Review, Richard Schickel, Brando: A Life in Our Times (Atheneum, 1991)

Columbia Missourian, September 22, 1991

Beneath the political conformity and cultural complacency of the early 1950s, many Americans felt a vague sense of disquietude. Yet the political issues around which this anxiety could coalesce remained a decade away. The rise of rock ‘n’ roll, which provided young people with their own cultural form and icons, lay a few years in the future. In this context the children of the American Cold War and middle-class consensus looked for someone to articulate their dissatisfaction.

Onto this stage stepped Marlon Brando. In a string of successful movies between 1950 and 1954, Brando came to symbolize the outsider who sneered at social niceties, whose barely repressed sexuality threatened to break loose at any time. If James Dean, who followed in Brando’s footsteps a few years later, symbolized middle-class angst, Brando was much more menacing because he was openly contemptuous of the social order Dean uneasily tried to fit into. When, as leader of the motorcycle gang The Rebels in The Wild One (1954), Brando was asked “What are you rebelling against?” and he replied, “Whaddya got?” a whole generation of rebels without a cause felt they had found their champion.

Richard Schickel was one such teenager who believed he had found a spokesman and he has followed Brando’s career ever since. Currently film critic for Time, Schickel’s biography avoids focusing on Brando’s often sensational personal life, concentrating instead on the complex relationship between an actor and his audience—the thrill of discovery, the shared pleasure in great accomplishments, the disappointment of failed expectations, and the anger when the audience believes the actor has betrayed his promise.

Brando’s promise began after his expulsion from military school in 1942 when, at 18, he decided to move to New York to try to make it as an actor. There he came under the tutelage of Stella Adler, an outstanding stage actress and teacher. Adler taught “the Method,” a psychologically oriented style of acting that called on performers to be close observers of human nature and, through self-examination, draw on their own experiences for emotions similar to those the character was playing.

Quickly mastering the Method, Brando performed in several Broadway plays before achieving his greatest stage success in 1947 in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. As Stanley Kowalski in both the play and the movie, Brando electrified audiences with, as Schickel says, “the almost satanic satirical spirit he loosed on the fine literary-romantic pretensions of his visiting sister-in-law,” an attack which became, “in effect, an assault on the manners and morals of an entire class.”

Brando’s decision to leave the stage after his success in Streetcar and move to Hollywood was considered at the time—when few people believed that film could also be art—a sell-out. But as Schickel says, there existed in the late 1940s only a small repertory of plays that fit the Method actor’s need for characterizations based on intensive self-exploration. Meanwhile, Hollywood in the post-war years was going through a brief period of making topical, socially conscious movies. Thus the move appealed both to Brando’s sense of his craft and his growing political awareness.

In such early movies as The Men (1950) and Viva Zapata! (1952), Brando’s Method acting successfully made the transition from stage to screen. In Julius Caesar (1953) he demonstrated that he also could adapt the Method to handle Shakespeare. With his Academy Award-winning performance in On the Waterfront (1954), Brando reached the pinnacle of his early career, prompting director Elia Kazan to say, “If there is a better performance by a man in the history of film in America, I don’t know what it is.”

But Brando’s early performances did not meet with everyone’s approval. Among defenders of traditional standards of decency, Brando seemed threatening, though the exact nature of that threat was unclear. Hollywood studios made significant cuts in both Streetcar and The Wild One to satisfy the Catholic Legion of Decency, which promised a boycott of all movies that did not meet its approval. Yet, as Schickel says, such censorship was unavailing because the sexuality of Brando’s Stanley Kowalski and rebelliousness of his motorcycle gang leader did not emanate from the scripts, but from Brando’s subtle performances. Thus in such movies Brando’s acting subverted the compromises the filmmakers were forced to make.

By the late 1950s Brando’s career had fallen into a rapid, sustained decline, partly the victim of his own success, for he had opened the way for a host of imitators who could play inarticulate rage without seeming quite so threatening. Ironically during the 1960s, Schickel says, Brando fell increasingly out of touch with his times. As movies became more frankly sexual—partly due to the advances he had made a decade earlier—Brando’s own sustaining libidinal energy seemed to diminish. His performances were marked by “professionalism,” which Schickel defines as “practical moves presented with bland conviction.”

“It was not just that he was working in bad pictures . . . ,” Schickel says. “It was for the most part that he was working in cheap bad pictures.” In all fairness though, several of the movies during this period, including One Eyed Jacks (1961, the only movie Brando directed), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), and Burn! (1968), were artistic—though not commercial—near misses.

Rumors of Brando’s professional death turned out to be greatly exaggerated, though. His brilliant performance in The Godfather (1972), for which he won, and refused, an Academy Award, and Last Tango in Paris (1972) attest to that. Last Tango especially signaled a triumph, Schickel says, because “Brando had for the first time linked himself with an alternative school of filmmaking . . . [and] had taken the dangerous art of improvisation further than it had ever gone before—making up not just a scene or two, but an entire character, an entire movie while he was on his feet. This was the kind of daring his talent and his spirit had promised from the start.”

But Brando failed to follow up on the success of Last Tango, withdrawing increasingly into political activism, making only occasional brief and outrageously overpriced appearances in films before disappearing from public view in the early 1980s. His minor comeback in 1989, with an effective performance in A Dry White Season (1989) and a humorous self-parody in The Freshman (1990), was cut short by personal tragedy when his son was arrested for murdering his daughter’s lover.

Schickel avoids the easy sensationalism such events lend themselves to, choosing to de-emphasize Brando’s politics and personal life and concentrate on his performances. In doing so he presents a complex and fascinating portrait of how Brando came to represent the hopes of a generation and show the way for a new crop of actors—like Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro—who followed in his footsteps.