In a line-up that includes On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!, and The Godfather, I am wholly of the opinion that his performance in Last Tango In Paris is his personal best and one of the best captured on film.
He’s the forerunner of Johnny Depp. Depp could have been “Blockbuster Boy” since he hung up his 21 Jump Suits, but he instead explored acting and look what it’s given us. The argument could be made to say the same for Robert Downey, Jr., too.
Thank Brando for paving the way.
I would say he was both honest and a bit crazy. Although I don’t know if crazy is the right word, maybe more like different/ interesting. Also I want to take this opportunity to say that I think Brando’s performance in Apocalypse Now is fantastic. Even people who like the film say that his performance was mediocre and he overacted but I disagree. I though it was perfect. I think I might be the only person that feels this way though.
Brando was an actor of rare genius and talent, not often used effectively in films of his time. Because he was a larger than life character, like Welles, he is very difficult to define. Beside the roles mentioned here, I can only add: The Young Lions where her gives a perfectly believable performance as a German officer or the neglected The Fugitive Kind where he plays a drifter and reprises a James Dean style character – as Brando, not Dean. He had the kind of intelligence rarely seen by any other American actor and equalled now by only Jack Nicholson. There will never be another.
I personally put him miles above Newman, who just couldn’t rise above his method acting style or pretty boy looks. It was no accident that Newman left acting for racing, as he knew his own limitations. Dean had too few films to really have us know what he could have done. But Dean had an unmistakeable screen presence that rivets you to the the screen – surely cinematic charisma that is difficult to match.
I really dont see the parallel between Brando and Johnny Depp. Brando was an actor who had talent and good looks and used them to make subversive films with powerful moments of honesty and integrity.
Depp plays exaggerations. He uses his good looks and meager talents to play pretty, safe roles. He plays token outsiders who are isolated from their surroundings by something, and then creates a bunch of quirks and mannerisms so he doesn’t have to really act. Marlon Brando demanded something from his audience, Depp plays into their expectations.
Not to say he isn’t a decent actor (although my fingers are crossed his work in Public Enemies is stellar), but he’s no Brando. At least not to me.
Bob is right, he was not often used effectively. I should have also mentioned Clift, who is my own favorite, but for a variety of sad reasons he could not realize his full potential.
Even in Brando’s lesser roles he’s eminently watchable. I consider him to be our greatest film actor and it’s startling to watch his earliest roles and see how far ahead of the game he was in bringing verisimilitude to the screen. Clift, Newman and Dean are all excellent actors but none had the sheer talent and range, not to mention nerve, of Brando. Subtract all the films of his that you consider misteps and you still have an amazing body of work. Even if you cut his career down to his first three films (The Men, A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!) to equate him with Dean, I still think he stands head and shoulders above him. Weird? Definitely but all the more interesting for it. I remember a great quote about Brando:“‘his acting choices weren’t always good but they were almost always astonishing” (Mutiny on the Bounty and Apocalypse Now come to mind here). That’s the comparison I’d make with Depp. I’d watch either of them in any role just to see what they’d do with it.
Brando is more movie star than actor. He can be effective but his range isn’t that great.
Besides “Streetcar” and “Last Tango” my favorite Brando performances are “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” “The Figitive Kind,” and “Guys and Dolls.”
I think he’s a great actor, maybe not the best, but watching “Hearts of Darkness” was great because you get to see him behind the scenese working out his character and making up some of his lines. It helps to show him as he truly is instead of reading about him somewhere.
Justin – Interesting points you bring up. Whenever I look for another actor that parallels Brando today, I look at Mickey Rourke (whenever I watch the film Rumble Fish and see Roarke on the motorcycle, I think “Brando.”) Like Brando, Roarke is a strange bird who has taken some pretty bizarre career turns, and people are just now starting to acknowledge that he is a decent actor. know people have mixed views on Roarke, but that’s my opinion.
Of course he has presence, is a legend, and i liked him in One-Eyed Jacks (which he happened to direct) but dare i say it, i’ve never really taken to his self-centred mumbling, and being a loony lefty i must hold On the Waterfront against him. In Apocalypse Now (where he was apparently not the easiest to work with) it’s hard to be sure whether he detracts or enriches by creating a strange extra layer to the madness. I’m inclined to agree with David Ehrenstein; was also thinking his range was quite limited, in more than one way he was too big for his parts
compare Brando with a more sprightly self-effacing chameleon like Alec Guinness, who can inhabit very different roles, whether comic of serious, without drawing attention to himself. He can fit in with the background or play it a bit bigger as needed. It’s not so easy imagining Brando in Kind Hearts and Coronets, or to be fair an American equivalent.
And for a star who’s bigger than the parts, how about Marlene Dietrich; no method with her, in those 30s films for example she’s delicious as she is, she has the allure of fantasy. With a realist method, it’s a bit counter-productive being or having become the great Brando. Give me Cary Grant any day
Lester, that’s interesting about Roarke — I thought his work in Spun was underrated. But Brando really invented the modern, post-studio system actor, i.e. the actor who chooses his own roles, who does “projects,” who transforms himself from one film to the next. So all the male stars are his heirs — Benicio del Toro, for instance, is enormously Brando-esque. And someone mentioned Depp — very different physical types and personalities, but he too is in the Brando mold in terms of his relationship to the roles he plays and his working methods.
Kenji, I think you have articulated a very important idea between realism and non-realism as they relate to acting — the 30s were the heyday of a certain walking, talking glamour that was not at all realist in nature or method, but which stiill seems uniquely suited to cinema.
Justin – I agree on Depp. He and Roarke, in my opinion, come closest to the Brando personal today. George Clooney comes close to the Cary Grant persona, and Brad Pitt to Robert Redford.
I don’t think Brando can be matched in his ability to make imaginative choices as an actor. The way he used his physicality, props, vocal intonation to express character. And his towering mystique, man! A real force of nature. I’d have to agree that Depp, Del Toro and Rourke are of that mold, but none are he. Even closer might be Gerard Depardieu, no? A similar kind of brute force coupled with a disarming gentleness, which is very Brando-esque.
Johnny Depp struck up an actual friendship with brando after appearing on “Don Juan DeMarco” with him. But Depp is an actor who has managed to nvigate his ways through the slings and arrows of being a Big Star and et the sort of challenging roles he wants (eg. “Sweeney Todd”) at the same time.
Not to hijack this thread, but we have Brando types, Dean types, but I’ve not caught any reference to a Montgomery Clift-type actor. Of the three, he was the most nakedly real, for me. And after his accident, and the beginnings of his psychic decline, his work showed an almost unbearable sadness. Will there ever be another?
River Phoenix probably came closest to reincarnating Montgomery Clift. With equally sad results.
Hmm, River Phoenix. I’ll have to think about that. Intriguing. Though he left us too young for any evaluation of mature work. He did have a definite physical handsomeness, and perhaps he might have developed Clift’s grace. We’ll never know.
Clift is a saint. A true saint. It’s hard to find duplications. I think, sadly, Clift wouldn’t have been able to survive even if he was alive today. The fact that Robert Downey, Jr., for instance, has survived is very good for him but only proves that he was never Monty Clift.
Justin, I’ve always tried to imagine Clift as the priest in Bresson’s “Diary of…” Claude Laydou is unquestionably superb, but imagine Clift.
Good point. He played a priest in Hitchcock’s I Confess.
Dancing about architecture.
I wouldn’t call Monty a saint. And neither would Jack Larson or (if he were still with us) Jerome Robbins. Monty was a smokin’ hot gay boy.
Funny thing, I always get the stick from colleagues whenever the subject of Brando comes up, since I always name the odd, unconventional films he’s in as my favorites – Reflections in a Golden Eye, Missouri Breaks and Burn! for example. I thought he’s also great in the least-admired The Chase as Sheriff Calder. Man, he received some relentless beating from the good-old-boys and even without the makeup he made it look real. And of course, Lt. Christian in the campy Mutiny on the Bounty. Good comparisons to contemporary actors, but nobody acts (and mumble) like Brando. The cat’s definitely insane and brilliant.
Justin Biberkopf
In the early-mid 50s there were three exciting young actors — Brando, James Dean, and Paul Newman. All three had lots of talent and charisma, but Newman’s work, being the least self-consciously “method,” seems to have aged the best. It isn’t such a strain to watch him. He’s the most like an Everyman figure, which was his great humility compensating for his good looks and his intuitive discovery that over the next generation men were going to become less and less heroic, less and less larger than life. Dean never got to evolve, more’s the pity; it’s hard not to pay attention to him whenever he’s onscreen. In fact Dean can be downright scary in a way that no one until some of the Warhol people ten years later. But Brando, the early leading favorite, soon revealed himself to be deeply weird, not as out of control as Dean but simmering and full of radical ideas: not just rebelling against Hollywood conventions of the leading man/sex symbol, but bound and determined to express some incredibly strange part of himself in films like One Eyed Jacks, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Last Tango in Paris. Was he simply the most honest? Or was he truly insane?