The history of the motion-picture industry might be summed
up as the development from the serials with the blade in the sawmill moving
closer and closer to the heroine’s neck, to modern movies with the laser beam
zeroing in on James Bond’s crotch. At this level, the history of movies is a
triumph of technology. I’m not putting down this kind of movie: I don’t know
anybody who doesn’t enjoy it more or less at some time or other. But I wouldn’t
be much interested if that were the only kind of movie, any more than I’d be
interested if all movies were like Last Year at Marienbad or The Red
Desert or Juliet of the Spirits. What of the other kinds?
While American enthusiasm for movies
has never been so high, and even while teachers prepare to recognize film-making
as an art, American movies have never been worse. In other parts of the world
there has been a new golden age: great talents have fought their way through in
Japan, India, Sweden, Italy, France; even in England there has been something
that passes for a renaissance. But not here: American enthusiasm is fed largely
by foreign films, memories, and innocence. The tragic or, depending on your
point of view, pitiful history of American movies in the last fifteen years may
be suggested by a look at the career of Marlon Brando.
It used to be said that great clowns,
like Chaplin, always wanted to play Hamlet, but what happens in this country is
that our Hamlets, like John Barrymore, turn into buffoons, shamelessly,
pathetically mocking their public reputations. Bette Davis has made herself
lovable by turning herself into a caricature of a harpy—just what, in one of her
last good roles, as Margo Channing in All About Eve, she feared she was
becoming. The women who were the biggest stars of the forties are either
retired, semi-retired, or, like Davis, Crawford, and DeHavilland, have become
the mad queens of Grand Guignol in the sixties, grotesques and comics, sometimes
inadvertently.
Marlon Brando’s career indicates the
new speed of these processes. Brando, our most powerful young screen actor, the
only one who suggested tragic force, the major protagonist of contemporary
American themes in the fifties, is already a self-parodying comedian.
I mean by protagonist the hero who
really strikes a nerve—not a Cary Grant who delights with his finesse, nor mushy
heart-warmers like Gary Cooper and James Stewart with their blubbering sincerity
(sometimes it seemed that the taller the man, the smaller he pretended to be;
that was his notion being “ordinary” and “universal” and “real”) but men whose
intensity on the screen stirs an intense reaction in the audience. Not Gregory
Peck or Tyrone Power or Robert Taylor with their conventional routine heroics,
but James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson in the gangster films, John Garfield in
the Depression movies, Kirk Douglas as a post-war heel. These men are not
necessarily better actors, but through the accidents of casting and
circumstances or because of what they themselves embodied or projected, they
meant something important to us. A brilliant actor like Jason Robards, Jr.,
may never become a protagonist of this kind unless he gets a role in which he
embodies something new and relevant to the audience.
Protagonists are always loners,
almost by definition. The big one to survive the war was the Bogart figure—the
man with a code (moral, aesthetic, chivalrous) in a corrupt society. He had, so
to speak, inside knowledge of the nature of the enemy. He was a sophisticated,
urban version of the Westerner who, classically, knew both sides of the law and
was tough enough to go his own way and yet, romantically, still do right.
Brando represented a reaction against
the post-war mania for security. As a protagonist, the Brando of the early
fifties had no code, only his instincts. He was a development from the gangster
leader and the outlaw. He was antisocial because he knew society was crap; he
was a hero to youth because he was strong enough not to take the crap. (In
England it was thought that The Wild One would incite adolescents to
violence.)
There was a sense of excitement, of
danger in his presence, but perhaps his special appeal was in a kind of simple
conceit, the conceit of tough kids. There was humor in it—swagger and arrogance
that were vain and childish, and somehow seemed very American. He was
explosively dangerous without being “serious” in the sense of having ideas.
There was no theory, no cant in his leadership. He didn’t care about social
position or a job or respectability, and because he didn’t care he was a big
man; for what is less attractive, what makes a man smaller, than his worrying
about his status? Brando represented a contemporary version of the free
American.
Because he had no code, except an
aesthetic one—a commitment to a style of life—he was easily betrayed by
those he trusted. There he was, the new primitive, a Byronic Dead-End Kid, with
his quality of vulnerability. His acting was so physical—so exploratory,
tentative, wary—that we could sense with him, feel him pull back at the
slightest hint of rebuff. We in the audience felt protective: we knew how lonely
he must be in his assertiveness. Who even in hell wants to be an outsider? And
he was no intellectual who could rationalize it, learn somehow to accept it, to
live with it. He could only feel it, act it out, be “The Wild One”—and God knows
how many kids felt, “That’s the story of my life.”
Brando played variations on rebel
themes: from the lowbrow, disturbingly inarticulate brute, Stanley Kowalski,
with his suggestions of violence waiting behind the slurred speech, the sullen
Ace, to his Orpheus standing before the judge in the opening scene of The
Fugitive Kind, unearthly, mythic, the rebel as artist, showing classic
possibilities he was never to realize (or has not yet realized).
He was our angry young man—the
delinquent, the tough, the rebel—who stood at the center of our common
experience. When, as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, he said to his
brother, “Oh Charlie, oh Charlie … you don’t understand. I could have had class.
I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody, instead of a
bum—which is what I am,” he spoke for all our failed hopes. It was the great
American lament, of Broadway, of Hollywood, as well as of the docks.
I am describing the Brando who became
a star, not the man necessarily, but the boy-man he projected, and also the
publicity and the come-on. The publicity had a built-in ambivalence. Though the
fan magazines might describe him alluringly as dreamy, moody, thin-skinned,
easily hurt, gentle, intense, unpredictable, hating discipline, a defender of
the underdog, other journalists and influential columnists were not so
sympathetic toward what this suggested.
It is one of the uglier traditions of
movie business that frequently when a star gets big enough to want big money and
artistic selection or control of his productions, the studios launch large-scale
campaigns designed to cut him down to an easier-to-deal-with size or to supplant
him with younger, cheaper talent. Thus, early in movie history the great Lillian
Gish was derided as unpopular in the buildup of the young Garbo (by the same
studio), and in newspapers all over the country, Marilyn Monroe, just a few
weeks before her death, was discovered to have no box-office draw. The gossip
columnists serve as the shock troops with all those little items about how
so-and-so is getting a big head, how he isn’t taking the advice of the studio
executives who know best, and so forth.
In the case of Brando, the most
powerful ladies were especially virulent because they were obviously part of
what he was rebelling against; in flouting their importance, he might undermine
their position with other new stars who might try to get by without kowtowing to
the blackmailing old vultures waiting to pounce in the name of God, Motherhood,
and Americanism. What was unusual in Brando’s case was the others who joined in
the attack.
In 1957, Truman Capote, having spent
an evening with Brando and then a year writing up that evening (omitting his own
side of the conversation and interjecting interpretations), published “The Duke
in His Own Domain” in the New Yorker. The unwary Brando was made to look
public ass number one. And yet the odd thing about this interview was that
Capote, in his supersophistication, kept using the most commonplace, middlebrow
evidence and arguments against him—for example, that Brando in his egotism was
not impressed by Joshua Logan as a movie director. (The matter for astonishment
was that Capote was—or was willing to use anything to make his literary
exercise more effective.) Despite Capote’s style and venomous skill, it is he in
this interview, not Brando, who equates money and success with real importance
and accomplishment. His arrows fit snugly into the holes they have made only if
you accept the usual middlebrow standards of marksmanship.
It was now open season on Brando:
Hollis Alpert lumbered onto the pages of Cosmopolitan to attack him for
not returning to the stage to become a great actor—as if the theatre were the
citadel of art. What theatre? Was Brando really wrong in feeling that
movies are more relevant to our lives than that dead theatre which so many
journalists seem to regard as the custodian of integrity and creativity? David
Susskind was shocked that a mere actor like Brando should seek to make money,
might even dare to consider his own judgment and management preferable to that
of millionaire producers. Dwight Macdonald chided Brando for not being content
to be a craftsman: “Mr. Brando has always aspired to something Deeper and More
Significant, he has always fancied himself as like an intellectual”—surely a
crime he shares with Mr. Macdonald.
If he had not been so presumptuous as
to try to think for himself in Hollywood and if he hadn’t had a sense of
irony, he could have pretended—and convinced a lot of people—that he was
still a contender. But what crown could he aspire to? Should he be a “king” like
Gable, going from one meaningless picture to another, performing the rituals of
manly toughness, embracing the studio stable, to be revered, finally, because he
was the company actor who never gave anybody any trouble? Columnists don’t
attack that kind of king on his papier-mâché throne; critics don’t prod him to
return to the stage; the public doesn’t turn against him.
Almost without exception, American
actors who don’t accept trashy assignments make nothing, not even superior
trash. Brando accepts the trash, but unlike the monochromatic, “always
dependable” Gable, he has too much energy or inventiveness or contempt just to
go through the motions. And when he appears on the screen, there is a special
quality of recognition in the audience: we know he’s too big for the role.
Perhaps, as some in picture business
say, Brando “screws up” his pictures by rewriting the scripts; certainly he
hasn’t been very astute in the directors and writers he has worked with. What he
needed was not more docility, but more strength, the confidence to work with
young talent, to try difficult roles. But he’s no longer a contender, no longer
a protagonist who challenges anything serious. Brando has become a comic.
The change was overwhelmingly
apparent in the 1963 Mutiny on the Bounty, which, rather surprisingly,
began with a miniature class conflict between Brando, as the aristocratic
Fletcher Christian, and Trevor Howard, as the lowborn Captain Bligh, who cannot
endure Christian’s contempt for him. Brando played the fop with such relish that
audiences shared in the joke; it was like a Dead-End Kid playing Congreve. The
inarticulate grunting Method actor is showing off, and it’s a classic and
favorite American joke: the worm turns, Destry gets his guns, American honor is
redeemed. He can talk as fancy as any of them, even fancier. (In the action
sequences he’s uninteresting, not handsome or athletic enough to be a stock
romantic adventure hero. He seems more eccentric than heroic, with his bizarre
stance, his head held up pugnaciously, his face unlined in a peculiar bloated,
waxen way. He’s like a short, flabby tenor wandering around the stage and not
singing: you wonder what he’s doing there.).
In The Ugly American (1963)
once again he is very funny as he sets the character—a pipe-smoking
businessman-ambassador who parries a Senate subcommittee with high-toned clipped
speech and epigrammatic sophistication. When he plays an articulate role, it is
already rather a stunt, and in this one he is talking about personal dignity and
standards of proper behavior. His restraint becomes a source of amusement
because he is the chief exponent of the uncouth, the charged. Even his
bull neck, so out of character, adds to the joke His comedy is volatile. It has
the unpredictable element that has always been part of his excitement at any
moment we may be surprised, amazed. When he submerges himself in the role, the
movie dies on the screen.
Brando is never so American as when
his English or foreign accent is thickest. It’s a joke like a child’s
impersonation of a foreigner, overplaying the difference, and he offers us
complicity in his accomplishments at pretending to be gentlemen or foreigners.
What is funny about these roles is that they seem foreign to the Brando the
audience feels it knows. When he does rough, coarse American serviceman comedy,
as in Bedtime Story, he is horribly nothing (except for one farcical
sequence when he impersonates a mad Hapsburg). Worse than nothing, because when
his vulnerability is gone, his animal grace goes too, and he is left without
even the routine handsomeness of his inferiors.
He had already implicated us in his
amusement at his roles earlier in his career, in 1954 with his Napoleon in
Désirée, in 1957 with his hilarious Southern gentleman-officer in
Sayonara, but these could still be thought of as commercial interludes, the
bad luck of the draw. Now he doesn’t draw anything else. Is it just bad luck, or
is it that he and so many of our greatest talents must play out their “creative”
lives with a stacked deck?
It is easy these days to “explain”
the absence of roles worth playing by referring to the inroads of television and
the end of the studio system. Of course, there’s some truth in all this. But
Brando’s career illustrates something much more basic: the destruction of
meaning in movies; and this is not a new phenomenon, nor is it specially linked
to television or other new factors. The organic truth of American movie history
is that the new theme or the new star that gives vitality to the medium is
widely imitated and quickly exhausted before the theme or talent can develop.
The industry makes tricks out of what was once done for love.
What’s left of the rebel incarnate is
what we see of Brando in the 1965 Morituri: his principal charm is his
apparent delight in his own cleverness. Like many another great actor who has
become fortune’s fool, he plays the great ham. He seems as pleased with the
lines as if he’d just thought them up. He gives the best ones a carefully timed
double take so that we, too, can savor his cleverness and the delight of his
German accent. And what else is there to do with the role? If his presence did
not give it the extra dimension of comedy, it would be merely commonplace.
In Morituri all we need is one
look at the cynical aesthete Brando in his escapist paradise, telling us that
he’s “out of it,” that war never solves anything, and we know that he’s going to
become the greatest warrior of them all. It can be argued that this hurdle of
apathy or principle or convictions to be overcome gives a character conflict and
makes his ultimate action more significant. Theoretically, this would seem to
explain the plot mechanism, but as it works, no matter how absurd the terms in
which the initial idealism or cynicism or social rejection is presented (as in
such classic movie examples of character reformation as Casablanca, To
Have and Have Not, Stalag 17), it is the final, socially acceptable
“good” behavior which seems fantasy, fairy tale, unbelievable melodrama—in
brief, fake. And the initial attitudes to be overcome often seem to have a lot
of strength; indeed, they are likely to be what drew us to the character in the
first place, what made him pass for a protagonist.
In Morituri, as in movies in
general, there is rarely a difference shown, except to bring it back to
the “norm.” The high-minded, like the Quakers in High Noon or Friendly
Persuasion, are there only to violate their convictions. They must be
brought down low to common impulses, just as the low cynical materialists must
be raised high to what are supposed to be our shared ideals. This democratic
leveling of movies is like a massive tranquilizer. The more irregular the hero,
the more offbeat, the more necessary it is for him to turn square in the finale.
Brando’s career is a larger
demonstration of the same principle at work in mass culture; but instead of
becoming normal, he (like Norman Mailer) became an eccentric, which in this
country means a clown, possibly the only way left to preserve some kind of
difference.
When you’re larger than life you
can’t just be brought down to normalcy. It’s easier to get acceptance by
caricaturing your previous attitudes and aspirations, by doing what the hostile
audience already has been doing to you. Why should Bette Davis let impersonators
on television make a fool of her when she can do it herself and reap the rewards
of renewed audience acceptance?
Perhaps Brando has been driven to
this self-parody so soon because of his imaginative strength and because of that
magnetism that makes him so compelling an expression of American conflicts. His
greatness is in a range that is too disturbing to be encompassed by regular
movies. As with Bette Davis, as with John Barrymore, even when he mocks himself,
the self he mocks is more prodigious than anybody else around. It’s as if the
hidden reserves of power have been turned to irony. Earlier, when his roles were
absurd, there was a dash of irony; now it’s taken over: the nonconformist with
no roles to play plays with his roles. Brando is still the most exciting
American actor on the screen. The roles may not be classic, but the actor’s
dilemma is.
Emerson outlined the American
artist’s way of life a century ago—“Thou must pass for a fool for a long
season.” We used to think that the season meant only youth, before the artist
could prove his talent, make his place, achieve something. Now it is clear that
for screen artists, and perhaps not only for screen artists, youth is,
relatively speaking, the short season; the long one is the degradation after
success.
March, 1966