Word: brandos
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...MARLON BRANDO The most influential screen actor spoke for a silent generation...
...important time in his life--and ours--Marlon Brando was touched by genius, by which we mean that he did things in his art that were unprecedented, unduplicable and, finally, inexplicable. And sure enough, for a much longer time, he was "too much trouble" for everyone to bear--including, possibly, himself. The road from self-realization to self-parody is always shorter than we realize...
...talk about that--not yet. Let's think instead about brutal Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, about yearning Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, about the rough voice and silky menace of The Godfather and the noble and ignoble ruin of Brando's Paul in Last Tango in Paris. Then let's think about how in a minor but still palpable way our lives--especially our imaginative lives--would have been diminished if Brando had not been there to play them. Sometimes in those movies, and in others too, he gave us moments of heartbreaking behavioral reality...
Elia Kazan, who brought Brando to fame in the Broadway production of Streetcar (1947) and directed him in Waterfront, never took credit for that or any of the other moments Brando achieved for him. "The thing he wanted from me," Kazan later said, "was to get the machine going. And once that machine was going, he didn't need a hell of a lot more." It was, of course, quite a complicated mechanism. Kazan spoke of the contrast, in Brando's work, between "a soft, yearning girlish side to him and a dissatisfaction that is violent and can be dangerous...
...They believed he was pulling all that conflict out of himself, out of his troubled and rebellious past (cruel and drunken father, wistful and drunken mother) and using it--just as their great guru, Lee Strasberg, preached. In the first years of his fame, that was O.K. with Brando. It saved him a lot of tedious explanations. And it was more than O.K. with the crowd at the Actors Studio, which he briefly joined. It was the headquarters of Stanislavskian acting in America, inheritor of the Group Theater tradition (where in the 1930s Strasberg first came to controversial prominence). They...