization of Terry Malloy. The role demanded all that Kowalski had, and far more. Kowalski was a brute, and to understand him Brando's heart had to die a little. Terry Malloy was a brute who was turning, in agony and wonder, into a human being, and to interpret him Brando had to take the more painful brunt of being born...
Throughout the entire film there is not a break in Brando's almost magical lifelikeness. At times the audience feels it is being sucked into a painful situation that it had only intended to observe from a safe distance, and there are moments of sudden, nervous recoil. At several of the most painful points, when Brando makes a gesture almost too natural to be borne, the spectators do not dare to gasp-they giggle. There could be no higher tribute...
Firmer Grip. Waterfront, in short, suggests strongly that Brando is getting too big for his blue jeans. But the question arises: What else is he to wear? From Brando's precocious eminence, the future may well look less like a land of dreams than a highly promising nightmare. If, as he professes, he cares chiefly about acting as an art, there will hardly be enough opportunity in commercial Hollywood to keep him there much longer. Désirée, for instance, which will be released next month, is another big slick costume historical with no artistic nonsense about...
...result, while Brando's counterparts in England and France-Laurence Olivier, Jean-Louis Barrault, Gerard Philipe-play a number of important roles on the stage every year as well as one or two in the movies, Brando has only created 14 roles in his entire career of ten years. Furthermore, in five of those parts he played variations on the Kowalski theme. His intimates claim that he can do high comedy, low farce and classic tragedy just as well, but the world has had small chance to judge for itself. One director believes "there's a Faust...