Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  The film was faithful to the basic outline of Zapata’s life. The opening scene portrays a delegation of peasants meeting with President Diaz to protest the usurpation of their lands by sugar developers. The final scene, Kazan’s favorite, shows the body of Zapata worshipfully attended by a crowd of women after having been dumped in his hometown square.53 Building the character from physical details, Brando focused on the eyes as the basis for his interpretation. Slanting his lids, he wore brown contact lenses and emphasized the man’s trademark stare, the intense gaze that projected insight and curiosity along with passion for the cause. Zapata’s illiteracy, in Brando’s portrait, was a consistent source of shame for the proud Mexican leader. It serves as one explanation for his aversion to assuming the presidency and figures prominently in his marriage to a merchant’s daughter (Jean Peters), who teaches him to read.

  Brando’s Zapata anticipates Don Corleone in The Godfather. Brando viewed both as traditional men forced into power by the need to defend cherished values. As revolutionary insurgent and Mafia Don, respectively, both resort to extreme violence, yet they exercise authority through a quiet dignity that inspires devotion from their followers as much as fear. Their attitudes toward women, appreciative but dismissive, are similar, as are their loyalties to family and comrades. Both films are bloody. But Kazan knew, as did Francis Ford Coppola later, how to intersperse moments that humanized the protagonist: Zapata playing with puppies just before his assassination anticipates Don Corleone carefully selecting fruit from a street cart before the attempt on his life. Zapata dies and Don Corleone survives to have a peaceful death from old age while in his garden with his grandson. Brando conveys gentleness in both scenes through restraint. In The Godfather, the Don doesn’t touch the fruit but points so as not to disturb the vendor’s display; in Zapata, he is at rest on a bed of hay, his hand supporting the puppy perched on his chest. The peacefulness of the protagonists helps audiences forget that they are gunmen and makes the audience recoil from the violence soon visited upon them.

  The combative atmospheres of these films ensure that their climactic scenes will center on death. In Viva Zapata!, it is the death of Emiliano’s brother Eufemio, played by Anthony Quinn. Brando’s performance here presages his reaction to the death of his first child, Sonny (James Caan), which is perhaps his greatest moment in The Godfather. In both scenes, Brando opts for gestures over words, and they could not be simpler. Confronting his dead brother, Zapata collapses slowly, fussing a bit over the body before bringing his brother’s hands up to rest on either side of his own head. Cradled thus by his dead brother, Brando’s Zapata demonstrates that the need for consolation applies only to the living. In The Godfather, the Don is completely still, his formerly imposing frame shrunken by gun wounds and grief. From his hollowed-out face comes a choked plea to the undertaker: “I don’t want his mother to see him this way. . . . Look how they’ve massacred my boy!” In both scenes, Brando achieves something incomparable through his imagination of how a warrior confronts death—by embodying it and moving on.54

  Brando as Zapata with puppies before his assassination. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

  Brando’s next two pictures, Julius Caesar and The Wild One, might have seemed antithetical to Zapata and to each other. In all three, however, he is cast as a warrior, and the latter two share a fundamental preoccupation with language. Julius Caesar is about the power of rhetoric, which it sees as more potent than sabers, while The Wild One treats a conflict of generations and social types—older upstanding citizens versus young misfit bikers—as a war of words. From youth, Brando revered Shakespeare, committing to memory many choice speeches as part of his high school work and on his own. Anyone who was taught Shakespearean drama in high school, as he was by Duke Wagner at Shattuck, was expected to memorize long passages. Moreover, Brando had superb recall, especially for poetry, dramatic literature, and foreign languages.55 He owned a complete collection of the Pelican Shakespeare and many works of criticism on the playwright-poet, which were among the most valuable of the books auctioned after his death.56 In classes at Shattuck and at the New School, he had opportunities to perform Shakespeare, and he played Sebastian in Twelfth Night under Erwin Piscator’s direction at the New School’s summer institute. As a major actor in 1950s Hollywood, it was likely that he would be asked to do Shakespeare. Brando’s care in evaluating proposals was evident in his choice to play Mark Antony in John Houseman’s 1953 production of Julius Caesar, directed by Joseph M. Mankiewicz.

  Both Houseman and Mankiewicz wrote screenplays and directed; Houseman had staged a Macbeth set in a Haitian court with black actors for the Federal Theatre Project (1935), and an equally ambitious “fascist” Julius Caesar with Orson Welles (1937). Mankiewicz had a reputation for intelligent handling of scripts and actors. The son of German immigrants, the American-born Mankiewicz, who had worked as a journalist in 1930s Berlin, was an idealist and a later participant in the civil rights movement. Mankiewicz was eager to cast Brando but had to overcome resistance from the MGM Studio heads, who were worried that Brando wouldn’t be able to manage Shakespeare’s language. Mankiewicz recorded Brando delivering Antony’s main speeches. The lucidity and resonance of Brando’s recordings erased all worries about the actor’s diction.

  Brando had multiple copies of Julius Caesar, as he did for many Shakespeare plays and poetry books in his collection, but his 1935 Hudson Library edition with light pencil marks and comments is probably what he was reading around the time of the film. It has some revealing annotations. He writes “Brooding Irony” above Antony’s speech to the conspirators, where he announces his own preparedness to die too (“there is no hour so fit/As Caesar’s death’s hour”). On Antony’s major address to the crowd after Caesar’s murder, Brando paraphrases the basic points while adding humorous commentary. Beside Antony’s assertion that Caesar did “thrice refuse” the crown, he adds balloon-size exclamation points; beside Antony’s rhetorical question to the crowd, “Was this ambition?” he writes, “It can’t be.” Next to Antony’s charge, “Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,” he writes, “That blundering old fool.” Brando answers Antony’s question, “What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?” in the margin: “!!Shame” Throughout Antony’s speeches, to pinpoint the rhythm, he adds scansion marks.57

  Brando was able to make Shakespeare’s language authentic by connecting Antony’s lines to his actions and motivations and to the larger circumstances of the play. When Brando’s Antony shouts at the milling crowd, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, Lend me your ears!” the shrill accent on lend gives the demand an urgency nearing desperation. As portrayed by Brando, Antony is a novice bidding for power in the wake of his mentor’s bloody death. He has no personal claim on the unruly horde. What he has is plenty of hubris, together with a belief in the supple force of speech, and he makes the most of his opportunity, successfully rousing the mob. Words are tools to Brando’s self-serving Antony, hence his slightly sinister smile as he ascends the steps following his eulogy. In Julius Caesar, one eulogy begets another. Brutus had allowed Antony to speak, not expecting him to be able to turn the crowd against Caesar’s assassins. With Antony winning the battle, Brando portrays him as eagerly paying tribute to Brutus’s corpse. Antony’s self-interest dictates solemnity as he expertly fits his speech to the demands of the occasion. Though not as rich a role as Stanley Kowalski or Emiliano Zapata, the part is one of the most compelling of Brando’s early performances because of his strong interpretation of Shakespeare’s hero as a master rhetorician. John Gielgud, a veteran British actor who played Cassius, so admired Brando’s work in it that he invited him to join his repertory group in England, an admiration underscored by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, which awarded Brando a BAFTA for Best Foreign Acting Performance in 1953.

  Playing chess on the set of Julius Caesar. Ruth Orkin/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

  Brando as usual was dissatisfied. “It takes someone of Gielgud’s stature to perfo
rm with authority because he has played most of the important Shakespeare roles. But for me to walk onto a movie set and play Mark Antony without more experience was asinine.” In a contemporary interview shortly after Julius Caesar was released to critical approval and popular success, Brando explained that, despite the film’s reception, American audiences lacked the preparation and patience to appreciate Shakespeare’s language. American moviegoers, he concluded, “just don’t want to have to reach.”58 But Brando was not yet willing to give up on them.

  Though some may have believed that The Wild One, made in the same year as Julius Caesar, was proof that he had given up, Brando approached this next project with high hopes. He would be working again with producer Stanley Kramer on a social-problem film, this one about motorcycle gangs wreaking havoc in a staid town. The Wild One was based on an incident in Hollister, California, a small rural community in the center of the state that had been overtaken by a group of bikers. Unexpectedly, the film touched a nerve in the culture, becoming a symbol for the disaffection of American youth and their identification with nonconformists. This was due in great part to Brando’s performance as the alienated Johnny Strabler, head of the Black Rebels.

  The Wild One is about communication, or the lack of it. It portrays intergenerational strife as a problem of misunderstanding. The bikers and the townspeople speak different languages, and their mutual incomprehension results in violence. The motorcyclists are self-styled opponents of the status quo who take to the road as a way of avoiding responsibility and exhibiting their vaguely defined dissatisfaction with middle-class morality. Their lingo—based on popular tunes and bebop, which involves adding O’s to names, as in “Daddy-O,” frequent rhythmic tongue twisters, and the use of terms such as crazy as superlatives—sounds like Greek to the owners of the local café whose corny speech is just as opaque to the bikers. The gang members drag-race to expend their aggressive energy, ultimately finding release in vandalism. The townspeople range from the innocent or curious to the nervous authoritarians eager to put these young hoodlums in their place.

  Brando’s Johnny Strabler is rather passive for a gang leader, behaving for the most part as if he has nothing to prove. What arouses him is authority of any kind, especially the police. His motto, “Nobody tells me what to do,” is belligerent as well as self-defensive. Never the first to offend, Johnny lashes out when he feels insulted or attacked. Refusing to fight until he is goaded into it (by the head of the opposition gang, Lee Marvin’s Chino), he refrains from vandalism or aggression against the townsfolk. Johnny offends by failing to act, ignoring the sheriff’s plea to gather his gang and leave town, and never lifting a finger to stop their ravaging. Because he is their head, their destruction reflects his will. Still, Johnny’s only definitive act is a display of gallantry. When gang members surround the sheriff’s daughter, Kathy, in a dark square, he rides in to foil the impending violation. Johnny and the girl ride off to a blissful union, their bodies merged, the wind in their faces, going nowhere in particular.

  Trouble starts when Johnny and Kathy stop to talk, which creates confusion and distrust. Frightened by his anger, the girl runs off, with witnesses misreading her flight and accusing Johnny of rape. His mute hostility, his inability to communicate with anyone, is a direct cause of his victimization. Because he has actually rescued her from assault by his comrades, the beating he receives from the townsmen is all the more unjust. Kathy defends him, explaining to the police that Johnny is innocent of the charges against him. And he is seen redeemed at the end, when he returns briefly to bestow a gift on Kathy in gratitude for her defense. He gives her the trophy he has stolen at the film’s outset during a community bike race. The gift, like the giver, is tainted, but the hint that Johnny feels grateful for Kathy’s defense of him, that he cares even momentarily what the girl thinks, is sufficient to provide closure to a film that is eager to preserve its protagonist’s likability. Brando’s rebel is never that threatening—striking out only at another gang member, protecting the honor of the local girl, and parting with a shy smile that implies he is salvageable. This is why Brando’s biker could achieve an iconic status that was readily marketable, sending sales of black leather jackets and motorcycles soaring.

  Johnny Strabler could be widely emulated because he represented a highly democratic American-style rebellion as a rite of passage that leaves the social order undisturbed. Still, it would be cynical and inaccurate to argue that Johnny’s resistance is as superficial as the leather jacket on his back, for the film ends with little hope that Johnny will be incorporated into the social order. And the character and film, like other cultural works of the 1950s, helped to lay the ground for fundamental social change. In an interview discussing Brando’s contributions to black civil rights, Black Panther Bobby Seale recalled how liberating it was for him as a boy to hear a major American actor utter such lines as “I don’t make no deal with no cops.”59 The performance inspired future participants in subsequent social movements, when their own rebellions were embryonic.

  Brando observed years later that no one making The Wild One anticipated that it would have such appeal. He also affirmed the affinity he felt for his character’s emotional insecurity and rebelliousness.60 As with his other major iconic role, The Godfather, The Wild One touched him profoundly. His access to that emotional depth produced a character who spoke to audiences everywhere, sometimes menacingly. The British Board of Film Censors, for instance, concerned that The Wild One might provoke youth to violence, banned the film for fourteen years. Brando was himself a rebel, and he would find rebellion to some degree in practically every character he played. The one exception was Stanley Kowalski, whom Brando considered a conformist. Kowalski, Brando observed, “would have voted for Reagan. He was a marine. He would have been a Republican . . . would have thought Joe McCarthy was one of the heroes of the age.”61 Johnny Strabler is the ultimate rebel in Brando’s gallery, but his rebels come from all walks of life and are not confined to the pre-Godfather career. Some of his most dangerous rebels are in his later movies: the anarchic assassin Lee Clayton in The Missouri Breaks (1976), who invents his own weapons and ends up answerable to no one, which is even truer of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979). For intellectually informed rebellion, there is Ian MacKenzie of A Dry White Season (1989), who takes on the South African legal establishment, and the title character of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), who pursues his experiments with a diabolical disregard for scientific ethics. Hostility toward institutions and their representatives, no matter the institution or the representative, was the default setting of Brando and his protagonists.

  This anti-institutionalism ensured that Brando would never become a bona-fide radical, join a party, or subscribe to a creed. His notes in his copy of Sidney Hook’s Political Power and Personal Freedom (1959) are a case in point. Brando’s disdain for the totalitarianism Hook critiques is clear, but so is his resistance to the critique. He questions Hook’s ongoing argument for the superiority of democracy, demanding in a section on the Soviet takeover of Hungary: “Was not the suppression of Hung. what we might do in Cuba if a soviet inspired pure communist revolution had taken place?” Near a passage arguing that well-informed adults are the best judges of their own interests, Brando asks, “What adults, and are they?” and references “The Ford Foundation voting habits.” Hook’s notion that totalitarian efforts to impose blueprints on history seem monomaniacal to democrats leads Brando to wonder: “and the evangelical spirit in western Christianity, what of that?”62

  Brando gravitated intellectually and professionally to the flaws and limits of systems. His hunger to know more about everything was motivated in part by dissatisfaction. At the same time, he was idealistic and, though a sharp analyst of human nature, he was usually willing to give individuals the benefit of the doubt. In many ways, then, despite significant idiosyncrasies, his beliefs were compatible with basic American cultural and political ideals whose violation he was quick to denounce. This helps
to explain his extraordinary influence. He took on roles that captivated audiences because they expressed common disappointments and aspirations.

  ON THE WATERFRONT

  Elia Kazan, who directed Brando for the last time in On the Waterfront (1954), shared his affinity for American mainstream sentiments, but he and Brando were destined to diverge in matters of politics and personal loyalty. In contrast to Brando, Kazan was an enthusiast, which enabled his commitments for periods of time to Communism, The Group Theatre, Broadway, and then Hollywood. Once he became a member of an organization, Kazan devoted himself to achieving success within it—by seizing opportunities, fending off obstacles, and pursuing and developing talent wherever he found it. When he was summoned before the HUAC hearing investigating Hollywood in 1952, Kazan’s main concern was protecting his flourishing career. He had been a member of a Group Theatre Communist cell in the 1930s and knew that his stature as a major Hollywood director would bring HUAC the publicity it had sought by pursuing the entertainment industry. While Kazan hoped to avoid naming fellow members of his Group cell, he knew that refusing to do so could result in jail or, at the very least, the end of his career. From the beginning, Kazan was prepared to act expediently. The political winds, he told himself, would change and he would be vindicated for doing something that was essential to continuing as a director in Hollywood, which he considered essential to his existence.63