Somebody is the name of another book about Marlon Brando, a title taken from his famous “I could have been a contender…a somebody” speech in the backseat of the taxi in “On the Waterfront.” The author is Stefan Kanfer who has written several books on theater and film. The best know is a biography on Groucho Marx. The publisher thinks it is “the final word” about Brando’s “dazzling highs and such abysmal lows.” That’s quite a claim, and after reading the book, although I did learn a few new things, mostly about lovers not yet outed, male as well as female, there were not that many new insights. But there were some amusing tidbits along the way, like, for example, when he was filling out papers for his draft card on the line marked COLOR he wrote: Seasonal—oyster white and beige. He was well known for cracking wise. Like for example in “The Wild One,” when Mary Murphy says to him, “Johnny what are you rebelling against?” he answers: “Whaddya got?”
His story begins, like it does with all of us, with the parents, with Dodie his alcoholic mother, and Marlon Senior, his traveling salesman father, a drinker, brawler, and philanderer, who put down Marlon Junior every chance he got. It was a dysfunctional family and Marlon never achieved the closeness or approval he sought and needed from his parents, with his two older sisters providing that instead of the mother and father. His name as a kid was Bud, a name that separated him from the father; perhaps it was even a kind of neutral, non-specific identity, as Marlon was for the exclusive possession and use of the bully father. His mother was a sometime actress in local theater in Omaha, Nebraska, but basically she existed in an alcoholic haze, to dull the pain of a bad marriage. Brando Senior, when he did come home, beat his wife and never had anything good to say about Marlon Junior. He kept dumping on him with harmful crap like “You’ll never amount to anything but a bum.” Coming from a father he rarely saw, such comments had to cut deep. His parents did not create for him what some psychologists call “a precious deposit,” a core element of love and self-esteem, something internal and substantial for him to build on, so that he had something positive to work with in order to be a balanced personality that could roll with the punches that life was bound throw his way, while striving toward worthwhile goals. But shinning through that knot of parental abuse and neglect was the innate transcendent talent that quickly became evident when he went to New York City as a young man. He arrived on the scene there looking like God’s gift to women, and Kanfer wrote, “He was like catnip to dozens of women,” and he did his best to have sex with as many of them as possible. Meanwhile, he was a sensation in a bad play called “Truckline Café,” and from that he went to “Streetcar Named Desire,” by Tennessee Williams, playing the brute, Stanley Kowalski, with his thrilling performance causing volcanic reactions among the theater crowd; that in turn led to a movie of the play that established his reputation once and for all. He repeated the role in his second movie in Hollywood, with Elia Kazan once again the director.
Stella Adler had been his teacher when he arrived in New York. She was a passionate advocate of what came to be called “Method Acting.” His mastery of this mode of acting made him into the role model of his generation. It was a method of internalizing character, becoming the character, and then emoting from that inner center, out of your own inner resources. He followed “Streetcar Named Desire” with another powerful role, as ex-boxer and longshoreman Terry Malloy in “On the Waterfront,” a story of corruption and the lone individual standing up to it. It was his fifth movie and it was another electrifying performance that set the world on fire. He won an Academy Award as Best Actor. No other performer had gone from stage to screen with such dramatic results in such a short period of time. Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Jimmy Dean, and Robert DiNero, all looked to Marlon Brando for guidance and example. They measured themselves against his innovation and brilliance.
But from 1955 to 1970 the quality of the movies dipped a bit and his attitude about acting dipped as well. A few were interesting (“Reflections in a Golden Eye,” “The Fugitive Kind,” “Mutiny on the Bounty”) but fell short of the dynamism and coherence of two early masterpieces. Some others were stinkers (“Bedtime Story,” “The Countess from Hong Kong,” and “The Night of the Following Day.”) Some were not worthy of his talent, and as a consequence there was an erosion of his interest in the craft of acting. He began to echo his father’s attitude, disparaging the profession as not a serious endeavor. He got involved with civil rights and Native American issues, while his love life became more complicated, as he married a couple of times, both times to exotic women while still bedding as many women as he could. Children began arriving and he ended up with 9 at home in the L.A. Hills.
But then in the early seventies along came the role of Don Corleone, the Godfather, a character created by a novelist but brought to vivid life by Brando in cahoots with Francis Ford Coppola in a film to rival Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane,” the picture that before “The Godfather” always claimed the top spot as the best all-time American film. Brando’s extraordinary performance has contributed greatly to the film’s reputation. Talent and character came together as if it was destiny. In the opening scene Brando on a whim picked up a cat on the set and sat tenderly playing with it, in a spontaneous and off-hand manner, while conducting business as crime boss. Fondling the cat was not in the script, but it made a small miracle out of the scene. I can also recall that scene where he crinkles his forehead in crushing grief as he stands over Sonny’s dead body. That went beyond mere technique to feel with that depth. There were other innovations and ad-libs that Coppola had no trouble including. After the film’s great success he was back on top and could from that point on charge outlandish amounts of money for his services.
(Dear Reader: I have just decided to write this review of Somebody in two parts, something I have done twice before. But before I stop this first part I must include a personal note. I was a senior in high school when “The Wild One” was released and several buddies and I were so impressed with Brando’s rebellious image and performance in the movie we came to school dressed in leather jackets or with white t-shirts with BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB written on the back, which was the name of the biker gang that Johnny (Brando) led. The school I was attending, a strict catholic institution, booted us all out of school for a week. But it was era even more conservative than today, and rebellion was in the air, at least for a certain kind of student.)
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