Few are the girls who never dreamed of becoming an actress, a movie star, a Hollywood icon. Even fewer are the girls who never swooned over a hot movie star. Whether we like it or not, Hollywood is still the film-making capital of the world, and if you look at many of today’s starlets you would believe that all it takes is a nice face and a lot of well-placed silicone. However, Hollywood became the stuff of dreams decades ago when the movie stars were larger than life. This series is about the Golden Era of Hollywood and the legends on whose blood, sweat and talent the success of the modern film industry was built upon.
How do you even talk about Marlon Brando without falling into cliche, throwing in a quick reference to his most memorable performance as Don Corleone - as I just did. Had he made only that movie, it would still be enough for Brando to be remembered as one of the greatest actors of all times. But Brando is much more than that, both as an actor and a man, and his personal life is just as extraordinary as his career.His life was so rich you could make a movie about him. Oh, wait, there’ no need for that. There is a documentary on Brando, narrated by the man himself from beyond the grave. Released in 2015, eleven years after the artist’s death ‘Listen to me Marlon’ draws upon 300 hours of tapes recorded by Brando himself over the years, tapes in which he reflects upon his career and his life and he’s not all that happy.
“I searched but never found what I was looking for. Mine was a glamorous life but completely unfulfilling.”
Quite a strange thing to say for such a great man, but understandable since there’s a pattern of unhappiness throughout his life.
Born in 1924,in a family of mixed German, Dutch and Irish origins, Marlon Brando had an unhappy childhood of neglect and abuse. His father, Marlon Brando Sr, was a violent man, a heavy-drinker and a serial womanizer. Left to care for three children on her own for most of the time, his mother, Dorothy, also found solace in drinking. Sometimes it was his father who’d go out and search for her in bars, but when he was old enough it was often Marlon Brando who brought his drunk mother home.The cinema became one of the few places where he could be happy:
"I would escape everything. That sense of good feeling got me through the week. Those moments were magical."
The father would frequently berate the boy, telling him he’d never amount to anything in life.You’d think winning an Oscar for his performance in ’On the Waterfront’ would please the most demanding of parents. Brando Sr., however, was not impressed. In 1955, shortly after the Oscars, father and son appeared on a CBS interview. Asked about his son’s acting in the critically-acclaimed movie, Brando Sr. Answered that no, he didn’t like it. The documentary captures the moment when the smile freezes on Brando’s face, as his own father expresses contempt for his acting in front of millions.The relation with his father hurt a lot, which is why it features so much in the tape recordings he left behind.
"I was making more in six months of work than he made in ten years.He couldn't understand how this ne'er-do-well son of his could possibly do that."
His father put him through military school, where he got in trouble for insubordination, so Brando dropped out and went to New York to study acting with Stella Adler, whose methods focused on encouraging the actors to explore both internal and external aspects to fully understand the character they had to portray. Life in New York was rough, he recalls:
“I remember getting drunk, lying on the sidewalk and going to sleep.”
As was often the case with actors studying in New York, Brando appeared in a series of Broadway performances, none very successful until he got the part of Stanley Kowalski in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’. The year was 1947 and Brando based his interpretation on famous boxing champion Rocky Graziano, whom he studied at a local gym. Graziano was impressed, and playwright Tennessee Williams even more so.
The 1951 Hollywood adaptation of the play brought Brando his first Academy Awards nomination and promoted him as a male sex symbol.
The film was directed by Elia Kazan, who also cast him as Mexican rebel leader Emiliano Zapata in ’Viva Zapata’ (1952) and the 1954 ’On the Waterfront’. Brando almost refused the part, unhappy with the fact that Elia Kazan had ‘named names’ during the anti-Communist investigations of the 1950s. Brando was already making a name for himself as a rebel, which is why the FBI opened an investigation on him.
As I was saying in the beginning one cannot write about Brando without talking about ’The Godfather’ (1972) the multi-generational saga of the Corleone crime family. If you’ve seen the movie, you don’t need me to tell you why it’s one of the greatest movies ever. If you haven’t, there’s nothing I can say but ‘Go watch it. Now!’
Also form Brando’s mature period, there’s another classic, ’Last Tango in Paris’(1973), highly controversial because of its sexual content, but also one of Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterpieces.
Then there’s Brando’s epic performance as an ex-colonel turned a lethal godhead in the Cambodian jungle in ’Apocalypse Now’(1979), a hallucinatory, often nightmarish movie about the Vietnam War.
Of his later years, there’s one movie that stands out ’Don Juan De Marco’ (1995), one of my personal favorites. Playing an ageing psychiatrist soon-to-retire, Brando becomes captivated by the fantastic amorous tales of one of his patients (Johnny Depp), a troubled young American man who believes himself to be the legendary Don Juan who has seduced 1500 women. The doctor ends up agreeing the boy might actually be Don Juan and helps him get out of the mental facility. The end sees Depp finding the girl of his dreams on a beach, where they are joined by the doctor and his wife, eager to rekindle their own love.
There’s a lot to say about Marlon Brando and love, for he had three wives, two semi-official partners and many mistresses, including Marilyn Monroe. According to the official biography, he had 11 children, three of whom adopted. Unofficially, it is believed he fathered at least five more children.
“I was young and destined to spread my seed far and wide.”
However, Marlon Brando liked to keep his private life as private as possible, which is why he suffered enormously when his family life became tragically public in 1990, when his son Christian Brando shot and killed his half-sister’s boyfriend. Cheyenne Brando had told her brother the boyfriend was abusive, Christian wanted to confront him and accidentally killed him.
It was a broken Marlon Brando who testified at his son’s trial, where he blamed himself for having failed as a parent. His complicated love life and his hectic schedule meant that his kids were often neglected and confused by the complicated family relations.
In the ‘Listen to Me Marlon’ documentary, Brando admits he’d unconsciously turned into his father.
"Christian was burdened with emotional disorders and psychological disarray, the kind of trouble that I had in life. I never tried to be like my father, but one inadvertently takes on the characteristics of one's parents."
Christian Brando got a five years sentence for manslaughter, while his daughter Cheyenne was in and out of psychiatric institutions for the next five years. In 1995, she committed suicide.
The affair garnered so much publicity, one cannot talk about Marlon Brando without referring to the murder drama which involved two of his children - Brando’s impressive career forever tarnished by the mistakes of Brando the man.
It’s hard to say to what extent his family drama was mitigated by the fact that in 1999, at the turn of the millennium,Marlon Brando was included in ‘Time’ magazine’s Top 100 Personalities of the Century.
Marlon Brando died in 2004 of respiratory failure, aggravated by his other conditions, heart failure and liver cancer.
Marlon Brando was well aware posterity will ponder over his success as well as his failures. Here’s how he imagined a documentary on his life would be:
"It will be highly personalized.... We establish that he's a troubled man, alone, beset with memories in a state of confusion, sadness, isolation, disorder...”
Throughout his life, Marlon Brando often felt the cinema and Hollywood did not love him enough, maybe because he was a difficult partner many times. But he always loved cinema and understood it better than many.
"There's something absurd about it, that people will go with hard-earned cash into a darkened room, where they sit and look at a crystalline screen upon images; images that move around and speak. The reason they don't have light in the theatre is because you are there with your fantasy. The person up on the screen is doing all the things that you want to do; they're kissing the woman you want to kiss, hitting the people that you want to hit, being brave in a way that you want to be brave. The audience will lend themselves to the subject. They will create things that are not there."
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