US: He was the finest, most adventurous actor of his generation, but Marlon Brando slithered into lazy mediocrity. Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent, assesses a lost cinematic icon
For the first 30 years of his screen career Marlon Brando vividly etched some of the most distinctive - and indelible - portrayals in cinema history.
In film after film, in one calculatedly risk-taking performance after another, Brando raised the bar for Hollywood actors, and while he was at his peak over that sustained period, he was arguably the finest, most adventurous exponent of his craft in world cinema. It is also arguable that no screen actor has been quite so influential on the generations that followed him into his profession.
Even in his prime, however, he did not always choose wisely, and in later years his choices clearly were influenced more by the size of the cheque waved before him than by any other aspects of the roles he accepted.
The one-time dedicated Method actor - who went to great pains to venture deep within the psyches of the characters he played - became content to turn out lazy, rote performances that suggested contempt rather than commitment.
This is by no means an unusual feature of actors' careers, and Brando was not alone in reaching a point where he evidently didn't care any more about the quality of his films, nor about his physical appearance as his once-handsome features collapsed under excess weight.
Perhaps he should have retired after his brooding, enigmatic portrayal of Col Kurtz in Apocalypse Now in 1979, but he had personal, family and financial problems with which to contend. Nor should anyone begrudge him the substantial payments he went on to command for lesser work, given that they were far greater than what he earned for his extraordinary output in his first decade as a screen actor.
His contemporary, James Dean, who started out in movies a few years after Brando, remains a cinema icon remembered as a golden boy, but Dean starred in only three movies and died aged 24 in 1955. At that time Brando, who was 80 when he passed away yesterday, was only getting into his stride.
In 1950, when he was 26 and already hailed as a phenomenon on the Broadway stage, Brando made an arresting cinema debut as a paraplegic young war veteran in The Men. His intense dedication to his craft was illustrated by his decision to spend a month in a hospital observing the rehabilitation of paraplegic patients.
Having received rave reviews on Broadway for Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, Brando returned to the role of its volatile anti-hero Stanley Kowalski in a riveting, incendiary performance in Elia Kazan's 1951 film version. It earned him the first of four consecutive Oscar nominations as best actor before he won the award for the first time, reunited with Kazan for On the Waterfront, as the morally conflicted ex-boxer Terry Malloy, who "could have been a contender".
In between those two films, Brando impressively played a Mexican bandit in Kazan's Viva Zapata!, Marc Antony in Julius Caesar and the leather-clad biker protagonist of The Wild One, in which he is asked what he is rebelling against and he famously replies: "What've you got?"
Brando went on to demonstrate his truly remarkable range, moving with ease from playing the singing gangster, Sky Masterson, in the 1955 musical, Guys and Dolls, to a German soldier in The Young Lions (1958), a guitar-strumming seducer in another Tennessee Williams adaptation, The Fugitive Kind (1959) and doubling as director (replacing Stanley Kubrick) and actor in the 1961 western, One-Eyed Jacks.
That western revealed Brando's strange propensity for wallowing in masochistic roles, to which he notably returned as the beleaguered sheriff in Arthur Penn's vastly underrated 1966 drama, The Chase, and a year later as the repressed homosexual army officer in John Huston's Carson McCullers adaptation, Reflections in a Golden Eye.
By 1972 Brando had appeared in a string of failures when Francis Ford Coppola cast him in the title role of The Godfather, and his boldly idiosyncratic performance as Vito Corleone, complete with cotton wool in his mouth to puff out his cheekbones, was hypnotic. His comeback was sealed when he was voted a second Oscar as best actor for that performance, but he refused to accept it.
Brando dared to follow it with the bravest performance of his entire career, as Paul, the middle-aged American who gets involved in a passionately erotic affair with a much younger French woman (Maria Schneider) in Bernardo Bertolucci's sexually candid Last Tango in Paris, which provoked a blazing international controversy.
In 1976 Brando and Jack Nicholson made an engaging team in Arthur Penn's agreeably offbeat western, The Missouri Breaks, and two years later he struck a benign paternal presence as Jor-El in Superman, before reuniting with Coppola for the epic shoot that produced Apocalypse Now.
Brando's subsequent output was sporadic and undistinguished apart from an amusingly self-effacing performance in the 1990 comedy, The Freshman, and a fascinating, deeply immersed portrayal of a maker of snuff films in The Brave (1997), Johnny Depp's critically mauled and sparsely released directing debut.
To the few who witnessed it, that served as a reminder of just how effectively Brando could command the screen when he tried, as he did so often in his illustrious heyday.
Yet, despite all the depth, richness and versatility of his work, he had become dismissive of his craft. "Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts," Brando once said.