Word: brandos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...star-spangled cast, recruited from both stage and screen, exhibits a wide variety of acting styles, but the individual performances are expert. Most unusual casting: Marlon Brando giving a flamboyant performance in the showy role of Mark Antony, Caesar's ruthless avenger. Cinemagoers who saw Brando in The Men and A Streetcar Named Desire may be surprised to hear him, minus his slurring Stanley Kowalski speech mannerisms, clearly enunciating the famous, rabble-rousing funeral oration. Less clear in his performance is that mercurial combination of demagogue and patriot, of force and "quick spirit" that is Antony's character...
...friends-a good many of them bebop-talking actors, waitresses and artists-Marlon Brando, 29, is "the most," a "cool cat" off stage or on. If he has a reputation for being a "character," it is only because he dislikes conformity, either in his professional or private life...
...Brando objects, for instance, to the pressures of movie acting: "You have to get up in front of a camera and say the same lines all day long. It's like saying: 'Pass the salad, pass the salad, pass the salad,' until it gets as dull to your ear as water dripping from a faucet." He also dislikes some of the character-diluting cutting that moviemakers do. One final unkind cut in Caesar: "During the battle-I've forgotten the lines-where Octavius says something like 'Man, what's happening...
...last year An American in Paris became the darkhorse victor over A Streetcar Named Desire, A Place in the Sun, and Death of a Salesman. Gene Kelly's technicolor crepe suzette was a fine musical comedy--it was also inferior to the other three. Also last year unpopular Marlon Brando lost out to Humphrey Bogart as a matter of sentiment rather than performance...
...Best Actor division there is a real dilemma. No one can complain if either Marlon Brando (Viva Zapata), or Gary Cooper (High Noon), wins. But if the Academy falls back on Jose Farrier because he is famous, influential, and a high-brow actor, it will be chopping up the last remnant of its already tattered prestige...