Word: brandos
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...book, Some People, Places and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel, Cheever made a list of subjects he considered off limits. Some seemed frivolous: "All parts for Marlon Brando." Others contained a mix of irony and rue. The author would shy away from explicit scenes of sexual commerce: "How can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives as if -- jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts -- we were describing the changing of a flat tire?" He would disdain alcoholics: "Out they go, male and female, all the lushes; they throw so little true light...
...France," says Bertrand Blier, writer-director of six Depardieu films, including the Oscar-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs and the new Merci la Vie. "Like all the great talents, Gerard is a raw talent -- art brut. They learn a little technique doing theater, but the rest is inside them. Brando, Dustin Hoffman, Mastroianni: he's in that great class." Like those actors, Depardieu is capable of melodramatic excess; to give all is sometimes to give too much. But also like them, he has set an indelible stamp on his country's films, defining current French cinema as fully...
...fraternal twin to Sky in the Bertolucci canon is Last Tango in Paris, his taboo-trashing melodrama about a displaced American (Marlon Brando) who provokes a torrid, cloistered affair with a young Frenchwoman. But the new movie is not about sex -- or even, Bertolucci says, "the impossibility of love. It is about the impossibility of being happy within love. Kit and Port don't realize that the modern couple is an endangered species. Couples are so attacked by the outside world that they create a kind of fusion, a symbiosis. And that takes them, eventually, to a crisis. They look...
...Revolution to The Conformist, from 1900 to The Last Emperor, are big canvases holding tiny, forlorn souls. Because of the performers' power, the Moresbys come alive onscreen as they never quite did in the book. Bertolucci looks at Malkovich, the lizardly eminence of Dangerous Liaisons, and thinks of Brando: "They are two monoliths, unchanging, absolutely still -- and, from the first moment, condemned." Winger, for too many years the great unused actress of American film, is the perfect vessel for a woman who must be a piece of baggage on Port's existential tour, then a Florence of Arabia ministering...
...issue, tinged with prejudice and artifice, is as old as theater. In Shakespeare's day, Othello was acted by whites -- and Olivier played the Moor - in blackface in the 1960s. In old Hollywood, where nonwhites were nonstars, Caucasians often played Oriental roles. Marlon Brando kowtowed through The Teahouse of the August Moon; John Wayne did a Genghis Khan job on The Conqueror; no Chinese ever played Charlie Chan. As recently as 1984, Linda Hunt won an Oscar playing a half-Chinese man in The Year of Living Dangerously...