Brando and Kazan change the face of an Art form

When I discovered A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), it was a shocking revelation, a religious experience. Had I never been able to watch Streetcar, arguably Cinema wouldn't be so important to me. The master Elia Kazan wrote a poem on film, just one out of an incredible albeit brief body of work, which includes such titles as Viva Zapata! (1952), East of Eden (1955) and America, America (1963).

The Tennessee Williams play was already a legend when Hollywood decided to capitalise on its Broadway success. Kazan and the entire original cast were hired by Warner Bros., with the notable exception of Jessica Tandy, who happened to be the female lead. However, Kazan defied the system and refused to replace Marlon Brando; so, it was either Tandy or Brando. Vivien Leigh was signed to star as the one household name amongst the bunch of Method actors. Tandy was out. Brando was definitely in, though. And Film history would never be the same.

It doesn't matter that the Academy awarded Humphrey Bogart's career instead of Brando's Stanley Kowalski in the 1952 ceremony, because we all know who truly deserved the highest honors that night. Streetcar features the first modern acting ever realised. In this regard alone, Brando is an artist of the same stature as Flaubert or Picasso. So is Kazan, of course!

12 September 2005

Midnight Cowboy

Midnight Cowboy, Midnight Cowboy
See the lonesome Midnight Cowboy
Once his hopes were high as the sky
Once a dream was easy to buy
Too soon, his eager fingers were burned
Soon, life’s lonely lessons are learned
Hearts are made for sharing
Love is all that’s left in the end

Midnight Cowboy, Midnight Cowboy
See the lonely Midnight Cowboy
Once his hopes were high as the sky
Once a dream was easy to buy
Too soon, his eager fingers were burned
Hearts are made for caring
Life is made for sharing

Love is all that’s left in the end
Love can turn the tide for a friend
Love can hold a dream together
Love is all that lasts forever
Love is all that’s left in the end
Love can turn the tide for a friend
Love can hold a dream together
Love is all that lasts forever

Midnight Cowboy, Midnight Cowboy
See the lonely Midnight Cowboy
Midnight Cowboy, Midnight Cowboy
See the lonely Midnight Cowboy
Midnight Cowboy, Midnight Cowboy
See the lonely Midnight Cowboy
Midnight Cowboy, Midnight Cowboy
See the lonely Midnight Cowboy


Music & Lyrics by John Barry

Cary Grant

The usual self-proclaimed Brando scholars were discussing this quote attributed to Grant on a message board up until Jan 29: "I  have no rapport with the new idols of the screen, and that includes Marlon Brando and his style of Method acting. It certainly includes Montgomery Clift and that God-awful James Dean. Some producer should cast all three of them in the same movie and let them duke it out. When they've finished each other off, James Stewart, Spencer Tracy and I will return and start making real movies again like we used to."

One of them even said that Grant knew those actors were better than he was, so I replied the following on Feb 9:

Brando and Clift weren't both better actors than Grant. Cary Grant just was not a naturalistic actor at all --let alone an ultraneurotic one, like Brando, Clift and Dean were. Grant remains one of the greatest actors to ever grace the silver screen. His craft was pure magic, and he made it all believable and effortless-looking. He was like Gable, he belonged to the kind of leading men you rooted for without any conflicting views, even if he played the characters he did in Suspicion or To Catch a Thief. He was perfect for Hitchcock movies. He was perfect in an ideal way: every guy will always want to be Cary Grant whenever one of his movies is being watched.

On the other hand, I love Brando and Clift and Dean because they remind me of my human condition, of the reality outside my room where I watch their movies on DVD. Grant was cool. Dean was not: and in spite of people going on calling him cool or, worse, the ultimate cool guy, his craft was made of nervousness, angst and self-esteem issues. His best work is about dealing with the real world. Of course Brando was his hero. Johnny Strabler is the original rebel.

Apollonia

Michael did become the evil gangster, full of lies and cold-blooded murderousness, AFTER Apollonia's death. Hers was the death of an innocent, and, poor girl, she was what? 15, 16 years old. She was beautiful and full of life, but she had to meet Michael Corleone. It was destiny, fate. That is why The Godfather is so awesome.

Kay is to Michael a WASP woman who gives him already a feeling of belonging to America and the country's upper social levels. He settles for Kay because he knows her and wants a wife and children but in the way the other mafiosi heads have them.

Even though I don't like Part II that much, I'd agree that the Michael-Kay relationship is one of its strengths. Michael never felt a romantic love for Kay, and it is quite evident that the one time that ever happened in his life was right from when he met Apollonia until her death. If we consider the Pacino screen persona, something similar would happen in Scarface. It was lust (rather than love) at first sight when he met his boss' gun moll Elvira, the way it was fulminating love at first sight with Apollonia. Maybe Pacino is too intense to ever fall in love gradually through time, at least in his iconic roles. However, in Elvira's case, Tony Montana needed her in the way Michael Corleone needed Kay. Which makes this love story (Michael-Apollonia, needless to say) in The Godfather movie and trilogy in general all the more moving.

In the original book by Mario Puzo, the young Vito story is told as fact that becomes myth because of its own nature and relation to time: a gangster story from an historical past. But in the film, the young Vito is a hero of a sepia-colored world which looks strangely familiar not because of its own nature and relation to time, but because the values and principles that Brando as the Godfather represented in the original film seem to permeate everything in the representation or evocation of that world. The possibility of Michael "remembering" that past through his father's character is there. Don Vito was born with a heart, and Michael just couldn't make the right moral decisions. Vito Corleone became the Godfather because he refused to be a victim and instead decided to fight the oppressors, the "bad" mafiosi, and help the victims. Michael was born to be a very bad mafioso, and a pretty successful one at it --the gangster as a professional killer who is willing to destroy his father's family in its own name--, which of course is the irony and the tragedy of the whole picture.

It seems clearer now that Michael was perhaps only able to see beautiful things in a romantic way, but never to get in touch with them in the real world --Apollonia and Sicily were the ideal world, too good to last forever (more so when it belonged to his father's own making as the hero: as if Michael had been transported back to that past and his version of it all). Michael is the antihero obviously, and becomes the antagonist of his own life in Part II: he is so calculating, so cerebral as to be detached from any real human emotions, even his own --yet he arguably remains a human being after murdering his own brother.

Et tu, Scarlett?

Everything was alright UNTIL Scarlett O'Hara, a flawed person --she was still a kid, I know-- but the heroine nonetheless, beat that poor horse to death. At that moment, and despite the very context of the scene, she lost me --and I still had to see the second half of the story. But hey, that's me: I can't seem to ever get over anything like that from a major character in a movie (e.g. Plato shooting puppies as his background in Rebel Without a Cause). Of course, Gone with the Wind continues to be the ultimate epic melodrama, and arguably one of those films that will never get beaten by time.