Word: streetcars
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...than a decade later, Bad Boy Brando, still something of a showoff, has pulled the trick again. But this time his wall is a hundred thousand movie screens, his performance is distinctly more artistic, and his audience is the popeyed world. Six pictures in four years-The Men, A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!, Julius Caesar, The Wild One, On the Waterfront-have branded the Brando name and face blue-hot on the public mind...
Nonsense, says Elia Kazan, who directed him in Streetcar and Waterfront. "Brando is just the best actor in the world today." Many experts agree. Not since John Barrymore first hauled on his buskins has a young actor's fire brought such a light to so many critics' eyes. Almost all his Broadway performances have won rave reviews ("our most memorable young actor"), and he has backed the cinema critics into the adjective bin. They have felt in Brando's acting a kind of abysmal reality that not even Barrymore, who in all technical respects...
...rehearsals, Marlon is said to "flob around" so indifferently that the other actors get no benefit from the reading. During a Streetcar rehearsal, Actor Karl Malden once smashed his fist into a wall in sheer frustration. Marlon refuses to change, says he has to feel himself into the part that way. Once when a woman tried to compliment him on a screen performance, Marlon broke in coldly: "You've got a run in your stocking...
...struck the critics as merely "charming," but theater people began to take notice. "Incredibly good," exclaimed Director Robert Lewis, and the offers began to pour in. In Truckline Cafe ("quite effective"), Candida ("superb") and A Flag Is Born ("the bright, particular star"), Brando raised high hopes; and in A Streetcar Named Desire he fulfilled them...
...Streetcar's Stanley Kowalski, as Brando conceived him, was a man to match the blast furnaces and the man-killing mines of an industrial age-"one of those guys who work hard and have lots of flesh with nothing supple about them. They never open their fists, really. They grip a cup like an animal would wrap a paw around it. They're so muscle-bound they can hardly talk. Stanley didn't give a damn how he said a thing. His purpose was to convey his idea. He had no awareness of himself...