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

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  Diestl’s most stirring speech, with Françoise in a Parisian apartment just before he encounters the concentration camp, is among his best ever. Brando later recalled how pivotal this scene was for all his future performances, for it was here that he first recognized that he didn’t need to memorize his lines. “I had just written the scene at the dinner table, and instead of memorizing the lines, I put them on my plate and shaded my eyes the whole time so I could read them.”113 Françoise begs Diestl to abandon the now-hopeless fight, and he replies that he has “come too far.” It was Brando’s decision to put a rotating musical light on the table before him that emits a low, atonal hum as he speaks: “When you are in a hole, filled with your own excrement for days on end, and when you see the faces and the bodies of the men you’ve killed, you change, and when you’re out there like that, when you have to live with death every day, for so long, you have to keep something in front of you, or you would go insane, so I was, I was always afraid that I had just invented you.” (Italics indicate words stressed by Brando.) He delivers the whole speech with his hands over his eyes, slowly speaking in the soft German accent he had carefully learned. He looks up only at the end, to check whether she is indeed real. Brando’s timing here is critical; he pauses, staring, disbelieving still, finally sighing out, “Yeees.” The other actors in the production emphasized how Brando’s work affected their own. In the words of Liliane Montevecchi, “He made me an actress and I was never an actress before, just a puppet.”114

  The Young Lions was a critical and commercial success, nominated for four Academy Awards, despite its controversial subject. While some moviegoers and critics resented Brando’s effort to humanize a Nazi soldier, the majority commended his acting and agreed that it was the film’s “chief attraction.” The praise from other professionals was particularly strong. Brando’s Diestl clearly moved the director Otto Preminger. “You seem to have pushed through some sort of an acting sound barrier, and gone far beyond anything I have ever seen before,” Preminger commented, adding that he lost “all consciousness” that he was even watching an actor and a movie. Stanley Kauffmann, in his review for the New Republic, was even more enthusiastic. The Young Lions was “worth seeing because of Brando’s performance. . . . He has caught perfectly the stiff cordiality, the slightly declamatory speech, the somewhat angular movements, the charm and the consciousness of charm that create another man—Diestl—for us.” Kauffmann concludes: “He now has the opportunity to be the first American film actor to achieve greatness.”115 Brando saved both Kauffmann’s and Preminger’s remarks. But the response that seems to have meant most, if careful preservation of the letter and his reply to it are any indication, was from a self-described “average American housewife.”

  Mary Motley of Detroit, Michigan, thanked Brando for his interpretation of Christian Diestl and confessed that she had often been tempted to indulge feelings of prejudice against the German people. Being a Negro, however, familiar with the pain of prejudice, she had withstood the impulse. She had never quite understood the importance of her resistance until she saw The Young Lions. It confirmed what she had known instinctively, that there had to have been decent men in the German army, because every nation or race is composed of good and bad elements. Brando’s characterization gave her confidence in the sentiment that prejudice against a whole people was indefensible. At the same time, she continued, Brando revealed in his expressiveness in the scene at the concentration camp what happens when a good person compromises his beliefs; he becomes responsible for the evil he has enabled. In his letter of May 22, 1958, Brando told Mrs. Motley he was heartened by her grasp of “the most important themes of my part,” conceding, “I think that perhaps you have understood the film better than anyone I’ve talked with.” He expressed gratitude for her “understanding and tolerance,” adding, “I hardly think you are an average American housewife.”116

  Brando had affirmed the same idea more than a decade earlier in portraying Stanley Kowalski on Broadway: People come in complex shades, never in black and white. He understood that among the greatest horrors of the Holocaust was that those responsible for its worst abuses were human, not monsters. Humans motivated by hatred perpetrated unfathomable cruelty, and other humans out of a sense of duty or indifference permitted it. To claim the humanity of the Germans, even the Nazis, was not to excuse them. By giving American audiences in The Young Lions what he believed was a truthful portrait of the human beings behind Nazi atrocities, Brando asked those audiences to contemplate their own propensities for evil. He hoped they would recognize that the potential for brutality was not confined to specific nations or individuals. Intellectual honesty for Brando was synonymous with authentic acting, which could be far-reaching. And touching a person like Mary Motley, making her think. That was an achievement.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE EPIC MODE, 1960–1963

  The more often a critical opinion is repeated, the more it is believed, no matter how tenuous its relationship to truth. This seems the most plausible explanation for the wholesale dismissal of Brando’s work from the 1960s. Biographers have claimed that the quality of his acting declined over the decade, and that there is very little worth seeing until his resurrection in The Godfather (1972). The fact is, however, that almost all the films released between 1960 and 1972 were profitable and earned the respect of critics. Brando’s films from the 1960s feature some of his most accomplished acting. In them he extended the promise of the 1950s by assuming projects that challenged him aesthetically and politically. His notes and script rewrites reveal how seriously he took these roles, and how much he knew about different aspects of moviemaking, from the technical to the philosophical. Brando’s extensive reading continued to inform his work and led him to use the Pitcairn Island sequence in Mutiny on the Bounty as an opportunity to explore human behavior in Utopia, and to qualify the moral absolutism in his Western One-Eyed Jacks by portraying all the characters as corruptible. Brando remained, as he had been from early in his Hollywood career, a magnet for talent. When his name was attached to a project, the prospect of signing other top actors, cinematographers, musicians, and screenwriters, was enhanced.1 Thus, accomplished composers continued to write scores for the 1960s films: Hugo Friedhofer for One-Eyed Jacks, Dave Grusin for Candy, and Ennio Morricone for Burn! The writers of these years were equally distinguished, including Tennessee Williams (The Fugitive Kind), Lillian Hellman (The Chase), and Carson McCullers (Reflections in a Golden Eye), as were the directors: John Huston, Charlie Chaplin, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Arthur Penn. Brando also appeared with many leading actors: Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, and Yul Brynner.

  More important, his work in the 1960s extended his commitments of the previous decade, reflecting his ideals, enabling him to travel and see the world, and to assume new dramatic challenges. It seems fitting that his two most personal pictures frame the decade: One-Eyed Jacks (1961) expressed his sense of what films could be, and Burn! (1969) was his favorite. Both were positively reviewed at the time and developed considerable followings over the years, especially among cinema devotees. They typify a range of Brando’s performances that are underappreciated.

  A number of these films sought to raise the bar for audiences, by repudiating traditional heroism or shedding light on subjects that had been avoided or overlooked. The most significant of them confirmed that aesthetic values and the obligation to entertain were compatible with the goal of enlightenment. While Brando’s film company, Pennebaker, was created, like others begun by stars of the era, to provide a tax shelter, Brando was most attracted to the prospect of greater control over moviemaking, which he felt should “address issues like hypocrisy, injustice and the corruptness of government policies.”2 Concern for those who were less fortunate and an eagerness to do something about prejudice and poverty influenced the initial projects the company pursued. The Ugly American would explore US diplomatic and military misadventures in Southea
st Asia. The Western, One-Eyed Jacks, sought to transform the genre by recuperating the cultural diversity of the American West and by exposing the deprivation and violence that so radicalized conventional morality.

  Another purpose of Pennebaker Productions was to provide a job for his father. Forced into early retirement, like Arthur Miller’s salesman protagonist, Brando Sr. was by the 1950s living off his movie-star son, who bought his parents a ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills. Neither a good business manager nor speculator, Marlon Sr. by this time had lost significant portions of his son’s earnings in poor investments.3 But Brando’s decision to continue trusting his father as a financial adviser highlighted a dependency evident in the conclusion to a letter he wrote Marlon Sr. about finances while he was performing in Candida with Katharine Cornell: “You’re damn swell to always offer your dummy son help when he thinks he does or doesn’t need it.”4 This was at least partly acting—the son kowtowing to the father in a manner guaranteed to stroke the paternal ego. But to the extent that the feelings were genuine, they would take time to overcome. During the years Marlon Sr. worked at Pennebaker, Brando could behave affectionately, even hugging his father in greeting. But the few times Marlon Sr. overstepped the bounds of employee—opening his son’s mail or firing one of his friends—Brando’s ferocious reaction was a reminder that the son controlled the company and that his resentment over his father’s verbal and physical abuse remained fresh.5 One-Eyed Jacks would serve as yet another reminder.

  BRANDO DIRECTING

  There was no project that Brando worked on longer than One-Eyed Jacks, especially if the time he spent generating a satisfying plot and script is factored in. The choice of a Western as a vehicle for his new company made sense commercially and was also wise from the perspective of his artistry and acting ambitions. Brando was well versed in the genre and intent on stretching its limits with a more accurate historical approach. The strategies he devised for making the most of the landscape—featuring ocean in addition to desert settings, filming on location at Big Sur, the Monterey coast, and Death Valley—served to distinguish the picture. He created continuity between the desert and ocean scenes by dwelling on dust, which from certain camera angles looked like sea mist. A reminder in Brando’s writing on the back page of his 1963 Indian book (he was reading for a prospective Indian film) to use “dust as a characteristic of Indians, one eyed jacks” identifies the deliberateness of the image. Dust symbolized both the life and the death of Indians, as confirmed by a page of “Notes on Indians” he wrote in Tahiti in 1963: “Indian lived dust, slipped on it prayed on it and ate it. Lived it and finally became the dust.”6 Another departure was the representation of the West as a site of cultural and ethnic diversity where Asians, Mexicans, Indians, and Anglo-Americans lived, sharing genes, customs, and diseases and battling over everything else. Brando read numerous books describing this volatile mix of native Indians and Mexicans, black soldiers and white prospectors on the frontier, the dress of citizens and criminals, and details such as how to draw a gun.7 He also read biographies of Billy the Kid, probably including Pat Garrett’s The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid (1882), which described the Kid’s expressive blue eyes and gentlemanly bearing, concluding: “Those who knew him best will tell you that in his most savage and dangerous moods his face always wore a smile.”8 The region was unrelentingly grim: privileging shrewdness and brute strength, nullifying bourgeois ideals.

  An orphan with no surname, of ambiguous parentage and cultural origin, Brando’s protagonist is the ultimate marginal man, on the edge in every community—deviant or law-abiding—making him vulnerable to victimization. One-Eyed Jacks was also unusual in portraying women as replicating the struggles and norms of men to a degree, but also harboring their own forms of spiritual solace and compassion. “Our early-day heroes were not brave one hundred percent of the time, nor were they good one hundred percent of the time,” Brando commented, adding that he had aimed “a frontal assault on the temple of clichés” defining the genre.9

  As the only movie Brando directed, and also starred in, and did scriptwriting for (on every role), One-Eyed Jacks reveals a great deal about his film ambitions. He surrounded himself with experts, from Hugo Friedhofer to cinematographer Charles Lang, who won an Oscar for his painterly portrait of desert and sea. From the point when he began reading and notetaking through the final day of shooting, which stretched into the fall of 1960, the script was unstable. The same was true of the film’s sources, for One-Eyed Jacks was based on two novels, neither of which had much in common with the ultimate film. Pennebaker had optioned the rights to Louis L’Amour’s To Tame a Land (1955), the story of a lonely gunman, Rye Tyler, orphaned at twelve after an Indian raid and then adopted by a literate outlaw whose conversance with Plutarch is superseded only by his survival skills.

  Drawn to L’Amour’s emphasis on California’s original inhabitants, their struggles against the Mexicans and Anglo-Americans threatening their land, Brando gives voice here to the “plight and rights of Indians.” His character Rye is advised not to hate the Indians, for “he has Indian blood in his veins . . . stands on Indian land and breathes Indian air.”10 These elements disappear over multiple revisions. By April 11, 1957, Brando Sr. tells his son in a letter that any lingering details from L’Amour’s novel should be stricken to avoid “contractual obligations.”11

  The credited source, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones (1956) by Charles Neider, a Mark Twain scholar who shared Twain’s passion for the West, was similarly more palimpsest than foundation. Neider’s novel focuses on the pursuit of the legendary outlaw Hendry Jones, or “the Kid,” who is conceived as a greater gunfighter than Billy the Kid. Killed by his former partner, Sheriff Dad Longworth, in the name of the law whose embrace ensures progress, the Kid endures as a folk hero to the Mexican, Asian, and Indian minorities populating California in the late 1880s. His criminality represents resistance to the modernizing tactics of Anglos such as Longworth, defenders of private property and social order. This opposition between a Protestant–capitalist ethos and the heterogeneous figures who threaten it haunts One-Eyed Jacks. Yet The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones seems to have served primarily as a trigger that spurred writers Calder Willingham, Guy Trosper, and Brando to imagine a story and a collection of voices. The similarities between novel and film are few: a bare outline of main characters Dad Longworth, the Kid, Bob Amory, Lon Dedrick; the protracted scene of the Kid’s jailing and subsequent escape; and some phrases (“You bet”; “I’m not hung yet”; “He won’t get any older than tomorrow”; “You’ll get yours one of these days”).12

  There are shared themes, among them the permeable border between good and bad. As the narrator of Neider’s novel observes, “Hell, we never turned. Those things just happened. One fellow went one way and another another and the first thing you knew one of them was called an outlaw and the other was running a faro bank and was protected by the sheriff.”13 Brando’s character, Kid Rio, and Karl Malden’s Dad Longworth appear in the film’s early scenes as bandits who have been together for a decade. Dad has befriended the youthful Rio and tutored him in the outlaw trade, then betrays him and becomes respectable. The father-son relationship is there in L’Amour and Neider, but it takes center stage in One-Eyed Jacks, where it is invested with a rare psychodynamic complexity. By enlarging the theme of thwarted succession—the patriarch bent on destroying the heir—acknowledging it as foundational to the Western, Brando reconceives the genre.

  One-Eyed Jacks opens through a window framing a busy town square, and a caption, “Sonora, Mexico 1880,” which establishes the film as a point of entry into a historical fiction or a fairy tale whose norms, we soon learn, will be slightly fractured. This is confirmed by the immediate image of a bank robber, Rio, eating bananas while guarding the customers as his partner, Dad, collects the money. Tossing the peels on alternate sides of a gold scale, Rio saunters over to a woman who has hidden a precious ring in her handbag, and smilingly takes the spoils
, wagging his gun at her. Robbery is a way of life for these men; their playfulness belies the risk. It is also a means for balancing the scales, readjusting the apportionments of fate. The next scene shows a well-groomed Rio courting an aristocratic lady in her home, passing off the stolen ring as his mother’s. This scene also concerns getting what he can, giving only what he must. His suit progresses admirably, until Longworth appears with Mexican Rurales at his heels. On his way out the door, Rio yanks the ring—an unnecessary expenditure for an aborted seduction—off the lady’s finger. Rio and Longworth are chased to a desert mountaintop, Gallon Rim, losing a horse en route, their arrest imminent. A game of chance with a bullet hidden in a hand decides who will seek fresh mounts. Rio considers that staying to protect the Rim is less perilous than riding, so he deceives Dad by hiding a bullet in each hand. This is Rio’s betrayal. The next one, Dad’s, is far more consequential: Arriving at the horse corral with the gold, he realizes the benefits of going it alone and abandons Rio, who is captured by the Mexican police. As they pass by the corral en route to prison, Rio sees Longworth’s horse and the many others that would have saved him.