Marlon Brando 1924–2004
July 2nd, 2004 2:00 PM
Was he an actor, or a cultural eruption, an all-American zeitgeist with two legs, one swinging dick, and the appetite of a tartar? For the hungry heart of the 20th century, Marlon Brando was the world's most important and influential movie performer, a rock 'n' roll re-personification of the national self-image. There's no underestimating how rupturous his 1950 movie arrival, from Broadway and Tennessee Williams, was—in an industry inhabited by glamour-pusses, mascaraed macho men, Anglo-fetishists, and chintzy-showbiz specialists, here came a seething reality, a thinking man's troglodyte, to mix up the placid Hollywood waters and initiate a value shift (alongside the Italian neorealists) that would end up distinguishing the entirety of post-war cinema. Without him, youth culture would've been a self-pitying fad, and the world's new waves might never have happened.
True, it's a lot to put on a man who has maybe five great performances in a filmography oven-stuffed with fuckups, and who became visibly disenchanted with fame and acting almost as soon as he became a box office monster. But Brando was a paradigm for cultural truth-telling—his influence rivaled the confessional revolution in American poetry—when movies were thought of as being wholly escapist. (It's clear that Brando's debut, 1950's The Men, realigned Montgomery Clift's approach, and gave James Dean a countryside to gambol around in; before them, who was interested in acting as authenticity?) The 1960s were a dumping ground for Brando's career, and he gave up caring as soon as he could, after Francis Ford Coppola and Bernardo Bertolucci briefly motivated him by holding the ring high enough.
Since then, Brando, the only thespian to ever buy himself an island, had decided to be the laziest marquee name in the world, regarding movies as a brothel and himself as a reluctant, top-shelf whore. All in all, there's a case to be made that he shouldn't have stuck it out to 80, that, like Jim Morrison (who so resembled Brando in cynical spirit), he should've checked out before the bills piled up. It's a case for new generations studying Brando of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and not the Brando—who was that guy?—of The Score (2001). MICHAEL ATKINSON