Word: brandos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Brando, that heartbreakingly beautiful champion of the Stanislavskian revolution in acting, never arrived at Hamlet. Never even came close. He would go on to give us a few great things, and a few near great things, but eventually he would abandon himself, as every tabloid reader knows, to suet and sulks, self-loathing and self-parody. The greatness of few major cultural figures of our century rests on such a spindly foundation. No figure of his influence has so precariously balanced a handful of unforgettable achievements against a brimming barrelful of embarrassments...
...reverence in which he is held by his profession is unshakable. His sometime friend and co-star Jack Nicholson said it simply and best: "He gave us our freedom." By which he meant that Brando's example permitted actors to go beyond characterizations that were merely well made, beautifully spoken and seemly in demeanor; allowed them to play not just a script's polished text but its rough, conflicting subtext as well...
...brute. But he's also a funny brute, slyly, sexily testing the gentility and hypocrisies by which his sister-in-law, Blanche DuBois, lives as they contend for the soul of Stella, his wife and her sister. Streetcar's director, Elia Kazan, loved this performance because of the way Brando "challenges the whole system of politeness and good nature and good ethics and everything else." It was, of course, this rebelliousness that made Brando a hero to kids growing up in the '50s--and made him a star...
...made into a star "a soft, yearning, girlish side...and a dissatisfaction that can be dangerous." There's "a hell of a lot of turmoil there," he said. "He's uncertain about himself and he's passionate, both at the same time." The performances that defined Brando's screen character, and that somehow articulated the postwar generation's previously inarticulate disgust with American blandness and dishonesty, its struggles to speak its truest feelings, are powered by that rough ambivalence. The rage and self-pity of his grievously wounded paraplegic in The Men, the rebel angel of The Wild One, above...
...these movies were small, intense, black and white, ideally suited to the psychological realism of the Stanislavskian Method, as it came to be known; ideally suited, as well, to Brando's questing spirit. But in the '50s, as he reached the height of his powers, Hollywood sank to the nadir of its strength. Competing with TV, it embraced color, wide screen, spectacle--and was looking for bold, uncomplicated heroes to fill its big, empty spaces. Brando looked (and felt) ludicrous in this context...