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

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  The success of Désirée and Guys and Dolls gave Brando the freedom to pursue his next two projects: The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) and Sayonara (1957). Brando had enjoyed the Broadway version of Teahouse and actively sought the lead role in the movie. “If Marlon had wanted to play Little Eva, I would have let him,” producer Dore Schary confessed.94 Though Sakini in Teahouse was not Little Eva, it was an atypical role—not only because Brando was nearly unrecognizable in his makeup as the Okinawan interpreter but also because the character was asexual. A philosophical mediator, he is the first of Brando’s comedians, a genre he would try again in Bedtime Story, Candy, and Free Money, with mixed results.

  Brando was a puzzling case of an actor with an extraordinary sense of humor and a passion for great comedians—W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, and Charlie Chaplin were favorites—whose own comic work fell well below these standards of greatness. His library had many books on the subject (including anthologies of wit and works analyzing humor in different cultures). Brando’s sense of humor was the first thing people noticed about his personality, and it was usually the first thing he noticed about other people. On screen, Brando was most humorous when it was least expected. He used it to relieve tension, or to create empathy for a character who might otherwise seem villainous. The prime example is the unscripted plate-breaking scene in Streetcar, where Brando’s Stanley, in response to Stella’s irritated demand that he help her clear the table, smashes a plate with his fist, sweeps it to the floor, hurls a china cup against the wall, then asks quietly, “My place is all cleared now, do you want me to clear yours?”95 Brando’s German soldier in The Young Lions playfully introduces his date to a festive noisemaker with hairlike streamers—“My sister Frieda,” he says—for comic effect on the point of a New Year’s Eve toast to Adolf Hitler. His buttoned-up ambassador Harrison Carter MacWhite in The Ugly American uses his wife’s toes as a letter holder in a soothing bedroom interlude, and the sardonic bent of his sheriff in The Chase alleviates the general grimness.

  But full-blown humor somehow escaped Brando as an actor. Conceding that “I’ve never been a comic actor and am not very good at it,” Brando went on to describe how he was so entertained by his costar David Niven in Bedtime Story that he was often laughing too hard to finish a scene.96 In generic comedies, his surest mode was irony. His direct prologue to the audience as Sakini, where he presents colonialism as a gift—“Okinawa very fortunate. Culture brought to us—not have to leave home for it”—is still amusing, however dated it now seems, as are the scenes where he patiently explains local customs to the dense Captain Frisby (Glenn Ford). The scenes shot on location in Nara, Japan, were its most successful, and an added benefit came from casting Japanese actors in major parts. These aspects, together with the use of Okinawan and Japanese music and musicians, counterbalanced the plot’s hackneyed opposition between Asian shrewdness and American military bumbling.

  Brando was excited about spending time filming in Japan for Teahouse. He immersed himself in books about the country: its language, architecture, plant and animal life, religion, philosophy, geography, and even its art of flower arrangement. The nearly one hundred books on Japan in Brando’s library, ranging from the 1940s through 1995 (with the preponderance from the mid-1950s and earlier), suggest that he was motivated by his own interests to visit Japan and make films about the country. But his interest grew with exposure to Japan, and Southeast Asia in general. What concerned him the most in the 1950s was the political situation. He paid close attention to experiences of colonization as well as types of self-government, and the relationship between language and religious customs in Felix Keesing’s Native Peoples of the Pacific World (1945). On a page about the Buddhist concept of “suchness” (tathata), describing how spirituality inheres in the direct experience of the concrete, Brando underlines the statement—“things are separable in words which are inseparable in nature,” because words can be rearranged. Moreover, the static terms that we apply to feelings conceal that “our feelings are directions rather than states.”97

  Brando put himself on a starvation diet to achieve the litheness of his Okinawan character, studying Japanese and other Pacific languages and mannerisms to authenticate his gestures and speech inflections. Submitting to two hours of makeup a day, he donned a black wig and wore dark contact lenses, losing himself so completely in the role that many left the theater wondering whether he had even been in the movie. The mere fact of a major actor assuming such a part was significant in 1950s Hollywood. It revealed a sincere lack of vanity and a dedication to furthering cross-cultural awareness that was central to Brando’s agenda. Because comedy was not a hospitable genre for him, he accomplished much more on behalf of that agenda in his next two projects Sayonara (1957) and The Young Lions (1958). Both were big pictures, based on popular novels by James Michener and Irwin Shaw, respectively, concerned with issues central to the culture. As an actor at the height of box-office success, Brando was the obvious choice to star in both films.

  Because Brando was conversant with the subjects of both films—Japanese–American relations and the rise of Fascism in Germany, respectively—he played a significant role in articulating their treatment. In Sayonara, Brando was concerned about the accuracy of the portrait of Japan and its traditions. He was also intent on enlightening Japanese as well as American audiences on the issue of interracial romance.98 Having arrived in Tokyo on January 12, 1957, Brando held a press conference arranged by Warner Brothers the next day. It highlighted the importance of friendship and understanding between the United States and Japan and his own knowledge of Japan, including its language.99 Brando’s personal diplomacy, his effort to speak Japanese, and his obvious interest in the culture helped Sayonara’s producers gain access to sites such as the Imperial Gardens and the Takarasuka Theatre Company, which had never been filmed.100

  Brando’s high hopes for Sayonara were offset by concerns about the director, Joshua Logan; the script, written by Paul Osborn; and the plot of the novel by James Michener on which it was based. “Their interracial romance was doomed by the tradition in both cultures of endogamy, the custom of marrying only within one’s own race or caste. In accepting this principle, I thought the story endorsed indirectly a form of racism.” Brando insisted that the “Madame Butterfly ending” be replaced with one that portrayed racial intermarriage as a “natural outcome” of love. This allowed Sayonara to be “an example of the pictures I wanted to make, films that exerted a positive force.”101 Once these changes were agreed to, Brando accepted the role.

  He would have other issues with the Sayonara script. Brando was alert to inaccuracies in cultural norms. He questions, for instance, a scene of a Japanese audience eating at a Kabuki theater: “never eat in public,” Brando notes in the margin. The comment by his character Major Gruver to a leading Kabuki actor that their all-male theater could have used “a few Marilyn Monroes,” inspires a scribbled “gauche.” These two false notes remained unchanged in the script, but he did manage to revise another scene he complained about, where Gruver appeared “humorless” and “false” in badgering a dancer to arrange a meeting for him with Hana-Ogi, the dancer he adores. He also altered a scene he found highly inappropriate, where Hana-Ogi is depicted as staring intensely at Gruver in their first meeting: “false that a Japanese girl should be so forward. Doesn’t look like candor so much as cheapness.” In the actual scene, Hana-Ogi’s eyes are averted for most of the encounter, and Gruver behaves more circumspectly, which is far more effective, culturally and dramatically.102

  Sayonara is in certain respects a fanciful, glossy travel brochure. Yet its detailed appreciation for Japanese art and ritual and its tough political stances—especially its normalization of the cross-cultural affair—enhances its significance. Thus, it exposes the hypocrisy of the US Army for allowing thousands of enlisted men to marry Japanese women and then barring the women from entering the United States, effectively forcing the men to choose divorce or exile. Suggesting
that true rapprochement can only occur when traditional and institutional constraints are diminished, the film depicts a journey of self-discovery for Brando’s character. The conventional son of a military man, Major Gruver has spent his life conforming; though he is dissatisfied, he has no real access to his feelings. His appreciation of a foreign culture and recognition of the limitations on soldiers in love with Japanese women, as well as the oppressive cultural limitations on Japanese women, sets in relief the compromises he has made. As Gruver becomes more emotionally aware, a development intensified by the double suicide of a soldier friend and his Asian wife, he becomes more appealing. The final scene is a classic romantic affirmation. “We’ve been wasting two good lives trying to do the right thing, the right thing for Matsubayashi [Girls’ Troupe], the right thing for my father, the right thing for the military, the right thing for Japanese tradition, the right thing for the great white race,” Gruver pleads, reminding Hana-Ogi of their “obligation” to love. “We live in different worlds, come from different races,” she responds. “What will happen to our children, what would they be?” His answer is a prophecy of American multiculturalism: “What would they be? They’d be half Japanese, half American, half yellow, half white, they’d be half you, they’d be half me, that’s all they’re going to be!” Signaling the new beginning, Hana-Ogi, the Japanese woman who finds it “very difficult to speak in public,” announces their marriage to the press. “Major Gruver has asked me to be his wife, he knows there are many people in his country who will be disturbed by this. I know my people will be shocked too. But I hope they will learn to understand.”

  The movie was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Actor, Best Picture, and Best Director, winning four. Deborah Kerr, who had played Portia in Julius Caesar, found herself in the odd position of writing Brando “a ‘fan’ letter” but “felt absolutely compelled to express my admiration and gratitude for your really exquisite performance. . . . It was a performance of such skill . . . for another of the same trade . . . an unbelievable enjoyment.”103 Veteran actors and ordinary theatergoers commended his Southern military officer, the ace pilot graduate of Princeton and West Point, who embraces an unexpected destiny, marrying a Japanese dancer and taking a moral stand against prejudice.

  Brando knew what he was talking about. He had always been attracted to “exotic, dark-skinned” women, a category that ranged over a lifetime from the Jewish women he met as a young actor in New York to the Hispanic, Asian, and Tahitian women he met in Hollywood and on location.104 Most of his longstanding relationships were with nonwhite women, including the half-Indian Anna Kashfi, whom he married in 1957 (they had met in the fall of 1955 at the Paramount commissary) when she was pregnant with their child. Brando was a visionary who understood that the increasingly global perspectives of average people would help to erode, however gradually, the customs barring cross-cultural romance, challenged in Sayonara.

  The Young Lions was equally preoccupied with issues of prejudice and justice, but it was focused on the past rather than the future. Here, in attempting to educate audiences about the rise of Fascism, Brando played a role almost antithetical to his previous one. Based on Irwin Shaw’s bestselling 1948 novel about the intersecting lives of American and German soldiers during World War II, the original movie script by Edward Anhalt preserved Shaw’s basic plot and characterizations. The idealistic Jewish-American soldier Noah Ackerman (Montgomery Clift), the cynical but good-hearted Broadway producer turned unwilling soldier Michael Whiteacre (Dean Martin), and the evil Nazi Christian Diestl (Brando) fight in Europe and Africa, pair off with various women, and eventually meet in a climax that results in the death of Diestl and Ackerman.

  Brando had no intention of playing Diestl as a Nazi zealot, bloodthirsty in battle, alternately slavish and violent toward women. He had the contractual right to alter the script, which he exercised, vastly improving the characterization and the movie as a whole.105 While the bare outlines of character and plot remain in the revised script (though Diestl is now the only one of the three principals to die at the end), Brando’s revisions were transformative.106

  By investing his German officer with humanity and charm, Brando foisted a moral responsibility on audiences, forcing them to reassess presumptions about the inherent evil of those who fought for the Nazis. Convinced that the time had come for Americans to deal honestly with the horrors of World War II, Brando saw real prospects for educating the public. He wanted The Young Lions to offer the most complicated perspective possible in a commercial entertainment.

  Brando had the first English edition of Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which was published in the United States in 1946. He annotated passages denying that Fascism was the province of a single nation—passages that were directly pertinent to his characterization of Diestl. These included the warning that “One cannot make the Fascist harmless . . . if one does not look for him in oneself”; and again: “Fascism is still being considered a specific national characteristic of the Germans or the Japanese,” because analysts are afraid to acknowledge its “international” presence.107 When he noted that America had been fortunate to avoid a significant Fascist influence, he probably had the Reich volume in mind.108

  Brando also read the massive two-volume History of Philosophy Eastern and Western (1952, 1953) by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the philosopher-statesman renowned for bridging Eastern and Western thought, and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) by anthropologist Ruth Benedict, which centered on Japan in its general exploration of Eastern versus Western traditions. An argument for tolerance among nations, Benedict’s book championed “a world made safe for differences,” to which Brando added: “we do not judge nations on the mistakes they have made but how earnestly they try to recognize the ones they have made and correct them.”109 Another book Brando read and annotated carefully during this period was Gardner Murphy’s In the Minds of Men (1955). Murphy’s book focused on India but claimed wide relevance for its applied-psychology approach, which brought individual motivation to bear in analyzing subjects like the rise of Fascism in Germany or the prevalence of caste hostilities in India. Taking its title from a sentence in the preamble to the UNESCO constitution—“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed”—the book was exemplary as a learned analysis with practical uses (which explained the UNESCO support granted the author), the kind of work Brando especially admired.110

  When Brando arrived in Paris for on-location shooting of The Young Lions, he went to visit Irwin Shaw and was surprised to find that the author had met no one from the production. Explaining the changes he had made to his German character, Brando asked Shaw whether he would have portrayed him in the same way that he had ten years earlier. Shaw reaffirmed his belief in the monolithic evil of Germany. The two were sufficiently cordial in their disagreement to appear jointly on David Schoenbrun’s CBS News program from Paris, where they held steadfastly to their opposing views. At a subsequent Berlin press conference, Brando commented, “The picture will try to show that Nazism is a matter of mind, not geography, that there are Nazis—and people of good will—in every country. The world can’t keep looking over its shoulder and nursing hatreds. There would be no progress that way.”111

  Brando greeting Irwin Shaw in Paris, 1957.

  Christian Diestl is in many ways a classic Brando character: brooding, reticent, erotically charged. Apolitical and idealistic at the film’s start, he recognizes Nazism’s fanatical elements but hopes that they will be superseded by its democratizing potential. As the son of a shoemaker who has had to sacrifice his ambition to be a doctor, given the dearth of free universities in Germany, he trusts Hitler to abolish the social hierarchy that prevents people from rising above their class. The next time we see him, he is a lieutenant in the army, skillfully guiding his men through an exchange with the French Resistance en route to Paris. He opts for wounding a French fighter in the shooting arm, r
ather than killing him, and disputes the brutal work of his unit in occupied Paris. Meanwhile, in scenes that enhance his appeal, he romances two beautiful women—a dark-haired Frenchwoman named Françoise (Liliane Montevecchi), who warms up to him after initial hostility, and Gretchen (May Britt), the seductive blonde wife of his commanding officer, Captain Hardenberg (Maximilian Schell). When his company is sent to North Africa with General Rommel’s brigade, Diestl continues to be a brilliant strategist who dislikes war. Poised on a hillside to attack a British battalion below, Diestl advises Hardenberg to delay until sunrise, when the sun’s rays will blind the enemy, giving the Germans an advantage.112 The turning point comes after Diestl has rejoined German forces in Europe and chances upon a concentration camp, where his worst fears are realized. After listening wild-eyed to the camp commandant’s grousing about the challenges of exterminating sixteen hundred men, women, and children a day, he exits in despair. Diestl’s death is a virtual suicide: He smashes his machine gun, walks unarmed into Michael Whiteacre’s gunfire, then falls facedown into a puddle.

  Brando’s acting in The Young Lions is full of distinctive moments. He makes superb use of objects: the paper horn in the New Year’s Eve scene; the napkin balls he tosses into a wineglass at the sidewalk café while impatiently awaiting the French girls. He locates the latent drama in the smallest actions—shaking the wine Françoise has overturned, in an angry outburst, off his black leather gloves; the martial click he gives his boot heels as he bows in greeting Gretchen Hardenberg; pouring a drink for Gretchen, deciding it is too much, and returning half to the bottle. Brando’s evocation of riding a motorcycle in the desert while half asleep is a considerable feat—the rocking motion, the lids drooping as he brushes sand from his eyes. Equally striking is the anguish on his face as he watches a one-legged boy on crutches struggle over a log. So much of what Brando conveys is silent, given his belief in the difficulty of articulating in words the crushing impact of war on soldiers as well as civilians, and of cultivating empathy in American audiences for German suffering.