{"id":5945,"date":"2007-01-29T13:48:58","date_gmt":"2007-01-29T18:48:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5945"},"modified":"2022-10-12T12:48:28","modified_gmt":"2022-10-12T16:48:28","slug":"brando","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5945","title":{"rendered":"Stanley Crouch on Marlon Brando"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stanley Crouch analyzes him<\/a>. It’s a very nuanced take. Here’s part of the piece … but most certainly read the whole thing.<\/p>\n

Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), like any superior film, benefits greatly from the DVD format and the revisions it makes possible. The inclusion of the experimental gold and sepia tone, which was removed from the print shortly after the film was released, allows the audience of our moment to see a film that most did not when it was available in theaters. We now have director John Huston’s vision intact. We also have Brando in one of the boldest performances ever given by an actor on screen. What validates that last claim is the exemplary courage of Brando’s egoless deep sea dive into his character, Maj. Penderton, whose desperate and arrogantly veiled pathos tellingly overflows twice. The character’s central problem is his feeling of inadequacy, of being less that he should, and his terrible loneliness because of the difficulty of handling his attraction to men.<\/p>\n

Brando reaches a nearly matchless desolation in the first instance of overflowing when his attempt to secretly equal his wife’s control of her stallion is thwarted by the horse’s power, which he cannot meet with the necessary combination of confident ease and equally confident force. When the stallion smells his fear, it is spooked into running through blueberry bushes that tear the animal’s flesh and cut the face of the rider. The humiliation felt by a man facing the terrible pain of his limitations is far more intimate than cutting embarrassment?Brando evokes a moment of horrifying pathos. One thinks of Olivier’s well-remembered theater cry after Oedipus has plucked his eyes out, for which the actor used the image of a seal shrieking when its tongue is stuck to the ice until it’s clubbed to death by hunters. In the case of Brando’s Maj. Penderton, the feeling is banked neither by having a tantrum nor by brutalizing the stallion with a tree branch; the violent action only deepens his sorrow to such a degree that the failed horseman slowly descends into apologetic sobs that cannot be held down. If a more shattering moment is available on film, I would like to know what it is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the problems with most commentary about acting is that there is absolutely no understanding of the degree of difficulty<\/i> … or the rarity<\/i> of certain things.<\/p>\n

I’ve said it before: writing about acting without understanding all that context would be like a sportswriter who has no idea why a triple play is important and doesn’t give it its due, for degree of difficulty or the sheer fact of how rare one is.<\/p>\n

Here’s the whole thing<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stanley Crouch analyzes him. It’s a very nuanced take. Here’s part of the piece … but most certainly read the whole thing. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), like any superior film, benefits greatly from the DVD format and the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[133],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5945"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5945"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180104,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5945\/revisions\/180104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}