MARLON BRANDO: Marlon Brando Pictures, The Godfather, all about Giga Actor Marlon Brando

BRANDO, MARLON. Born April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska; actor, director. The actor who changed film acting with his provocative and expressionistic Method style, shattering the stage-bound technique of all who preceded him and influencing all who followed. By the mid-1960s, however, Brando, uncomfortable with his phenomenal success, had purposely turned his image against itself and, as a result, lost most of his audience. As the suffering, horse-loving wanderer in The Appaloosa, the pummeled sheriff in The Chase, and the whip-snapping, latent homosexual southerner in John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, Brando settled into a position he had only flirted with in such films as The Teahouse of the August Moon—that of an artistic explorer who was more concerned with pushing himself than catering to audience expectations. While gambles such as Charles Chaplin’s A Countess from Hong Kong failed, Gillo Pontecorvo’s allegorical Marxist adventure Burn! paid off artistically if not commercially. By 1972, Brando had all but been erased from the Hollywood slate, only to reemerge in two of his finest roles—the omnipotent Don Vito Corleone of The Godfather and the despairing widower Paul of Last Tango in Paris, both of which earned him the sort of raves that recalled Stanley Kowalski and Terry Malloy. Every gesture, from the Don’s jowl scratching to the dying Paul’s removal of the gum from his mouth is imbued with, and modulated by, a genius level of awareness that has no match in American film. A force of nature as unpredictable and powerful as the weather, the physically expanding Brando then set off on a career that is equal parts madness, whimsy, and passion, winding out the 1980s with just three more film roles—the giddy gunfighter in The Missouri Breaks; the $3 million cameo as Jor-El, father of Superman; and the magnetic mumblings of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. After a rare television appearance as an American neo-Nazi in Roots: The Next Generations and a playful role as a Milk-Dud popping tycoon in The Formula, he announced one of his frequent retirements only to return in Euzhan Palcy’s antiapartheid film A Dry White Season. After the monotonous excess of Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, Brando turned to a pair of intelligent comedies in which he costarred with two popular young actors—opposite Matthew Broderick in The Freshman, as Carmine Sabatini, a fictional character on whom Don Vito Corleone was based (a self-reflexive twist on movie reality), and opposite Johnny Depp in Don Juan DeMarco, as a jaded psychotherapist who rediscovers romance through a supposedly crazy patient. His enigmatic autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me was published in 1994. ‘‘It was as if The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris exhausted him…. His final disguise is as a fat man too lazy to learn his lines, pasting them on the camera, on his fellow performers’ foreheads for the closeup’’ (Richard Schickel, Film Comment, February 1985).

Filmography of key pre-1965 films: The Men (1950); A Streetcar Named Desire (1951); Viva Zapata! (1952); Julius Caesar (1952); The Wild One (1953); On the Waterfront (1954); Guys and Dolls (1955); Sayonara (1957); The Fugitive Kind (1960); One-Eyed Jacks (1961) also director; Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).

Filmography since 1965: The Appaloosa/Southwest to Sonora (1966); The Chase (1966); A Countess from Hong Kong (1967); Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967); Candy (1968); The Night of the Following Day (1968); Burn!/Quemada! (1969); The Nightcomers (1971); The Godfather (1972); Last Tango in Paris (1972); The Missouri Breaks (1976); Superman (1978); Apocalypse Now (1979); Roots: The Next Generations (1979, tvms); The Formula (1980); A Dry White Season (1989); Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992); The Freshman (1990); Don Juan DeMarco (1995).

Honors: Academy Awards for Best Actor (On the Waterfront, The Godfather); Academy Award nominations for Best Actor (A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!, Julius Caesar, Sayonara, Last Tango in Paris) and Supporting Actor (A Dry White Season); Cannes Film Festival Awards for Best Actor (Viva Zapata!, On the Waterfront); New York Film Critics Circle Awards for Best Actor (On the Waterfront, Last Tango in Paris); Emmy for Best Supporting Actor (Roots: The Next Generations).

Marlon Brando in Movie History:

Still, before the 1970s no-one could have imagined that feature-length hardcore films would, however briefly, play neighbourhood cinemas or that the respectable press would give newly minted porn superstars Linda Lovelace, Marilyn Chambers, John Holmes and Harry Reems a venue in which to extol the virtues of the adult film industry and proclaim their conviction that sexually explicit movies would only become more generally acceptable in the years to come. A decade earlier, it would have been unthinkable that Marlon Brando, one-time Hollywood heartthrob and idol of a generation of actors, would appear naked in LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1973), whose frank portrayal of sexual congress was inextricably linked to its highbrow purpose. Even old-time smut peddlers were taken aback, if for selfish reasons - how could their no-name naughtiness compete with the appeal of big stars in the buff?

The point at which major experimental films ceased to have this kind of public forum coincided with the advent of the so-called `structural' film as exemplified by such works as Michael Snow's WAVELENGTH (1967), BACK AND FORTH (1969), and LA RÉGION CENTRALE (1971), Ken Jacobs's TOM TOM THE PIPER'S SON (1969/1971), and Hollis Frampton's NOSTALGIA (1971) - films associated with neither sexuality nor drugs in the minds of most viewers (though an intellectual minority continued to associate Snow's films with `trips', in part because of his own interest in drugs). This turning point, moreover, corresponded closely in terms of both period and attitude to the institutionalizing of the American underground film via museums, archives, and academic film studies, which tended to remove experimental films from the social spaces of ordinary or makeshift movie theatres and relegate them to the “safer” confines of various institutional venues (mainly classrooms).

Prior to this change, the experimental film that was probably seen most widely and frequently was SCORPIO RISING, and the cultural impact it had, as suggested above, was not closely tied to its experimental aspects, having more to do with its iconography and sexuality and its use of pop records than to its unorthodox cutting and its relatively esoteric symbology. (Indeed, the important roles played in the film by clips of Marlon Brando from THE WILD ONE, a photograph of James Dean, panels from such comic strips as Dick Tracy and Li'l Abner, and a wind-up motorcycle toy all gave the film a much wider address than the mythical references of Anger's previous and subsequent films.) And the same could be said of the underground films that had the strongest commercial impact a few years later: Warhol's THE CHELSEA GIRLS (1966), Robert Downey's satirical CHAFED ELBOWS (1967), and, perhaps most significant of all, a travelling program of shorts packaged on the west coast by Mike Getz (an exhibitor who had previously been brought to trial for showing SCORPIO RISING) that played in weekend midnight slots at a circuit of theatres owned by Getz's uncle, Louis Sher. The first such program, which went out in early 1967 under the label “Psychedelic Film Trips #1”, included George Kuchar's HOLD ME WHILE I'M NAKED, Storm De Hirsch's PEYOTE QUEEN, and Stan Vanderbeek's BREATHDEATH, and according to J. Hoberman - whose chapter on `The Underground' in our co-authored book Midnight Movies is the chief source of this survey - this very successful enterprise peaked in 1969, when it reached twenty-two cities in the U.S., though it continued until the mid-1970s.

Director Elia Kazan did with The Arrangement, which “was essentially an autobiographical study of him and his wife”. When he signed a contract with Warner Brothers to turn the book into a movie, Loden was going to play “her own” part, opposite Marlon Brando's Eddie Anderson. When Brando eventually refused the part, it went to Kirk Douglas. That meant keeping Loden out of the picture, for “the studio said `Kirk Douglas and Barbara Loden, nobody's going to see that'. So they got Faye Dunaway.” According to Kazan, “Barbara never forgave [him]”. She should also have been wary of the way she was portrayed in the book. While Anderson is given a complex, albeit unbearably self-centred, internal monologue, Gwen is denied interiority, and her identity and self-worth are entirely defined by the way she looks: “Gwen didn't need an analyst to build her self-esteem. All she needed was a mirror.” One is reminded of the character of Jenny in Yvonne Rainer's PRIVILEGE (1990), who discovers the sexism of her partner when he says: “You can always tell how a woman feels about herself by looking at her legs." Yet, as Rainer notices, Jenny didn't mind then, because she was sexually attracted to the man. Kazan recognised that his Gwen loved Eddie to distraction, and how patient Loden had been - for years she was his secret mistress as well as supportive mate and companion - but the question of female desire eludes him, as proven when, after her death, he tries to understand Loden: “Like many pretty girls I've known, she felt worthless, felt that the only thing that gave her any value was a man's desire for her.”

Scorsese's vision was of what had been left out of American movies in the wake of rock, the upheaval Hollywood hadn't come to terms with: the new synthesis of the mythic and the quotidian ushered in in the wake of Elvis Presley and Spector, the new style of poetic license fashioned by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. The hybrid quality of MEAN STREETS drew on neo-realism and film noir (on each as a version of the other) as well as rock, and it layered Godard-Bresson after-effects in between the pop juice, but ultimately had more in common with Let It Bleed than Elia Kazan (let alone THE GODFATHER). Much as the Rolling Stones drew on blues, soul, and early rock to invent a language of pop rebellion that spoke directly to American experiences and fantasies (to America's penchant for experiencing its fantasies as revelation), Scorsese filtered new European cinema through a uniquely American perspective. Here, reinventing film in terms of rock, he was closest of all to Springsteen, who at the same time was re-imagining rock in terms of Kazan, James Dean, and Marlon Brando. In Springsteen's thrilling, poignantly fetishistic cosmology, it was as if WEST SIDE STORY had mutated a heterosexual SCORPIO RISING: “Backstreets” itself was a virtual answer record to Scorsese. It merged Keitel's Charlie with Steiger's ON THE WATERFRONT role, and Brando's Terry donned De Niro's delinquent clothes, ghosts moving through the back streets of Bob Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone” as it might have sounded with Spector producing.

From the Fifties onwards, Hollywood had always kept rock at arm's length even as it sought to jump on the bandwagon: it tried to cash in on the youth cult explosion while muffling it with the wet blanket of show-business-asusual. THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT (1956) turned rock into baggy-pants burlesque - inspired burlesque, true, but Little Richard's monumental racial-sexual weirdness was reduced to novelty-act status, effaced by Edmund O'Brian's jowls and Jayne Mansfield's breasts. Later, youth revolt would be given the sociological-sensational treatment epitomised by Stanley Kramer's 1970 R.P.M. campus “revolution” effaced by Anthony Quinn's jowls and Ann-Margaret's breasts: Hollywood's idea of progress.) The entertainment industry was determined to assimilate rock if it couldn't replace it, so it exploited the latest craze even as it sought to replace it or give it a wholesome Pat Boone overhaul. Thus a new genre was born, `the Elvis movie', which epitomised Hollywood's contempt for rock. Early on, with the casually insolent JAILHOUSE ROCK (1957), it seemed like Presley might become the natural successor to Dean or Brando or Mitchum - that his rockabilly menace and carnality could be translated to film, and he might be able to bring the wild unseen side of America to the movies. Yet for all his swagger in JAILHOUSE ROCK, Presley's line readings will suddenly go flat, his expression blanking out, the lithe body growing wooden and unsure of itself. Conviction deserts him, his sneer replaced by the obliging death-mask he would wear through countless travesties to come: almost presaging the glad-handing self-sabotage of MEAN STREETS' Charlie (albeit unintentionally, as a perverse form of careerism).

There would be no THUNDER ROAD for Elvis: the history of rock in Hollywood is mostly a history of travesty, or a history of what might have been. In the Fifties, an icon gap had opened up in American movies. THE WILD ONE and REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE anticipated youth's new archetypes, but within a sonic vaccuum. Brando's poly-Orpheus scorn and Dean's charismatic anguish seemed anomalous, harbingers strangely cut off from the upheavals they heralded. But as rock took over and elaborated their gestures, the movies lagged behind, attempting to smooth the cracks in the facade. Hollywood offered Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis - a sexless sex symbol and a proletarian pin-up, old stereotypes upholstered in rugged, durable plastic. There's no better illustration of the mentality at work here than RIO BRAVO, which served up emasculated would-be rocker Ricky Nelson as a sop to `the kids' (he just about oozed sincerity and clean-living), but made him comically subordinate to the real men in the picture. Dean Martin embodied the industry's prevailing notion of entertainment: so casual and agreeable he makes indifference signify as the height of show business mastery. (His assured Vegas-cowboy guise - the hipsterism of the unhip - is precisely what Elvis will emulate so disastrously in dozens of films.) And standing for manhood itself, none other than John Wayne - that most enduring icon of the America that wished to be purged of rock and rebellion alike.

In the space between BONNIE AND CLYDE and MEAN STREETS, an era took shape - a rapprochement less between movies and rock as such than the ideal of freedom rock represented, but was snuffed out almost as soon as it was born. THE MISSOURI BREAKS (1975) simultaneously marked its last gasp and heralded the new age of the package deal. Here we had director Arthur Penn, ultrahip writer Tom McGuane, Jack Nicholson with the full force of his post EASY RIDER cachet intact, even Marlon Brando to lend the whole thing the lustre of immortality. But the movie's frontier parable of cattle baron imperialism vs. proletarian thieves came true in its making: THE MISSOURI BREAKS wasn't filmed so much as brokered among all cutthroat parties involved. Nicholson wound up adrift in the morass while Brando was acting up a storm - busy entertaining himself to keep boredom at bay, like an aging rock star on one last tour bus, trying on different masks and groupies for size. (Like an extroverted version Dylan's Alias, this performance might have served as the oblique inspiration for Dylan's own whiteface-minstrel feature RENALDO AND CLARA.) Under all that authentic looking blood and dung, rust had set in - a preview of a future where capital never sleeps, and HEAVEN'S GATE is just a mortician's kiss away.

In the dream-Western Neil Young had been piecing together since his days with Buffalo Springfield, this would not be a news flash. “When the first shot hit the dock,” he sang in “Powderfinger”, “I saw it comin'”. A chiming deathknell reverie, the song had the open, desperate feel of a lost Anthony Mann eulogy, THE FAR COUNTRY given a foretaste of APOCALYPSE NOW: “Look out, mama, there's a white boat comin' up the river.” The future had arrived and everyone's number was up (”It don't look like they're here to deliver the mail” was a bit of perfect Jimmy Stewart understatement). This was circa 1975, though like “Pocahontas” (originally titled “Marlon Brando, Pocahontas, and Me”) it would be a few years till Young got around to issuing them on record. For “Pocahontas”, Young even pictured himself getting chummy with Brando, chewing the fatted calf around the campfire: “We'll sit and talk of Hollywood and the good things there for hire.” Out to pasture or up a creek without a paddle, he had said much the same in 1969, with his band Crazy Horse behind him, on an album that was as unforgiving as it was seductive: “Everybody knows this is nowhere.”

From the Book The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s. Contributors: Thomas Elsaesser - editor, Alexander Horwath - editor, Noel King - editor. Publisher: Amsterdam University Press. Place of Publication: Amsterdam. Publication Year: 2004.

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Marlon Brando Fact Files:

Birth Name: Marlon Brando Jr.

Date of birth: 3 April 1924

Place of birth: Omaha, Nebraska, USA

Date of death: 1 July 2004

Place of death: Los Angeles, California, USA.

Cause of death: Pulmonary fibrosis (Respiratory failure)

Nickname: Bud), Mr Mumbles

Gender: Male

Nationality: United States

Occupation: Actor, Director

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Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris

Last Tango in Paris - aka Last Tango in Paris (UK & USA) - aka Le Dernier Tango à Paris (France)

"Tonight we improvise!" shouts a gleeful Jeanne (Maria Schneider) as she enters the apartment in the rue Jules Verne for the third time. Despite the allusions to Pirandello and Verne, the film represented a watershed for Bertolucci, for he was no longer tied to a literary model. His direct engagement with literature seemed to end with the series of films that had occupied his energies from 1961 through 1970. With the completion of The Conformist Bertolucci had proved that the cinema had a style and a language of its own, fully capable of expressing its own version of the literary model in its own way. The ghost of Atilio/Laertes was at least temporarily pacified.

"You must always leave a door open on the set through which an unexpected visitor may enter. That is cinema!" Jean Renoir was to tell Bertolucci a few years after the completion of Tango. But his younger Italian friend had already discovered this lesson for himself. Marlon Brando (as Paul) and Maria Schneider (as Jeanne) were given enormous freedom to invent their roles as the film unfolded. If we are to believe actors and director, the door remained open throughout.

The visitor to whom Jean Renoir alluded, however, was an unusual one. Bertolucci was to say, "The modern word for the Greek concept of fate is the unconscious. My unconscious is the fate of my movies." From his unconscious emerged a character from Greek myth who was to structure this film in a way that was deeply coherent despite the degree of improvisation carried out by the actors. An intricate series of allusions to the Orpheus myth and to various modern versions of the myth thoroughly permeates the film.

According to the myth, Orpheus's wife Eurydice was fatally bitten by a serpent while fleeing the advances of her lover, Aristaeus. Inconsolable at her death, Orpheus managed to charm the infernal deities with his poetry and music and obtained permission to descend to Hades to get her back. But the gods of the underworld diabolically imposed one condition on this permission : that Orpheus should not turn back to look at Eurydice as he led her out of the underworld. Orpheus of course broke this command and lost Eurydice, this time forever.

Parallels between the characters in the film and those of the myth are not immediately obvious because, like the adaptations of the myth by other modern artists such as Jean Cocteau, Jules Verne, Marcel Camus, and Tennessee Williams, Bertolucci's work is as much a perversion as a restatement of the myth. Recourse to an analysis of the film will elucidate the many connections with the mythic structure.

Last Tango in Paris in simplest terms presents a man (Paul) and a woman (Jeanne) who encounter each other in an apartment near the Quai de Passy in Paris. We learn during the course of the film that the man's wife, Rosa, has just committed suicide, and, grief-stricken, he seeks hopelessly for a way to get her back. With Jeanne, Paul acts out a series of violently erotic fantasies. When the couple leave the apartment for the last time, Paul pursues Jeanne to her own apartment where she shoots him in the genitals and kills him.

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