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

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  Pontecorvo’s decision to film Burn! mostly in Cartagena, Colombia, proved advantageous but also produced strife. Intense heat and rough conditions caused illnesses—from ordinary rashes to dysentery—among cast and crew, but Cartagena’s Spanish colonial architecture, as well as its Afro-Caribbean population, offered authentic shooting locations and an abundance of extras.46 Pontecorvo specialized in crowd scenes, and those of Burn! are resplendent: a tumultuous carnival that enables the assassination of the Portuguese governor; a hopeful populace pouring onto the beach to welcome Jose Dolores; starving multitudes stampeding for loaves of bread. Burn! is “perhaps the least condescending film that has ever dealt with slavery,” wrote Pauline Kael, applauding Pontecorvo’s “gift for epic filmmaking” and keeping “masses of people in movement on the screen so that we care about what happens to them.”47

  Playing chess on the set of Burn!, Cartagena, Colombia. Courtesy of MGM Media Licensing.

  Brando’s nineteenth-century British agent is a learned cynic familiar with ideas that move men and committed to none of them. Cunning and intelligent, he subordinates his needs to his vocation of arch manipulator. He has no attachments, displays no desire for women or men, and is skilled with his fists and multiple kinds of weaponry, but he employs them only when necessary at minimum force. When he shoots a young resistance fighter to prevent flight, he aims precisely, producing a flesh wound before interrogating him. Though he drinks whiskey from an omnipresent flask, it is never to excess, and this too is opportunistic—quelling thirst hygienically in a hot climate. While some critics compared Walker to Mutiny’s Fletcher Christian, Brando produced here, as usual, an individual, with unique accent (upper-class Lancashire), carriage, gestures, and walk.48 Walker’s voice lacks Christian’s light smoothness; it is deeper, with a craggy, almost barking undertone. While both are upper-class Englishmen, Christian has the upright bearing and elegance of an officer, while Walker works for the admiralty but is not of it. Moreover, Christian has right on his side, while Walker very clearly from Brando’s perspective does not.

  Burn! was above all a film about historical change, exploring the combination of forces that lead to seemingly inevitable events. In Walker, Brando embodied a set of interests and theories: progress; Protestant norms of rationality and restraint; racial hierarchy, both across and within civilizations (every culture has an elite, born to rule). With a Marxist director and an idealistic actor working self-consciously in a time of civil rights and independence movements, the film’s approach to these nineteenth-century pieties was predictably ironic. Yet Brando discovered Pontecorvo to be a director whose methods were at odds with his talents and politics. Brando charged Pontecorvo with paying black cast members lower wages than whites, and giving them substandard food.49 Their incompatible approaches to character development exacerbated tensions. For Brando, political values and dramatic authenticity were always delicately balanced, while Pontecorvo saw no separation between them, believing a film’s every aspect should validate its overarching theory. “Some of the lines he wanted me to say were straight out of the Communist Manifesto, and I refused to utter them,” Brando recalled.50 Brando’s methods of shaping a role over time, revising script lines, and feeling his way into the picture’s complexities were equally inimical to Pontecorvo’s authoritarian style, which brooked no modification of the director’s vision.

  Yet Brando prevailed, subtly injecting his role as a promoter of commercial interests and evolutionary laws with the human quality of guilt. In the film’s concluding scenes, Walker expresses ambivalence and alienation from his mission. He seems moved by the spectacle of violence he has initiated—the clumsy slaughter of the black resistance by British and indigenous troops. Gazing at a dead fighter he recognizes, he says to the British investor Shelton (Norman Hill): “It isn’t you who pays, or even Royal Sugar.” Then, as he strokes the snout of a horse, “I don’t know. I’m just not quite sure what I’m doing here. . . . Perhaps I’m unable to do anything else.” His elevated chin signals a partial restoration of purpose as he takes the reins, “But I do know that whenever I try to do something, I try to do it well.” Later, in a lather, he confronts a now silent and captive José Dolores, “It wasn’t I that invented this war, and furthermore in this case, I—I didn’t even start it. I arrived here and you were already butchering one another!” His failure at an attempt at rationalization is exposed by his stuttering emotionality and averted eyes. (Italics indicate words stressed by Brando.) These scenes culminate in Walker’s vain effort to liberate Dolores before he is hung. True to principle, Dolores refuses the white man’s freedom, knowing the threat his martyrdom poses to the colonizers. Walker at first seems unable to fathom a man who is willing to die for an idea. Insight comes slowly—that and his accompanying despair soar to the notes of Bach’s Cantata 156, whose tragic solemnity sides with the colonized. Pontecorvo was wise to substitute Bach for a speech to be given by Dolores.51 Brando’s face, a mask of wonderment, conveys all that is needed about the chasm between the two civilizations. Dolores is a man of incomparable nobility whose fierce commitment spells doom for cynics like Walker and the commercial interests he so ruthlessly serves. The end of Walker’s control (and the control of those like him) is confirmed when Walker is fatally stabbed en route to his ship by a black man inspired by Dolores. Despite their quarrels, Pontecorvo never doubted his lead actor. “There are many moments when there is no time for dialogue, and then we need the synthesis of Brando’s acting and his face. When things are psychological, we trust the face of Brando.”

  Some reviewers admired Brando but not the film. For instance, Vincent Canby cited Walker’s “marvelously complex, rueful intelligence,” reminding audiences that “Brando is worth watching under almost any circumstances, and you should enjoy seeing him here.” Joan Mellen acclaimed both: “Not since Eisenstein has a film so explicitly and with such artistry sounded a paean to the glory and moral necessity of revolution. Even had United Artists not attempted to sabotage Burn!, it would be a film deserving wider viewing and critical attention.”52 Burn! suffered from distributors even more indifferent than those for Reflections in a Golden Eye. Pauline Kael in The New Yorker concurred that “the movie was ‘dumped’—opened without the usual publicity,” adding that Burn! “could have been a hit, because it plays right into the current feelings of the young movie audience.”53 Whatever publicity the film did receive tended to be focused on disputes between Brando and Pontecorvo, avoiding its challenging content. To the end of his life, Brando maintained that in Burn!, “I did the best acting I’ve ever done,” expressing pride for the way the picture elaborated “the universal theme of the strong exploiting the weak.”54

  Pontecorvo was a contrast to Brando. He was notoriously inflexible, accounting for why he did so few films. “Like an impotent man, who can make love only to a woman who is completely right,” he confessed, unless a film had to be made, he passed it up.55 Brando was different; commitment to a film or a woman made him exceedingly uncomfortable. When he felt attached, as he did with One-Eyed Jacks and at times with women, he rarely admitted it. Still, there is evidence—annotated scripts, script notes, research files, letters, and books—that for every film in which he contributed substantially (and this includes most of them), Brando could be passionate for a significant time. Moreover, once he was immersed in a film, Brando’s sense of what it needed could be absolute. Whether or not he and Pontecorvo enjoyed the process of making a film together, their mutual respect outlasted it. “If you choose a genius like Brando, you have to give him space for creativity,” Pontecorvo told an interviewer in 1991. “He remains for me the very greatest actor ever to play in movies. Also, he’s a very deep and nice person.”56

  Brando’s admiration for Pontecorvo was displayed in Hollywood’s most meaningful way: He wanted the Italian director for the American Indian picture that had preoccupied him for more than a decade—roughly from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s. Brando’s work on his American Indian fil
m has been unappreciated, partly because the material record only became available after his death, and biographers routinely ignored Brando’s own accounts of his time trying to put the film together. Moreover, process has little relevance in the film industry, which made a magnum opus on the Indians that never reached production an embarrassment.

  Yet understanding Brando requires a grasp of the astonishing intellectual and professional energy he devoted to this prospective film. The project shows his perfectionism, ambition, and sense of justice; the difficulties he had delegating responsibility and trusting people; and the sheer pleasure he could experience in the moment when something had truly engaged him, whether it was a book, a person, a problem, or a dramatic situation. Brando’s Indian film will be treated at length in chapter 8. Its relevance here is Brando’s certainty that the film’s director should be Gillo Pontecorvo, which says a great deal about Brando’s tolerance for conflict and his vision for the picture. Brando had never been a snob; he was moved by Kevin Costner’s movie on American Indians Dances with Wolves (1990) and willing to admit it.57 But he had something different in mind. Pontecorvo’s gift for democratic imagery, his ability to humanize a population in his cinematic narratives, and his passion for expressing the plight of the dispossessed were essential to Brando’s conception.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ANNUS MIRABILIS, 1972

  For Brando, 1972 was a remarkable year. Three of his films were released, two of which, The Nightcomers and Last Tango in Paris, represented the culminations of his political films of the 1960s. The most popular of them, The Godfather, anticipated his late career as a film icon. Brando’s overwhelming cinematic sexuality peaked during the ’60s, and its fruits are visible in Nightcomers, which he made before The Godfather, and Last Tango, which he made after it. In these two films, his most erotically explicit ever, Brando extended his political explorations into the area of sexual politics. Both feature graphic sadomasochism in emphasizing the class and cultural politics of male–female relationships. What makes them more significant is the fact that the place of sexuality in Brando’s work changed after them. This had nothing to do with his personal life, where his appetites persisted unabated.1 But in his subsequent work, sexuality was subordinated to the vocations or obsessions of the iconic and demonic characters he played. Brando finished filming for The Godfather before beginning work on Last Tango in Paris, which explains why he was nominated for an Academy Award for Godfather in 1972 and for Last Tango in 1973. But Last Tango, like Nightcomers, is a film with strong ties to Brando’s political films of the 1960s, which is why I’ll treat it first here.

  SEXUAL REVOLUTION: THE NIGHTCOMERS AND LAST TANGO IN PARIS

  The Nightcomers, filmed at a country house in Cambridgeshire, England, during the fall of 1971, is another Brando film based on a literary classic—in this case, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). The film, however, dramatizes the violent eroticism and mayhem that precede James’s gothic novel, providing The Turn of the Screw with its haunting subtext. Peter Quint, a charismatic Irishman with a seductive brogue (Brando modeled it on landsmen he met at a pub), is one of his great subversives. An anarchic individual consumed with hatred for authority, Quint’s danger is subtly camouflaged in a bulky body, uneven gaze, and voice that never rises above a lilt. With a wealth of information about everything from how to tie knots and make a toad smoke until he bursts to knowing where the dead go, Quint controls the governess, Miss Jessel (Stephanie Beacham), and the orphaned aristocratic children, Miles (Christopher Ellis) and Flora (Verna Harvey), on the isolated estate where he is the gardener. Quint (who dons the deceased master’s clothes in one scene) is unable to upend the class system, but he exercises his resentment against it through nightly trysts of sadomasochistic sex with the governess (when his knowledge of knot tying comes in handy) and daily corrupting of Miles and Flora. A variation on Stanley Kowalski, Quint is a manipulator whose callousness and brutality don’t preclude his affection and need. While Brando considered Quint a “psychopath,” he made him enchanting—whether sticking pins in an effigy of the disapproving housekeeper (Thora Hird) or flying kites with the children on the heath.2

  Brando dominates The Nightcomers just as Quint dominates the estate community, an aberrant gardener planting seeds of destruction everywhere. Brando himself challenged the rigid hierarchy of the British set by rejecting the star’s dining room in order to have meals with the company, which made everyone so uncomfortable that he ended up eating alone. He drew on personal expertise (he owned the 1944 Ashley Book of Knots, which features 3,900 varieties) for the sex scenes and probably on his lifelong hostility toward his father for Quint’s tour-de-force tirade against his father.3 Brando made considerable revisions to the monologue in which Quint tells Miles and Flora about the last time he saw “me Da’.” It is Sunday morning and they’re in the barn. (The housekeeper has forbidden him to enter the house.) His dark tale, accompanied by background church bells, ends with the incompetent father stripped naked and nearly drowned by irate “Gypos” (Gypsies) he has tried to swindle. Critical here is the father’s swaggering effort to teach the son how to make a quid by stealing a decrepit horse, plastering it with glue and rabbit fur to hide its bones, perking it up with a piece of ginger in its anus, and selling it under cover of darkness. The young Quint’s lesson in paternal ineptitude illuminates both his contempt for authority and his need to substitute his influence for that of the children’s father.

  Brando rewrites his part and improvises further in performance, adding ideas and perfecting speech rhythms to reflect Quint’s personality and class.4 A few lines become the following sharper ones: “He spies a big Gypo, comin’ down the back, huge man he was . . . well me dad takes the horse and he walks over to him, oh he was full of himself, you know” [mimes bluster with arrogant expression and puffed chest]. The humor of the scene is all Brando. “Well the Gypo jumps on the horse and he rides the damn thing straight into the water, and no sooner is he in the water he starts turnin and you know buckin and kickin and fartin. I thought the British were comin . . . and the piece of ginger flew out of the poor animal’s ass like it was shot from a cannon. Well by this time me dad, you know, he’s trembling and he’s turnin white as a fish and prayin, oh God, for the first time in his life.” Brando vividly conflates the worthless father and the nag, with nods to politics and religion. References to British cannons; Gypsies, who despite their marginality are better off than Quint’s crooked father; and the father’s spiritual opportunism highlight Quint’s vulnerability: Alone after the events he recounts, he has to face the forces—foreigners, soldiers, the church—threatening a poor Irish boy.

  Class proves no barrier to uniting Quint and the aristocratic children. The three are waifs abandoned when young by irresponsible parents. Quint underlines the point, saying, “It’s time to go to church” in response to the distant bells, confident that the children will not move while he is talking. More important, the once-helpless boy has become a dangerous man whose hypnotic threat is reinforced by the mysterious smile he flashes at Flora, as he demands a kiss in payment for the toy horse he has carved. His smile is sweet and lascivious; whether or not he has designs on Flora, his promise to fix the toy horse’s broken ear is a reminder of her dependence. Such scenes explain how one reviewer could write: “The Nightcomers is a much more impressive piece of acting than his highly praised . . . Don Corleone,” noting how his “charming, fascinating man” with “a potential for violence and evil that is never deeply buried . . . supports the whole film.”5 Even Brando, in touch with screenwriter Michael Hastings years later about a script, reported, “I saw The Nightcomers recently and I found myself pleased with it all.”6

  Brando was nominated for a BAFTA Award in 1972 for Best Actor in a Lead Role for The Nightcomers (competing against himself in The Godfather). Quint’s gift of gab makes his world a magical place. Imparting wisdom through story, he transports listeners, a skill that is inseparable from his sexual prowess,
both limited only by what he can imagine. Michael Winner, the director of The Nightcomers, recalled Brando’s orchestration of the bedroom scene, all in character, as Quint swiftly subjected the helpless governess to his will.7 This is the trademark of Brando’s screen sexuality: spontaneous, unpredictable, yet always deliberate. He shows his personae knowing what they want and where they are going. The erotic excitement for their partners is that they don’t, but they can trust that they will experience passions and satisfy desires they wouldn’t believe they had. Lying together afterward, the governess bemoans the wildness of her lust exposed by Quint. Sex, replies the philosophical gardener, echoes and foreshadows our bodily doom; we are born and die in pain. In his copy of William Blake’s writings, a section of “The Prophetic Books,” Brando marked a description of the imagination pertinent to sexuality in The Nightcomers and Last Tango in Paris: “The world of Imagination is the world of Eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the Vegetated body. This World of Imagination is Infinite & Eternal, whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite & Temporal.”8 Quint, and Paul in Last Tango, use sex to contest that generative dead end, efforts that yield ecstasy for themselves and their partners.

  Paul is another of Brando’s irreverent sensualists. Nearly maddened by grief over the suicide of his wife, Rosa, at the film’s start, he takes solace gradually in an affair with a stranger in a rental apartment. This forty-five-year-old American in Paris despairs about ever really knowing anyone. “Even if a husband lives two hundred fucking years he’s never gonna be able to discover his wife’s real nature,” Paul says in a soliloquy before Rosa’s corpse. “I mean, I might be able to comprehend the universe, but I’ll never discover the truth about you, never.”9 This is the plight of everyone in the movie, from the most minor—the concierge who laments her unfamiliarity with the tenants—to Jeanne (Maria Schneider), the twenty-year-old Parisian to whom Paul will not divulge any of his personal details, including his name. She is casual, viewing the affair as a fling before marriage; he is in control, forcing her to “put up with” ignorance, one of many submissions. Film audiences, which were almost equally deprived, were not nearly so accepting. They filled the void of Paul with Brando and concluded that he wasn’t acting in Last Tango but being himself. Recognizing that such fantasies not only enhanced the appeal of an already sensational film but also his status as its director, Bernardo Bertolucci fanned the flames.10