“Sending Marlon Brando to acting class was like sending a tiger to jungle school.” – Stella Adler
“You can’t always be a failure. Not and survive. Van Gogh! There’s an example of what can happen when a person never receives any recognition. You stop relating: it puts you outside. But I guess success does that, too. You know, it took me a long time before I was aware that that’s what I was – a big success. I was so absorbed in myself, my own problems, I never looked around, took account. I used to walk in New York, miles and miles, walk in the streets late at night, and never see anything. I was never sure about acting, whether that was what I really wanted to do; I’m still not. Then, when I was in ‘Streetcar’, and it had been running a couple of months, one night — dimly, dimly — I began to hear this roar.”
— Marlon Brando
It’s his birthday today.
Let’s start off with this, a piece I had long wanted to write: Revelations about Marlon Brando in about 5 or 6 pages in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
Next up, another piece I’ve been saying “I really should write that” for literally over a decade. Old-timers will remember its genesis here: About those movie scenes when men look at themselves in the mirror, for the Musings blog at Oscilloscope. Brando has a DOOZY in Reflections in a Golden Eye. (Great performance.)
“At Field Elementary School in Omaha, I’d been the only one in my class to flunk kindergarten; I don’t remember why,”
― Marlon Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me
“We all know that movie actors often merge with their roles in a way that stage actors don’t, quite, but Brando did it even on the stage. I was in New York when he played his famous small role in Truckline Cafe in 1946; arriving late at a performance, and seated in the center of the second row, I looked up and saw what I thought was an actor having a seizure onstage. Embarrassed for him, I lowered my eyes, and it wasn’t until the young man who’d brought me grabbed my arm and said, ‘Watch this guy!’ that I realized he was acting.”
— Pauline Kael
4 things about the famous taxicab scene in On the Waterfront:
1. In the closeups of Rod Steiger, he wasn’t even talking to Brando. Brando had left to go see his shrink. Steiger did his closeups looking at Kazan. You would never know. Steiger never forgave Brando for that.
2. When Rod Steiger pulls the gun on him: the way it was written was to have Brando be shocked and frightened, and say his lines from a panicked emotional “don’t shoot me” state. Brando knew it was wrong. He couldn’t say why. His understanding of acting was not a verbal one (although he could be extremely articulate about character development and script analysis. Listen to some of the things he said about Stanley Kowalski. He had thought about this shit.) Brando tried to express his issues with the gun-moment in Waterfront to Kazan before shooting. “If my brother pulled a gun on me … I wouldn’t be like this … ” He couldn’t express his feelings about it, he just knew it wasn’t real. Kazan said, “Okay – so show me how you would do it.” They played the scene. Steiger pulled the gun. And Brando’s response, now an indelible moment in American cinema, flowed out naturally. His sorrowful look, the gentle “shame on you” glance he gives his brother, the regret, shaking his head, putting his hand on the gun, gentle, gentle, like, “No, no, you’re my brother … no … this isn’t you …” Brando always chose relationship over abstraction and that stunning moment is the best example I can think of of his sense of emotional truth. Directors who didn’t trust him in that way, who didn’t trust that he knew more about emotional truth than they did, were in for a tough time with him. Kazan said later, about that most celebrated scene in Waterfront:
“What other actor, when his brother draws a pistol to force him to do something shameful, would put his hand on the gun and push it away with the gentleness of a caress? Who else could read, ‘Oh, Charley,’ in a tone of reproach that is so loving and so melancholy, and suggests that terrific depth of pain? I didn’t direct that; Marlon showed me, as he often did, how the scene should be performed. I never could have told him how to do that scene as well as he did it.”
And lastly:
3. Brando taped his lines to the top of the cab roof, so he could glance up at them for reference if he ever got lost during the scene. You can even catch him doing it at times, if you’re looking for it. Those who do not understand acting often use the “cue card” Brando thing as evidence that he was a slacker, or somehow pulling one over on us. (Peter Manso took that stance in his poison-pen biography. Honestly, I wish that people who spent so much time writing about movies and movie-making would devote just a little bit of time to researching and understanding acting. Or take an acting 101 class. Play a scene. Rehearse it. Try to “get there.” Just see what it’s like. Just to understand a little bit about this most important element of the artform they supposedly revere so much.) All I can say is: Actors who have learned their lines perfectly can only WISH they were as connected to action/objective/emotion as Brando was in those scenes where he was “just reading off cue cards.”
So after all that:
Watch.
A post I wrote about the development of Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway.
A post I wrote on Peter Manso’s biography of Brando. Some good stuff there on why I think Manso is an idiot.
An excerpt from Truman Capote’s famous New Yorker profile of Brando.
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, first put on in 1923. The smoke hadn’t yet cleared from 1916. Home Rule started in 1922. There was a Civil War on. O’Casey’s play, about the slum residents of Dublin embroiled in revolutionary politics, is brilliant and biting. Then, in an extraordinary back-to-back homeruns, came Juno and the Paycock and 
in 1907, also at the Abbey, ie: 
is satire, one of the high watermarks of the form, and reading it I feel a little nervous fluttering in my gut. This is the reaction satire encourages. You get nervous people won’t “get it”, even 400 years later. What if this gets into the wrong hands? What if someone wants to implement Swift’s proposal into policy? Satire is often local and specific, it has a target and goes after it. Because of this, some satire seems impenetrable outside of its own time. Swift’s satire is more potent once you know the background, and the same is true with O’Casey. However, remove the context of the Irish Civil War and the reprisals following the Easter Rising, and you still have brilliant powerful works, relevant to our world today. Poor people will always weigh heavily on the minds of those more fortunate, especially those who came from poverty. And so what is to be done? O’Casey worried about what was to be done. 
(1924). The actors and director started out in a state of confusion: how should they approach this difficult material? The play was untraditional, it required a specific tone. O’Casey was not famous yet, not yet an Irish household name. 
. The rape of Nanking really was “forgotten” because the Japanese wanted it forgotten. They would refer to it as “unfortunate excesses” etc., and refuse to acknowledge the sheer scope of the crime, as well as how deliberate the attack was. This wasn’t just a couple of bad apples running wild on the women of Nanking. This was an orchestrated war crime. Rape is a war crime. It is an excruciating book, and I found it very difficult to finish it (the pictures haunt me to this day) but it is an essential book for this very reason. Don’t you turn away from it. It’s one of the most important books written in the last 50 years. She wasn’t even 30 years old when she wrote it. 
, which is self-explanatory and very interesting, and 
, which unearths the story of Qian Xuesen, a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project, was forced out of the program because of McCarthyism, was then deported, and went on to be a major figure in China’s space program.
