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Brando and His Imitators
 Marlon
Brando, dead at 80, was the most amazing
entertainer of his time.  He
is of course best
known for playing Don Corleone, the most mimicked role in movie history,
but that came late in a career he had already done his best to ruin.
If you don’t remember
Snooky Lanson, you may find it hard to understand Brando’s impact
on pop culture in the Fifties. Snooky, the poor man’s Perry Como,
was a minor pop singer who starred on a weekly TV show called
Your Hit Parade. He sang every hit song with a smile, eager
to please. Wasn’t that what entertainment was all about?
Into the land of the Lansons
burst Marlon Brando, unsmiling, brooding, mumbling, scratching —
and fascinating. Few geniuses in any art have ever been so instantly
transforming. Film acting, something of an anachronism in the age of
Spiderman, changed overnight. Every young actor wanted to be the next
Brando. Today, even his imitators have imitators.
But there can never be a next
Brando. The kind of change he wrought, for better or worse, can happen
only once. His influence will long survive the many wretched movies he
made after his astounding early success.
The would-be Brandos copy his
obvious mannerisms. They can do the slurred speech, seething silence,
explosive rage, and the now-routine rebellious attitude. But they can never
make it new, as he did. There are no Snooky Lansons left to play off.
Brando destroyed the bland pop culture he was rebelling against.
Beyond that, Brando at his best
had a subtlety, even a lyricism, his imitators lack. He added wondrous
little touches to his best roles, as in the oddly delicate love scenes of
On the Waterfront, where his cynical ex-boxer Terry Malloy
falls in love with a girl in a Hoboken park, Terry’s shy shrugs
belying his attempted bravado. Even as Don Corleone, Brando leaves the
violence of the character implicit, stressing tenderness and even pathos.
He conveys the Don’s power with cunning obliqueness, by showing
his efforts to restrain it and regret at having to use it. The least bit of
swagger — the very thing generations of movie audiences had
expected of movie mobsters — would have ruined the effect.
![[Breaker quote: Great actor, bad influence]](2004breakers/040706.gif) Like
Laurence Olivier, Brando was a master of the unexpected detail of
character. For all his disparagement of acting, he respected it and
mastered it. He admired two of the best in the business: Spencer Tracy and
Cary Grant. Grant may seem Brando’s polar opposite, but Brando
honored him with a simple and shrewd observation: “That guy really
knows what he’s doing.” So did the apparently spontaneous
Brando, when he bothered to use his gifts.
Brando could also be explosively
funny, in his deadpan way. In the only film he directed, One-Eyed
Jacks, he plays a cynical gunfighter who tries to seduce a
beautiful woman with a sob story and a ring he has just acquired in a bank
robbery (he shamelessly tells her he got it from his dying grandmother).
The seduction is aborted when he learns of an approaching posse. He
violently yanks the ring from her finger and runs for his life. It’s a
hilarious moment because it’s so perfectly in character,
illustrating a principle of comedy Charlie Chaplin once explained:
“When you’re doing something funny, you don’t have to
act funny doing it.”
Brando was even funnier in one
of his late films, The Freshman, a spoof of the
Godfather cult in which he plays a benign mobster who just
happens to be a dead ringer for Don Corleone. Addressing an awed film
student in his gently husky voice, he pointedly crushes two walnuts in his
massive fist. The gesture proves as persuasive as, say, a severed
horse’s head.
If Peter Manso’s huge
biography is to be trusted, Brando’s personal life was as sordid as
that of a Roman emperor, leaving a long trail of abortions, suicides, and
troubled children (one daughter hanged herself after her brother killed her
lover). He lived eight long decades without growing up; a couple of years
ago he railed obscenely to an interviewer against his long-dead father.
Naturally, he compensated for his private chaos with a hyperactive social
conscience, eccentrically espousing causes that might have been better
served by his silence.
The wonder is that so cruel and
crass a man could show such sensitive human insight in his work.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2004 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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