Word: brandos
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...Gist:A film critic at TIME for decades, Kanfer delivers another in a long line of Marlon Brando biographies (including 1999's Brando, by Richard Schickel, another TIME critic). Looking particularly closely at the actor's self-destructive tendencies, Somebody take the Brando myth up to his 2004 death and beyond...
Highlight Reel:1. On Brando (known as Bud as a child) and his early desire to prove everybody wrong: "Academically, he continued to lag, and various members of the faculty implied-or said outright-that he would never amount to anything. The athletic coaches disagreed: the following year Bud won letters in track and football, finished first in the school decathalon, and set a record by doing one thousand straight push-ups. He might have done more, but a teacher, worried that the youth would strain his heart, ordered him to stop...
...Brando at a White House dinner with President John F. Kennedy: "As Marlon attacked the pasta, Kennedy challenged him: 'Marlon, have you gained weight? Looks like you've put on a few.''Nary an ounce.''Kennedy grinned. "Then the CIA sent up some wrong information.'Marlon bet the president that JFK weighed more than he did. A bathroom scale was brought into the room. Brando checked in at 187 pounds. Kennedy was eleven pounds lighter.'Get some food into this man,' Marlon told the other guests. 'You can't lead the country at a hundred seventy...
...Lowdown:Why pen another bio of the much studied Marlon Brando? To take him seriously. To get inside his head and then recreate him from the inside out, much as Brando tried to do to the characters he played. The prurient details of Brando's life (and there are many) are downplayed here. Rather, Kanfer portrays Brando as a man at war with himself: self-loathing, self-destructive and self-sabotaging. Beautiful performances were often followed up by several lazy ones. Brando would blatantly goof off like a petulant child if he didn...
...would love to be able to say that I’m well-versed in American cinema, but when I really think about it, I’d be hard-pressed to name a pre-1975 film I’ve seen that doesn’t star Brando or Newman or the Marx Brothers. Though I’ve seen many of the best and worst films of the last two decades, I have little to no knowledge of B-movies or older exploitation films. To be honest, I hadn’t even heard the word...