Word: screens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...adapting forms from other media. Live TV drama was an outgrowth of Broadway theater; game shows were transplanted from radio; variety shows and early comedy stars like Milton Berle came out of vaudeville. I Love Lucy was unmistakably a television show, and Ball the perfect star for the small screen. "I look like everybody's idea of an actress," she once said, "but I feel like a housewife." Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason were big men with larger-than-life personas; Lucy...
Most of all, I Love Lucy was grounded in emotional honesty. Though the couple had a tempestuous marriage off-screen (Desi was an unrepentant philanderer), the Ricardos' kisses showed the spark of real attraction. In the episode where Lucy finds out she is pregnant, she can't break the news to Ricky because he is too busy. Finally, she takes a table at his nightclub show and passes him an anonymous note asking that he sing a song, We're Having a Baby, to the father-to-be. As Ricky roams the room looking for the happy couple, he spies...
...then, everything had changed, collapsed, coalesced. An early fissure appears in 1951, when Brando brought Stanley Kowalski to the screen; the great beast was unleashed. With the mid-'50s eruptions of lurid B movies, Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comic book and the onslaught of rock 'n' roll, the revolution was born. Now teenagers were the social arbiters, and their pleasure was to love stuff their parents hated. They renounced grownup culture (which was turning pappy and repetitive) for a language of their...