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<\/a><\/p>\n4 things about the famous taxicab scene in On the Waterfront<\/i>:<\/big><\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/i> about this shit.) Brando tried to express his issues with the gun-moment in Waterfront<\/i> 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<\/i>. 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<\/i> over abstraction<\/i> 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<\/i>: <\/p>\n“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And lastly:<\/p>\n
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.” <\/p>\n
So after all that:<\/p>\n
Watch.<\/p>\n
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