Word: brandos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Contemplating his own life in Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me (Random House; 568 pages; $25), Marlon Brando, aided by journalist Robert Lindsey, strikes a pose of injured innocence: he is a sweet-spirited, mischievous man- child who accidentally fell first into acting, then into fame and finally into self-contempt, and at 70 remains "an enigma to myself in a world that still bewilders me." That observation pretty well sums up the level of self- awareness (and self-revelation) he achieves in his book...
Contemplating the same life from the outside, Peter Manso, author of Brando (Hyperion; 1,140 pages; $29.95), plays the indefatigable investigative reporter. He spent seven years interviewing something like 1,000 people, and he has, it would seem, never met a woman Brando failed to bed or a man he failed finally to betray. His sense of propriety is typified by his willingness to trail Brando's daughter Cheyenne as she leaves her psychiatric clinic, corner her on a park bench and record without qualification her accusations about her father's role in the murder of her lover...
Neither author is capable of approaching their common subject in a way that is morally, culturally or aesthetically enlightening. Manso doesn't even try to evaluate Brando's work or place it in context, relying on old newspaper clippings instead. Like everyone, Brando is a poor judge of his own accomplishments -- he thinks he gave his best performance in Burn! Without a perceptive discussion of Brando the artist, the two books are left only with Brando the celebrity. But that celebrity has long since detached itself from the qualities that made Brando worthy of fame in the first place...
...Arab as Plutocrat. The gas lines of the '70s fueled the image of overpowerful sheiks, shifty in kaffiyehs and sunglasses, plotting the petrodollar domination of the world in grim melodramas like Marlon Brando's The Formula (1980), Richard Gere's Power and Jane Fonda's Rollover (1981). There is an ironic precedent for such pop paranoia: the anti-Semitic myth of the all-powerful...
Carousel sentimentalizes the redemptive power of parenthood for Billy, a pettish, self-pitying idler and punk whom Hayden plays with an early-Brando sneer. Becoming a father may not make an abusive husband saintly; it often just gives him a new victim to pummel. A compelling actor, Hayden is not enough of a singer -- he loses his way rhythmically and sounds faint in the score's one modernist number, the anthemic Soliloquy ("my boy Bill"), which ends the first act. Sally Murphy is too bland to evoke sympathy as Billy's doormat of a wife...