A Bright, Burning Star

Marlon Brando Acted His Way Skyward, Then Fell Spectacularly

In 1954, a babe had a question for Johnny Strabler, who leans next to his gleaming hog, in a pathetic small town in the middle of nowhere.

"Johnny, what are you rebelling against?"

Johnny doesn't even have to think. Every line in his body expresses the answer, as does the contemptuous power of the machine, the beautiful sullenness of his face, the slouch of his heavily muscled body as it contorts the leathers that drape him like knight's armor, the rakish tilt of his cyclist's cap pulled across his broad forehead.

He replies, "Whatta ya got?"

Meaning: Everything. Always. Forever. And: Even himself.

That was Marlon Brando the actor, in "The Wild One," a pretty bad movie that became a cultural touchstone. And that was Marlon Brando the man, who was a great artist and a great pain in the butt. He rode his technique to the heights, artistically and commercially, but never seemed to enjoy the view from up there. In the end, he squabbled with everyone, ultimately exiling himself from a culture that adored him.

You might easily ask: What the hell is with that guy?

And you might easily answer: genius.

On Thursday, death finally found Brando at 80 and he went to it sublimely, having had much experience with the ends of things: He had murdered his own career years earlier.

But in the beginning, oh, boy, was he something.

Brando exploded on the American theatrical consciousness in 1947, in Elia Kazan's Broadway production of Tennessee Williams's emotionally incendiary "A Streetcar Named Desire." Brando was a jalopy named fury. He played the brooding Stanley Kowalski, his body bulging out of a tight white T-shirt, his arms like oak trunks, his hair matted with sweat, his face agleam with intensity; nobody had ever seen anything like it. The charisma, the heat, the anger, the sense of self, the animal power, the capacity to dazzle unfettered by vanity. He was able to transfer intact that creation to the screen in 1951, again under Kazan's skilled leadership, and the American filmgoing public took notice in a big way.

It's not that he was the first movie star to look "different." In truth, he didn't look that much different, with his aquiline nose and broad forehead. He was handsome is as handsome does. Others before had been much less conventional in appeal. Bogart was no Johnny Pretty, nor was Edward G. Robinson or Victor Mature. Cagney was a street pug; Raft had never been a doll.

But Brando had something even those formidable precursors lacked and the camera worshiped. It was the sense of working from the inside out, not the outside in. This was the expression in performance of a theory first propounded by the Russian Konstantin Stanislavsky, then picked up in smart New York artistic circles, where Brando, a student of both Stella Adler and Kazan's Actors Studio, connected with it.

It meant that to project an emotion, one first had to generate that emotion within. Performance wasn't a parlor trick, an imposition of ticks and tweaks, an accent, a disguise, a way of walking, a form of magic. It was something more primal, more real, more powerful. It had to come from the dank, fetid psychic jungle two inches behind the eyes to register, and the authenticity was more important than the precision of expression. Thus one could mumble, stammer, spit, hem, haw, as long as those behaviors were part of the psychological text of the character. The actor's belief in the emotion, based on memory, was what created the audience's belief in it, not his mastery of breathing technique and diaphragm-powered pipes.