Marlon Brando, 1924 - 2004.

Simply put: In film acting, there is before Brando, and there is after Brando. And they are like different planets.

Rick Lyman, the New York Times.

In 1947 he erupted onto Broadway as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire under Elia Kazan's direction. His sweaty, bellowing, brutish performance won him acclaim as a stage actor of overwhelming talent; but despite professed contempt for film acting he promptly quit the stage for good in favor of acting. The best-known graduate of the Stanislavskian school of Method acting, Brando trained for his screen debut as a paraplegic in Zinnemann's The Men (1950) by spending weeks in a wheelchair among wounded war veterans. It paid off in a performance of tormented sensitivity concealed under surface truculence. Next he recreated his Streetcar tour de force, again for Kazan (1951), marking the role as his for keeps.

Philip Kemp in the Oxford History of World Cinema.

Is Brando marvelous? Yes, he is, but then he often is... The role of Don Vito - a patriarch in his early sixties - allows him more of the gentleness that was so seductive and unsettling in his braggart roles. Don Vito could be played as a magnificent old warrior, a noble killer, a handsome bull-patriarch, but Brando manages to debanalize him. It's typical of Brando's daring that he doesn't capitalize on his broken-prow profile and the massive, sculptural head that has become the head of Rodin's Balzac - he doesn't play for statuesque nobility. The light, cracked voice comes out of a twisted mouth and clenched teeth; he has the battered face of a devious, combative old man, and a pugnacious thrust to his jaw. The rasp in his voice is particularly effective after Don Vito has been wounded; one almost feels that the bullets cracked it, and wishes it hadn't been cracked before. Brando interiorizes Don Vito's power, makes him less physically threatening and deeper, hidden within himself.

Pauline Kael, reviewing The Godfather in the New Yorker, March 18, 1972.

Posted by dwhudson at July 2, 2004 11:39 AM