The Mystery of Marlon Brando

Our greatest and most unknowable actor

It’s amazing what a few decades of epic arrogance and self-loathing can do for a person’s reputation.  

Marlon Brando was, without a doubt, a genius, one of the more staggeringly talented figures of 20th-century art. But Brando repeatedly attempted to sour his accomplishments with a self-negating passion that sometimes bordered on mental instability. 

By the time he died in 2004, he had transformed a breathtaking, emotionally perceptive man into a grossly obese blowhard whose chief purpose in life appeared to be to deny his own God given gifts.  

Brando possessed—and fostered, when he cared enough to do it—a startling ability to cut through the bullshit and expose the raw nerve that’s shared by anyone who’s ever drawn a breath, and he first employed this skill at a time when the darker aspects of the human spirit weren’t discussed quite so bluntly in public. 

Brando at his best reveals our collective existential weakness, our anger and gracelessness when faced with the unknowable. It’s not a pretty sight.  

His impact on popular culture, both on Broadway and in film as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and in a string of iconic 1950s screen performances, was seismic. Simply put, there was acting before Brando and acting after Brando. 

That’s a fact. And even a casual observer can see the difference. 

Brando brought porcelain doll delicacy to big-screen toughness, but he was never afraid to push things into outright confrontation. This attitude even informs our musical icons. Everyone from Elvis to Mick Jagger to Bruce Springsteen would have had no starting point were it not for Marlon Brando. The channels of emotion he opened were powerful enough to flow into and redefine multiple forms of mass entertainment.

Brando, who grew up in Nebraska, California, and Illinois, was raised by an alcoholic mother who passionately directed community theater… and encouraged a bright young actor by the name of Henry Fonda when he was barely out of his teens. Brando’s father, Marlon Brando Sr., was a hard-drinking, womanizing, macho traveling salesman who was physically abusive and highly critical of his son. For that matter, he was critical of his entire family. 

Try as he might, Brando could never come to terms with his father. He even formed a production company with him in the late 1950s called Pennebacker, Inc. (Pennebacker being the maiden name of Brando’s mother, who had passed away.) Some of Brando’s friends started to think that Brando, rather than trying to reconcile with his father, actually brought him onboard so he could relentlessly pick on him for making mistakes on the job.

And mistakes were made. Marlon Sr. reportedly lost huge sums of his son’s money via bad investment schemes.

It was not, to say the least, a productive relationship, and it seemed to instill an underlying emotional rot in Marlon Jr. He appeared to ride a wave of contempt for both the machinations of Hollywood and anyone who was moved to praise him for his art. 

His great tragedy was that the love of the public wasn’t deep enough for him, and acting came too easily to be trusted. And his looks were just a lottery he won, something for him to utilize, not something to actually discuss. 

Whereas moviegoers saw a beautiful, wounded, impossibly honest individual and wanted to embrace him—or more—Brando never rid himself of the notion that he was little more than an overpaid con artist and was lowering himself to participate in the Hollywood game.

At turns seductive and pointlessly vicious, Brando wallowed in the spoils of his physical beauty and overwhelming charisma. He tore through a string of the most glamorous women on earth and dabbled with some men for good measure (James Baldwin and Miles Davis reportedly among them), at least until he became too jaded to bother with even carnal pursuits. 

Yet, with all that physical connection—the struggle between the twin poles of Brando’s sexuality lent an electrical undercurrent to many of his greatest performances—he managed to forever keep the world at arm’s length. (His long-suffering lover, Rita Moreno, once warned an actress friend of mine who had inquired about her relationship with Brando, “Never fall in love with someone who’s more beautiful than you.”)

The people who knew Brando best had just as much trouble defining and defending him as everybody else did. He was simply Marlon, and if you expected anything different, you were wise to just get out of the way.  

Brando set fires in his personal life, and he seldom bothered to stick around to put them out; he was too busy turning his existence into a sort of cosmic practical joke. Thus he cashed in his superstardom chips early, becoming a profanely bloated sex object, a thespian god who chose merely to make faces and deliver cheesy dialogue for ridiculous paychecks. 

Brando very nearly pissed away his livelihood in the 1960s while half-heartedly (or was it quarter-heartedly?) appearing in one stone-cold turkey after another...like, for instance, the 1968 hipster travesty, “Candy” (see the photo. Do not see the movie). Truth be told, he fully committed himself to only nine or ten films in his entire career. But when he decided to go for it, Brando was still Brando, and no one else has ever been able to touch him.  

As Jack Nicholson once said of his friend and long-time Hollywood Hills neighbor, “When Marlon dies, everybody moves up one.” 

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It’s confounding that Brando often delivered his best work in weaker movies. One of them, John Huston’s ridiculously overheated 1967 psychodrama, Reflections in a Golden Eye, makes Tennessee Williams seem like a paragon of chaste understatement. This, as far as I know, is the only movie where a woman gets so depressed she snips her nipples off with a set of pruning shears!

But, in the midst of such nonsense, Brando delivers a two-minute glimpse into his troubled character’s soul that’s so wild-eyed and raw, it’s stuck with me for years.

Brando plays Maj. Welden Penderton, a stoic, closeted homosexual Army officer who’s dismayed to find himself obsessing over a young male recruit on his base. Penderton soon grows distant, for obvious reasons, from his suspicious wife (Elizabeth Taylor), and his world unravels.

One day, Pendleton takes his wife's horse for a too-vigorous ride through the countryside. The ride ends with Penderton falling from the animal and being dragged when his foot gets tangled in the stirrup.

That could have been that. But Pemberton then angrily whips the screaming horse with a small tree branch. Brando’s halting collapse as Pemberton recognizes what he’s doing and the true source of his frustration washes over him is as overwhelming as anything I’ve ever seen on a movie screen. 

As is so often the case with Brando, it’s difficult to tell if he’s “acting” in this scene or if we’re getting a deeply personal glimpse at the crossed wires that drive the actor himself. Certainly, there’s an intense sense of voyeurism while watching it, a feeling that Brando is offering way too much for what amounts to just another movie.

It’s only an educated guess, of course, but it’s not too hard to imagine he fully identified with Pemberton’s sexual conflict. To one degree or another, he was living it.

The range of emotions that flicker across Brando’s face in this single shot is breathtaking, with a wistful femininity fluttering beneath it all that eventually wrestles Pemberton’s conventional sense of male identity into submission and drives him to sobs.  

There’s something powerfully elemental about Brando at moments like this. His awkward, stunned grimace is so real, so human, it’s impossible not to be jolted by it. You have to wonder what’s behind his terrified eyes as he collapses.

One prays the shot was accomplished in a single take.

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And then there’s Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, an overtly voyeuristic piece of lush, art house depravity that caused a scandal upon its release back in 1972, and it’s not hard to see why. The movie is less a relationship drama than a filmed essay on Brando’s disdain for other human beings. 

Here was Marlon Brando, fresh off his out-of-nowhere, mega-commercial comeback performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather, putting a girl half his age (Maria Schneider) through what amounted to her sexual comeuppance for daring to be young and tempting in front of an emotionally wounded middle-aged man.  

Despite Brando’s lifelong willingness to shock people, nobody could have expected his character—an American-in-Paris named Paul whose unfaithful wife has just committed suicide—to force anal intercourse on his co-star via a fistful of butter. 

Years later, Schneider revealed that Brando and Bertolucci dropped the famous “butter scene” on her totally out of the blue. It wasn’t in the script. “I was so angry,” she said. “Marlon said to me, ‘Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie.’ But during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn't real, I was crying real tears.”

This is, of course, unforgivable behavior. But Brando the man was no stranger to unforgivable behavior; this was just the first time he’d ever presented it onscreen.

Seen in a modern light, the shocking thing about Last Tango isn’t the simulated sex from a major film actor. It’s the ugliness, the unromanticized viciousness of how it’s presented. And yet again, you feel like you’re discovering more about Marlon Brando than you probably need or want to know while you’re watching it.

This is no fleeting moment or shot buried within a narrative, either. The entire movie seems designed to shatter Brando’s emotional barriers, moment to moment. The shoot was a filmed psychoanalysis session that peeled away the layers of his real-life anguish, with the results then being projected on movie screens around the world.

This was an exceedingly strange gesture from a man who was obviously no fan of telling people exactly what was going on in his head. God only knows why Brando agreed to do it. If Bertolucci was milking it out of him, Brando was absolutely sharp enough to recognize the manipulation—nobody manipulated like Marlon Brando! He could have easily given the director only as much as he needed to construct a scene.

Don’t expect an “I coulda been a contender” speech that warms you to Paul’s predicament.

You certainly recognize the guy’s pain and frustration, but Last Tango’s answer to it is little more than a beautifully photographed “fuck you,” whether physically or mentally, and that very pointlessness was viewed in some circles as nihilistic insight—a punk attitude before there was punk rock, if you will. 

Brando later referred to Bertolucci’s cameras-rolling improv sessions as “emotional rape,” which, when coupled with Schneider’s clear abasement, means there was more than enough violation to go around. Schneider is theoretically Brando’s co-star in the picture, but she’s really just there to encourage a desperate older man to brandish his genitals like they’re a shattered beer bottle in a bar fight.

The key problem with Last Tango as a film is that a lot of it is terrible. The scripted dialogue, in particular, is often false and unforgivably pretentious. And there’s a subplot concerning the young woman’s relationship with her documentarian boyfriend that’s completely unnecessary given the focus of the rest of the film. 

But, to say the least, it has its moments. 

Brando has a rambling monologue in Last Tango in which Paul is supposedly pondering his own life, but anyone with any knowledge of Brando’s past can readily grasp that Brando is talking directly about himself, including his hatred toward his domineering father.

It’s a fascinating scene that generated lots of analytical ink at the time, most of it centered on why, exactly, Brando would suddenly choose to let his guard down to such an extent. If anyone ever came up with a logical answer, I’ve never read it.

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Even then, the crowning moment of Brando’s Last Tango performance is a different beast altogether and almost too intense to endure.

Paul has returned to the fleabag hotel his wife operated to view her body after her suicide by razor. In the days since her death, he’s discovered she had a long-time lover he knew nothing about. 

He now realizes that the most important relationship of his life was an elaborate lie, that he was being played for a fool by the person he most trusted and believed in. He sits alone in a chair as his wife’s dead body lies on their bed, her face covered in makeup and the bed piled with flowers. 

This scene is acting as free jazz, with a minimal structure being provided to the performer, who then reaches inside himself and retrieves a primal squall.

Again, the scene is a matter of small, dark events that seem too private to be viewed within the context of a film. After screaming horrendous, belittling profanities at a woman who can no longer answer him, there's a tender reversal when Paul suddenly starts sobbing and tearing petals off the flowers so he can wipe the makeup his wife never wore in life from the death mask of her face. It's absolutely devastating.

You have to wonder, beyond the demands of the script, who is the true recipient of Brando’s rage here, the real life source of his method actor’s impulse? Does he see his mother lying there in front of him? Is it his father? Is he attacking the audience he had grown to view as a bunch of emotional parasites? Or is he lashing out at himself for the mess he's made of his life? 

Last Tango in Paris—and, quite possibly, the death bed scene in particular—was the end of the line for Brando. Considering how much he revealed about himself in the film, that may well have been his intent.  

He’d occasionally deliver lucid performances after this, although sometimes, as in The Missouri Breaks and The Island of Dr. Moreau, he also acted like a goddamned idiot on the set, and the idiocy carried over into the film. But any uncomfortable emotional disclosures would now reside solely in his shattered personal life, which would eventually include his son murdering his daughter’s lover and the daughter resorting to suicide when her father turned away from her.  

But one needs to cut Brando some slack as a performer, as hard as that may be, given his failings as a man. He had bigger balls than any actor in motion picture history, and if he had continually displayed them as recklessly as he did in his most searing efforts, he likely would have lived far fewer years than the ripe old age of eighty that he finally reached.  

When he laid it all on the line for an audience, surely he must have lost yet another piece of whatever spirit he had left. The hole inside of him just grew bigger.

I have to disagree with Jack Nicholson. Marlon did die, and whoever was in second place is still sitting right there. And that’s how it’s going to stay.