While Stanley is undeniably coarse from his first moment on stage, “bellowing” at Stella as he tosses her a “red-stained package” of freshly butchered meat, Williams and Kazan infuse the couple’s every word and gesture with joyous passion.8 This makes the arrival of Stella’s sister Blanche, at once needy and censorious (surveying her sister’s cramped, dingy living quarters), an unmistakable intrusion. As the visiting relative who overstays her welcome, Blanche is compromised from start to finish, which is true of all the major protagonists. “There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people,” the playwright explained in the spring of 1947. “Some are a little better or a little worse but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts.”9
Williams worried that actors might be tempted to interpret Stanley Kowalski as “a black-dyed villain,” but with Brando he had little to fear. The actor was preoccupied with human ambiguity. Williams’s diagnosis of his play’s collective social pathology would have made sense to him: “Nobody sees anybody truly, but only through the flaws of their own ego. That is the way we all see each other in life.”10 Brando was an intriguing case of a leading man with a powerful attraction to villains; he played many of them over a nearly sixty-year career, and always with great complexity. (The only exception was Brando’s 1979 television cameo as George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, in Alex Haley’s Roots.)11 He recognized the charisma of those who wielded power or desired it, and the helpless attraction of audiences to such figures. And because he believed that no one, with the possible exception of a Rockwell, was wholly good or bad, he never accepted the dehumanization of villains. If a character were scripted that way, Brando would complicate him, injecting a transformative humor and nuance.
This had nothing to do with the usual explanation for such revisions: that Brando was a typical star with a need to be heroic and admired by audiences. It was rather that he sought the deepest authenticity of character and insisted on educating his audiences, encouraging them to grapple with a work.12 He wanted people to come to terms with their own propensities for aggression, their own fascination with power.
Nothing interested Brando more, if his book collection is any indication, than the spectacle of seemingly decent people subscribing to evil systems. (Next to his bed was a copy of Eric Hoffer’s 1951 study of the mass psychology of fascism, The True Believer.) How did groups become hordes? What made some nations reject totalitarian ideas and others embrace them? “During the McCarthy era, everyone believed the propaganda about the evil of Communism,” Brando noted, and “overlooked the evil of Joe McCarthy, and we were very lucky not to have fascism sweep through the country,” which might have been the case “had it not been for my particular heroes Ed Murrow [Edward R. Murrow] and then some minor heroes like Izzy [I. F.] Stone [the investigative reporter].”13 What seems to have disturbed Brando most was mindlessness, and he struggled against the role of the film industry in furthering it. In his favorite quotation book, The Great Thoughts, Brando highlights these phrases from Hannah Arendt: “Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers,” and “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.” He believed that people could not abnegate responsibility toward society. Morality did not allow for opting out, and it necessitated education in a democracy. He also accepted Henry Ward Beecher’s warning, highlighted in the same book: “The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes. Ignorance is the womb of monsters.”14
In drama and in life, Brando was drawn to ethical dilemmas, dramatic situations that prevented effortless affinities and solutions. Thus, some reviewers, including Brando’s mother, criticized him for investing Kowalski with a magnetism that made it impossible for audiences to despise the character, as they should.15 But Brando read the play carefully and recognized Williams’s empathy for his male lead. Stanley embodies classic masculine traits: ambition, aggression, and the quest for dominance—of females especially. All are portrayed as signs of health: “Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence, dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens.”16
Stanley is a rooster bursting with phallic pride. Williams’s surprise at the advantages of having a more youthful actor than he had expected in the part, noting how “it humanizes the character of Stanley,” seems a common instance of an author overlooking a deep strain in his work.17 Kazan was convinced of Williams’s attraction “to the Stanleys of the world,” and summarized the ultimate point: “You can’t get through life without hurting people. The animal survives—at all costs.”18 The Darwinian foundation of Williams’s play was a challenge to author, director, and male star alike. Williams, and Brando in particular, identified with Blanche’s pain and abhorred Stanley’s violence.
Among the most distinctive aspects of Brando’s performance was the character’s voice (preserved in contemporary recordings of the play and in the 1951 film version): a low snarl at times, occasionally raised to a frightening pitch, it was for the most part soft and modulated by anxiety. The whine perfected by Brando was critical to his reorientation of maleness, for it pinpointed weakness as a motivating factor in Stanley’s need to dominate. Brando’s carefully crafted voice suggested a man full of sexual confidence yet perpetually fearing its diminution. This is borne out in the play’s famous staircase scene, when Stanley hollers for his wife Stella, who has fled their apartment for the flat above, after he has beaten her while in a drunken rage. Highlighting the disparate aspects of human sexuality, Brando conflates the infant’s cry for its mother—“out of which the entire verbal universe is spun”—with the brutal mate’s demand that his desire be satisfied.19 Brando, building on Williams’s words and Kazan’s direction, felt the play was implying that the most powerful sexual feeling draws on various human impulses, especially the most primal ones.
What Brando achieved in this scene—so erotically charged that the ornate ironwork staircase seemed sexually stimulating in its own right—was the fusion of infant and husband. Kim Hunter, who played Stella on stage and screen, reacted to her pealing spouse with a combination of outrage and helpless trancelike attraction, which fortified the interpretation.
Another distinctive aspect of the performance was the way Brando’s physique became central to the play. Williams enables this by giving Stanley frequent onstage changes of dress, inevitably during dialogues with Blanche. He swaps a T-shirt sweaty from bowling for a dry one in the first scene, knots his tie as he threatens her with exposure in scene 5, and removes his shirt before heading to the bathroom with his pajamas in scene 10. Brando milks these moments, linking them to Stanley’s drive for control, as he makes clear to Blanche that this is his territory and he will undress as he pleases. Brando’s Stanley is in perpetual motion—bristling, talking, eating, smoking, pushing people, slamming drawers, compulsively oral, and muscle-bound. Arthur Miller’s openness about Brando’s sexual magnetism would have offended contemporaries, but reviews of the day acknowledged the actor’s physicality, using terms such as lusty, rough and physical, and earthy naturalness to accompany their unvarying superlatives. “It was awful and it was sublime,” one director observed. “Only once in a generation do you see such a thing in the theatre.”20
What seems to have made the brute so irresistible to theatergoers was the sensitivity that Brando gave him. The complexities of the characterization are preserved in the Warner Brothers film version of the play, which Brando (and Williams) preferred to the Broadway adaptation. Brando thought Vivien Leigh, who replaced Jessica Tandy for the film, was an ideal Blanche, and the opportunity to power out a single performance, albeit over many takes, suited Brando’s talents. Still, there are those who remain partial to Brando’s Broadway conceptualization to this day, believing the immediacy of what he accomplished there in th
e flesh, night after night, to be superior to whatever could be done on film.
Stanley Kowalski’s ambiguities as Brando imagined them are stunningly revealed in Carl Van Vechten’s posed photographs from the long run of Streetcar. He has an image of Stanley, probably during scene 4, where Blanche believes she is privately holding forth to Stella about her husband’s “sub-human” traits. In beret, leather jacket over his shoulder, a smock on his arm, lifting a curtain, Stanley stares off at something disturbing, revealed by his wrinkled forehead, mismatched eyebrows, and lips (poised to pout or sneer?). The simple knit sweater, splayed shirt collar, and conventional slacks are those of a schoolboy; Stanley is not quite a man, and this must be factored into any judgments about him. The gesture, with the softest part of Brando’s open right hand exposed by the curtain edge, is almost childlike. But Stanley’s aggression should not be underestimated: His shoulders, enhanced by the black jacket, blend with the dark curtain behind him, creating the effect of raw power. The flared nostrils, broad chest, beard stubble, and above all the complex array of emotions displayed in this single look—self-pity, anger, and obtuseness—expose the potential danger of this man-boy who has hit his wife and will violate his sister-in-law.
When the rape occurs, Blanche has been so discredited by her flirtatiousness and by revelations of promiscuity (with sailors and a high-school pupil) that the play’s case against him is hopelessly compromised. There is no American author who understands more profoundly than Williams the conventional wisdom that because men and women are socialized in opposition to each other, it is to be expected that any given man or woman will interpret his or her sexual encounter differently. Williams extends his sympathies to both characters. Blanche is nervous, on the point of breakdown; Stanley remains the heedless aggressor whose violation of Blanche is unpremeditated. Stanley has returned home drunk from celebrating his child’s imminent arrival. Magnanimous, he offers Blanche a drink as he explains the significance of the silk wedding pajamas he is putting on. The prospect of sex with his sister-in-law dawns on him gradually as he reads the fearful expectation on her face. “You think I’ll interfere with you?” And then: “Come to think of it—maybe you wouldn’t be bad to—interfere with.” The stage direction for Stanley’s speech, “softly,” gives the impending violence a hushed spontaneity, underlined by the following: “What are you putting on now? . . . Oh! So you want some roughhouse! All right, let’s have some roughhouse! . . . We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!”21 He believes Blanche’s resistance is the classic tease, the not-so-prim schoolteacher playing hard to get. Stanley (who would have been declared innocent by any court of law in the land at that time) is the healthy man-boy justified in refusing to take no for an answer.
Stanley Kowalski by Carl Van Vechten, 1948. Courtesy of the Van Vechten Trust.
Brando and Williams’s preference for the film version of Streetcar had much to do with the ability of the camera to capture emotion. While Williams considered it “a pity” that Brando didn’t perform more on stage, after watching Last Tango in Paris he declared Brando to be “the greatest living actor . . . greater than Olivier.”22 Brando knew that an actor’s belief in his imaginary creation was the key to his power, and that awareness transferred readily from stage to screen. “Through his own intense concentration on what he is thinking or doing at each moment,” Harold Clurman observed of Brando’s theater performance as Stanley, “all our attention focuses on him.”23 Brando grasped, more expertly than any other actor of his time, the camera’s potential to exploit that concentration. On film, he said, “The face becomes the stage,” and the eyes were the storytellers. An actor’s lines were far less important than what he communicated with his eyes.24
Members of the National Theater for the Deaf cited Brando as their favorite actor, noting that they always understood exactly what he was expressing, even though they couldn’t hear what he said.25 He conveyed so much of the character’s ideas and emotions, over and above words, aware of how film afforded a vocabulary of image, gesture, and look utterly independent of sound. The majority of Brando’s revisions on scripts involved cuts: Directors and screenwriters who worked with him confirm his editing out dialogue more often than adding in new lines, as do copies of his personal film scripts. Moreover, Brando rejected the idea that there was a single way to enunciate. How an actor chose to enunciate a character’s lines was critical to the interpretation. “I played many roles in which I didn’t mumble a single syllable, but in others I did it because it is the way people speak in ordinary life,” Brando observed. “In ordinary life people seldom know exactly what they’re going to say when they open their mouths and start to express a thought. They’re still thinking, and the fact that they are looking for words shows on their faces.”
The fundamental wisdom of Hamlet’s advice to the players, which Brando quoted at length in a chapter on acting in his autobiography, applied to stage and screen: “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature.”26 Brando’s sense of truth in acting was generally unerring, and the only two people he encountered in his career whose discernment he trusted as much as his own were Stella Adler and Elia Kazan. Although Lee Strasberg liked to claim him as a product of his Actors Studio, Strasberg was never Brando’s teacher, and Brando could be quite caustic on the subject, probably because no amount of disavowing Strasberg’s influence seemed to stick. The term method “makes me curdle with irritation,” Brando said. “Lee Strasberg is someone I have no respect for. He’d claim credit for The New York Times and the Moon if he could.”27 Brando’s relationship to the Actors Studio was completely casual; he went there from time to time to meet women, offer tips to other actors, or attend a class taught by Kazan.28
On occasion, Brando even gave his own acting lessons, as evidenced by an encounter he had with middleweight boxing champion Rocky Graziano during the Broadway run of Streetcar. Graziano tells of seeing a “young bum in blue jeans hanging around” Stillman’s Gym, where he trained. One day he asked Brando when he was going to fight. Brando told him that he was an actor, not a fighter, and invited him to his play. When Graziano and his wife went to Streetcar, they were amazed to find the unassuming actor in a starring role. A few days later, Brando reappeared at the gym and invited Graziano “to an acting school he’s running” in “a crummy old tenement on Ninth Avenue.” Brando was preparing for his first (and last until his 1989 cameo in Roots) television show, Come Out Fighting, in which he played a boxer. Graziano was startled by Brando’s performance. “He’s playing me. Every gesture, every word he says, even the way he fights. . . . It’s like looking in the mirror . . . all that time Brando was around the gym he was studying me. And he didn’t miss a thing!”29
Kazan shared Graziano’s admiration for Brando’s skills. What made Kazan the best actors’ director of the era, a view held by many, was the great respect he had for the craft, an outgrowth of his experience as an actor and with The Group Theatre. He recognized that performances evolve, that several takes are required to get a scene right. He encouraged improvisation, giving his actors freedom and helping them to improve upon their ideas, delighted when their work exceeded his expectations. Like no director Brando worked with before or after, Kazan’s “instincts were perfect. Sometimes they were conveyed in just a brief sentence at exactly the right moment, or sometimes he inspired me simply by being there because I trusted his judgment.” Kazan included Brando in the list of geniuses he worked with in his lifetime, a group that included Copland and Williams.30
In transferring Streetcar from stage to screen, Kazan emphasized the prominence of Blanche’s subjectivity: “Crawl into her with your camera,” he wrote in his notes.31 By doing so, Kazan put Brando on display as the focus of her anxious, desiring gaze. Blanche, like the gay playwright, in Kazan’s interpretation, was helplessly attracted to the person destined to destroy her. In contrast, Stanley and Stella’s natural rhythm of
desire and satisfaction yields a child, born within a day of Blanche’s birthday. Her decayed gentility is replaced by this vigorous new life, identified significantly with his father’s Polish-American blood (“maybe . . . what we need to mix with our blood now that we’ve lost Belle Reve,” Blanche concedes to Stella).32 Yet sex may be liberating, cleansing even when it’s forced, Kazan implies, by juxtaposing Stanley’s ravishment of Blanche with an image of a bursting hose, cooling down the street.
The movie version of Streetcar allowed Brando to develop nuances from his stage interpretation, enhancing his portrait of Stanley’s humor and sensuality. The imitation of a cat screech that Brando improvises in scene 1, and the stroking of Stella’s back in scene 7 as he divulges the sordid details of Blanche’s past, added depth to a performance that could now be seen in cinemas across the country. Difficulties with the Breen Office, Hollywood’s censorship authority, and with the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency, only whetted the public’s appetite. Though the meddling of censors resulted in cuts and revisions (restored in the recent director’s edition), a wide audience was introduced to what Stella Adler had seen from the beginning: “a universal actor” to whom “nothing human was foreign.”33
Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work Page 10