Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1954) (© photofest)

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1954: The Wild One: Marlon Brando

Brando enters the sunlit café in Nowheresville, USA. He saunters to the counter, whistling and glancing about, slowing peeling off his gloves. He wears a leather jacket with his name, “Johnny,” neatly stitched on the front.¹ A second-place trophy for motorcycle racing dangles like costume jewelry from his arm, a trinket that had been heisted by one of the members of his gang, the Black Rebels. He exudes bravado, tempered by undercurrents of turmoil and weakness. Time passes, as if in slow motion, until the young woman behind the counter breaks the silence, inquiring what this beleathered mirage of a biker would care to order. “I’d like a bottle of beer,” he replies, with an accent that is vaguely southern and definitely odd.

The waitress, Kathy Bleeker, a niece of the owner and daughter of the ineffectual town sheriff, informs Johnny that beer can only be served in the bar section, a shuffle of feet away. So Brando must move himself again. He interrupts the short journey to pop a nickel into the jukebox, and he begins to snap his fingers to the music, in a private reverie. Then comes a cat-and-mouse game, as he pulls the coin for the beer away from Kathy when she reaches for it. Brando eschews the politeness of a glass to drink the beer from the bottle. Additional glances are directed at the waitress; it is unclear whether Johnny is sizing her up sexually or regarding her as an alien species.² The silence and gestures of the scene only end with the intrusion of chaos from the street—a car accident caused by his band of thugs. Johnny will soon impose momentary order through his quiet, menacing authority.

Later in the film, while the gang carouses in the crowded bar, a local asks Johnny what he’s rebelling against. His now famous answer, curt and cutting is, “Whaddya got?”³

As much as John Cage, Brando was a master of eloquent silences.⁴ Like Rauschenberg, he was a devotee of gestures. He inscribed himself with signatures from the emerging New Sensibility. He craved a style of acting that was vibrant and spontaneous—unbeholden to staid expectations. Gender distinctions sagged under Brando’s subtle assault. His acting was a form of what Susan Sontag desired, “an erotics of art”—each gesture pointing toward a potential volcanic eruption of sexuality. Brando sought a wide range of experiences, refusing to bow to the expectations of Broadway and Hollywood. And he made himself, both in his life and work, an exemplar of rebellion. There was also an aura of camp that surrounded Brando’s performances and regalia.⁵

Consider the motorcycle jacket he wore in The Wild One. It was spanking, Sunday-best new, summing up a style, at once rebellious and ersatz. As rebellion, the jacket symbolized a sharp break from middle-class proprieties. As camp it was subversive of those same expectations. “Clothes are our weapons,” wrote Angela Carter, “our challenges, our visible insults.” If so, then the leather jacket that Brando brandished—along with his smirks and sneers—constituted “visible insults” that teenagers ate up.⁶

Brando almost made a fetish (camp or otherwise) of welled-up sensitivity in his acting. In a marvelous, improvised scene in On the Waterfront, Brando, in the role of Terry Malloy, strolls on a wintry day through a city park with a young woman, Edie, played by the angelic Eva Marie Saint. He is desperately trying to connect with her, out of both attraction and guilt over his responsibility for the death of her brother. When his words emerge, they are mumbled or hesitant. Time seems unbearably suspended. He achingly takes out a stick of gum, slowly unwrapping it and failing to offer a piece to his companion. Later, Edie drops a dainty glove. With brilliant improvisation, Brando picks it up, but he does not return it immediately. Instead, he absentmindedly plays with it, smoothing out the fingers. At one point, he puts the glove on his own hand, a gesture that feminizes his character, a morally challenged ex-boxer. Elia Kazan, the film’s director, claimed, “I didn’t direct that; it happened.”⁷ Malloy tells Edie about how the sisters of the Catholic school he had attended used to whack him. Rather than resentment and hatred, a puppy-dog look graces Brando’s face; emotions at this point are subdued, kept under lock and key.

The year 1954 was a very good one for Brando. Six months after The Wild One had faded from screens, On the Waterfront opened at the end of July. Reviews about Brando’s performance were glowing: “A shatteringly poignant portrait,” announced the New York Times.⁸ A cover story about the enigmatic actor appeared in Time magazine in the fall, and the next year Brando garnered an Oscar for his depiction of Terry Malloy, who “could’ve been a contender.”

According to Time, Brando could “vanish into the character” he portrayed “like a salamander into stone—or a tiger in the reeds.”⁹ The Wild One and On the Waterfront did not make Brando a star; film stardom had come to him earlier (“the untamed acting prodigy”), when he recreated his Broadway role of Stanley Kowalski in the film A Streetcar Named Desire, based on the play by Tennessee Williams, which premiered in 1951.¹⁰ Brando tapped into Stanley’s primitive, rough-hewn nature, dripping with the ambivalent sweat of masculine power and impotency. As with most of his great roles, Brando endowed Stanley with weaknesses, with an almost childish need for Stella—culminating in his now famous guttural cry: “Stella! Stella!” As Brando recognized, in person, he said, “I was the antithesis of Stanley Kowalski.”¹¹

All was not garlands, however, for the thirty-year-old Brando. Unlike most of his contemporaries, who played ball with the press corps and gossip mongers, Brando was openly disdainful of celebrity, which, of course, brought him ever greater celebrity. It became de rigueur for articles about Brando to detail his manner of dress. Could a self-respecting actor traipse around publicly in soiled blue jeans and T-shirt? Could the public cotton to an actor who reportedly belched in public and scratched his private parts? Could the public accept an actor who chose to live in squalid conditions and kept a pet raccoon (named Russell)?¹² If the traditional Hollywood expectations of style demanded elegance and a certain haute glamour, then Brando defied them, gleefully.

Even more shocking were his interviews. Reputations were made—and broken—by a powerful coterie of gossip columnists. Walter Winchell, Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, and others served as guardians of the Hollywood tradition of glamour. During the Red Scare years, they acted as sentinels on the lookout for any sort of radical political activity, on the screen (pro-Communist subplots), in the credentials of actors and writers, and in the private lives of all connected to the entertainment industry. “Every actor,” Brando later noted, “was expected to butter up the columnists” and toe the line. He generally refused.¹³

In a column, “Hollywood Shaken by Nonconformity of Marlon Brando,” Hopper repeated the standard critique of Brando’s poor manners and general grunginess. He was, as someone had put it, “a grubby Peter Pan.”¹⁴ Yet Brando’s sex appeal and smile were sufficient to charm even Hopper; she admitted that Brando had integrity and that his nonconformity was genuine (and not, apparently, tied to any political agenda). Louella Parsons, an acid writer and wearer of outrageous hats, in contrast, resisted Brando’s charm and talent. Brando, she wrote, has “the manners of a chimpanzee, the gall of a Kinsey researcher, and a swelled head the size of a Navy blimp, and just as pointed—as far as I’m concerned he can ride his bike off the Venice pier.”¹⁵ Hollywood taste mavens Sheilah Graham and Faye Emerson had suffered through his interview shenanigans of yawning, dozing, mumbling, and turning the table by posing questions to interlocutors.¹⁶ The ultimate interview disaster occurred in 1956, when Brando was filming Sayonara in Japan, relaxed enough by drink to speak openly with Truman Capote.¹⁷ Although a sensitive side was revealed in the interview, Capote depicted Brando as a brooding “monologuist.” But one thing Brando got across in this interview was his disdain for the Hollywood system and its “bitch-goddess” of financial success. “The only reason I’m here [doing a film],” Brando confided, “is that I don’t yet have the moral courage to turn down the money.”¹⁸

In his personal life, however, Brando had the courage to follow his sexual convictions. Time magazine quoted a producer about him: “He’s a walking hormone factory.” Apparently, Brando was blessed, or damned, with a voracious appetite for sex. Luckily, he was a sexual hunter whose great magnetism impelled many to happily lie down before him. In the early years, he was beautiful, almost beyond imagination. The sensuous lips, the wide face and brooding smile, the extreme handsomeness made more bearable by the sloping broken nose were joined in Brando with a well-muscled body (he lifted weights and sparred often). The power was apparent but not overstated—a hint of pudginess remained that made him less threatening. Although he bedded many starlets, it was reported that he preferred young women who were waitresses, salesgirls, or from “exotic” backgrounds. In 1954 Rita Moreno, then at the start of her career, swooned to Brando’s allure. He was, she recalled, “a sensitive colossus,” a lover of great quality, “a walking A-bomb” when it came to the seduction of women. There was, she realized, a compulsive quality to his conquests, an almost childish need for love driving him forward.¹⁹

There was, however, in his personal life and on the screen, a sexual aura that challenged traditional ideals of heterosexual masculinity. The postwar years, as many historians have pointed out, were a period of gender uncertainty. Some analysts bewailed the feminization of the American male, as captured in one scene from Rebel without a Cause where an ineffectual father wearing an apron proves unable to offer his son a sufficiently paternal role model. Thanks to the Kinsey Report, the presence of homosexuality in American culture was revealed. But it was not applauded, as the government slapped down anyone considered any shade of pink. While earlier models of masculinity continued to abound (consider John Wayne), they seemed almost camp in their excess of testosterone. A host of film stars, led by Brando, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift, came upon the scene to present new, more nuanced models of male behavior that were rebellious and subversive—and hard to ignore. In his personal life, Brando gave off whiffs of unconventional sexual behavior, despite his oft-proclaimed macho aspects. Moreno remembered that Brando was fond of dabbing himself with Vent Vert, a woman’s perfume. It was rumored that Brando was open to various homosexual experiences.²⁰

The early 1950s was a perfect time for an actor to present himself as sexually charged yet gender-ambivalent—a hunk and a vulnerable individual. The Kinsey reports on human sexuality (the second volume, on women, had come out in 1952) recorded an American populace far more sexually active and varied in its sexual tastes than previously imagined by the heterosexual majority. Many rejected Kinsey’s findings out of hand, prattling about its database (interviews with convicts). For instance, literary critic Lionel Trilling worried that Kinsey’s conclusions reduced the complexity of relationships and love to social-scientific jargon. Further fears about the state of American popular culture were sounded when psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published his well-meaning but overwrought book The Seduction of the Innocent (1954); Wertham argued that gory violence and overt sexual content in comic books were warping a generation of adolescents. The United States Congress listened and concurred. The comic industry followed meekly in order to avoid sanctions; they cleaned house and started their own system of internal policing of content and graphics.²¹ Yet the culture continued to be fascinated by the sexually unusual.

In February 1953, Christine Jorgenson, an ex-GI formerly known as George William Jorgensen Jr., returned to the United States after having undergone operations and taken hormones to transition from a man to a woman. She fascinated the public, calling into question gender boundaries that had previously largely been sacrosanct. Playboy debuted at the end of 1953, quickly becoming a palatable magazine that combined pictures of female nudes, serious literature, and a philosophy of freedom, especially when it came to sex and consumerism. Marilyn Monroe, its first centerfold, was already well positioned, thanks to two films from 1953, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, as a voluptuous and seductive presence. She was upfront about her sexuality (how could it be ignored?), combining it with an innocence and humor that proved hard to resist. Sexuality, in all of its varieties, was beginning to bloom in public, although this should not be confused with its entering into the mainstream.²²

America seemed to be awakening from a slumber in other ways, too. The overall economy was booming (with a growth rate for the decade at 19.1 percent). Televisions sold like hotcakes. Indeed, by 1956, twenty thousand televisions a day were being sold in the United States. By 1960, the land was home to fifty million sets.²³ The May 1954 United States Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka declared unanimously that it was unconstitutional—at least in principle—to have one set of facilities for whites and another for African Americans, giving a shot in the arm to advocates of ending racial discrimination—“with all deliberate speed.”²⁴ In June 1954, Joseph McCarthy, finally overplayed his hand and met his match in lawyer Joseph Welch, who wondered aloud if the Senator had any decency in his attacks on individuals innocent of any crimes of treason and betrayal. Six months later, the Senate voted 67–22 to censure McCarthy, effectively bringing an end to his four-year reign of terror against mainly innocent Americans. It had begun in 1950 with a theatrical speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, when he claimed to possess a list of known Communist infiltrators in the United States government, a list that McCarthy mysteriously failed to share with the American public or appropriate investigative agencies.

This is not to say that anxieties about homosexuality and Communism at home ended instantly, nor that Cold War tensions had burned out by 1954. The high stakes of the Cold War continued to play out whenever the United States tested a new, ever more immense H-bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific and when the lagging-behind Soviets finally detonated a bomb more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima (see chapter 11). Secretary of State John Foster Dulles believed that the only way to avert nuclear war was through what he called “massive retaliatory power,” a phrase which, unsurprisingly, did little to quell fears of an atomic holocaust. The defeat of the French colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam inaugurated American intervention in the area, as Eisenhower upheld American responsibility to halt Communism in Asia, lest the nations there fall like a row of dominoes.²⁵

Brando caught these changes and anxieties brilliantly in two film roles of 1954. The biker Johnny presents himself with macho swagger, refusing to observe middle-class proprieties, more than willing to punch it out with a rival gang leader, and buzzing around the hive of waitress Kathy. But it is clear that his posturing hides an inner core of sensitivity. He drawls, “Why don’t we go out and have a ball?” to Kathy in The Wild One. Her notion of a good time is a picnic, a scenario that he ridicules as “too square” and “cornball.” Of course, over time, her resistance to Brando is worn down by her own rebellious spirit and his hidden gentleness. After Kathy is surrounded by sexually menacing bikers, Johnny, as a black knight on his motorcycle steed, saves her. Alone with Kathy in the countryside, he pulls her toward him for a passionate kiss; accordingly, she falls into his arms like a rag doll, too tired, she claims, to resist. Despite the power that Johnny has over her, he does not abuse it. In fact, he cannot violate her innocence. At one point, she realizes, “You’re afraid of me.” Kathy turns the table on Johnny, to the point of fondling his motorcycle and cooing that it “feels good.” Johnny is now the frightened square: “I’m gonna leave.”

In On the Waterfront, Brando’s Terry Molloy is a mixture of brute and baby. As director Elia Kazan remarked, “Mature and adolescent at the same time.”²⁶ Terry’s background as a fighter—with strange eyeshadow (Brando often did his own makeup or made revisions) somehow supposed to indicate scar tissue—and his connections to the waterfront mob, along with his crude manners, place him firmly in the jungle among the beasts.²⁷ Although he can erupt with violence and in a bruising way take Edie into his well-muscled arms, it is clear, too, that he has a gentleness, a sexual hesitancy when in her presence. Flash back to the glove scene: it was risky because it coded Brando as feminine. Identity was becoming less defined, more fluid in the postwar period—and Brando’s performances made that apparent on the screen.²⁸ Along with Montgomery Clift and James Dean, Brando was one of the actors who, in the words of critic Graham McCann, showed onscreen that they were “unsure of their masculinity.”²⁹ Brando tempted the fates for the artistic grand slam, bringing out the feminine side of his character, Terry’s edgy weaknesses as much as his brutal aspects in order to mine complexities, to resist reduction.³⁰

It worked in the glove scene and in others. Consider how Terry Malloy caresses and cares for his pigeons on the rooftop or how he frets about his moral culpability in fingering someone for mob violence and later on his social responsibility to testify before an investigative committee. Terry has a lot on his plate, and Brando magnificently captures the full range of emotions on the menu.

In these films Brando played characters that are both givers and takers of violence. In The Wild One, his fighting prowess is demonstrated when he beats up a rival biker, played by the imposing figure of Lee Marvin. But later in the film, when the townsfolk rebel against the bikers and become convinced that Johnny has violated Kathy, they beat him up. In a chaotic moment, he escapes, showing not only his own physical hurt—his motorcycle is damaged as well—but his emotional pain, as he wipes tears from his eyes. In On the Waterfront, we know that Terry was a talented fighter, probably more of a brawler than a stylist. One on one, he proves able to beat up Johnny Friendly (the corrupt union leader, played in hulking fashion by Lee J. Cobb). But victory is snatched from him—as it was years earlier when Friendly ordered Terry to throw a fight that he could easily have won and that would have made him a “contender.” A bunch of Friendly’s goons, played by former prizefighters whose faces look like they have been run over with a tractor, join the fight, brutally beating Terry. Thanks to the pleadings of a priest and the ministrations of Edie, Terry manages to rise and stagger forward, to lead the workers—if not to certain victory, then, in a paean to the power of the individual to battle corruption, at least at the Hoboken dockside.

Analysts of On the Waterfront often battle over the film’s political meaning. Was it, as Kazan and scriptwriter Budd Schulberg claimed, simply an exposé of corruption on the docks? Or was it a defense on their part for bowing to name associates to the House Un-American Activities Committee—in sum, a rationale for turning on one’s friends when they presumably represented a threat to the well-being of a larger community? Was the film a work of inspired realism, with marvelous attention to setting, details, and atmosphere, or something of a clunker thanks to overused and simplistic religious symbolism? Whatever the intentions for the film, Brando owned it with his magnificent portrayal of Terry Malloy. In the words of film critic Richard Schickel, “By the end of the film one didn’t really give a damn about what the film was saying”; one simply delighted in Brando.³¹

A new style of acting was emerging, one that was sometimes more daring, thanks to competition from television and to the slowly weakening power of Production Code censorship. By the 1940s, method acting had begun to transform both stage and screen. In the view of film historian Leo Braudy, the method approach was perfectly suited to postwar America, since it rejected the authority of language (especially classical rhetoric) and reason in favor of emotion and gesture; it was about tapping into reservoirs of emotion in an age when instrumental reason hovered like a menacing cloud over humanity.³²

The method school of acting traced its roots back to Constantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor and director who developed a system for acting that was popularized by Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler in New York City. Brando’s favorite director, Elia Kazan, had been trained in the method approach. But the influence and meaning of Stanislavski’s approach was murky and contested. Adler, the daughter of a famous Yiddish actor, and an actress in her own right, praised strict adherence to the text of the play or film. She maintained that an actor must understand the text (which was also the position of Erwin Piscator) and time period, as well as the role, to strive for a heightened realism.³³ In her thespian bible, The Art of Acting, she instructed actors, “You’re not speaking to the world in your own voice. You’re speaking in the voice of an author who matters to the world, who’s changed the world.” The responsibility of the actor, then, was to prepare the scene on the stage of the imagination and then to make it truthful when acted.³⁴ But Brando, clearly, did not follow this imperative. He improvised without blushing. In some ways, his respect was greater for Adler as a person (she had been very helpful to him early on in his career) than as a theorist. Adler admired Brando’s ability to call up emotions. With Brando, most of it (“seven-eighths”) remained “underneath,” so that when it exploded in acting, it became monumental—and controlled.³⁵

Adler, he later wrote, taught him to examine his “emotional mechanics.” Before Adler’s training, according to Brando, actors had played themselves, writing their own personalities onto the role. Now the imperative had become to “experience a character’s feelings and emotions.”³⁶ Were such “feelings and emotions” the same as Adler’s respect for the text? Or did they constitute a more open sea of possibility, wherein a creator such as Brando could develop a new sensibility? Actors needed to become receptive voyeurs, scooping up experiences and observations, and then transferring them to their roles. Brando readily admitted the pleasure he took in watching others, taking mental notes of how individuals spoke and moved in real life—with mumbles and stutters rather than with fluency, with nervous tics and affectations. As he once explained, “Actors have to observe, and I enjoy that part of it… . They have to know how much spit you have in your mouth, and where the weight of your elbows is.”³⁷

When the role demanded it and the spirit moved him, Brando could be obsessive in his preparation. Before filming The Men (1950), a drama about wounded veterans in which his character is confined to a wheelchair, Brando spent difficult weeks in a veterans’ hospital learning how to do everything as if he were himself incapacitated. Yet on occasion he loyally followed Adler’s admonition about worshipping words. Brando said he had played Kowalski as “a compendium of my imagination, based on the lines of the play.” “I created him from Tennessee [Williams]’s words.”³⁸ There is a wonderful tension, like that enunciated by Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in this notion of being true to the script and yet creating out of it something new and original.

Brando’s style of acting, in fact, owed more to Lee Strasberg’s method style. Here the key concept was “affective memory.” According to Strasberg, who helped to train such actors as Shelley Winters, Eli Wallach, and many others, the essence of good acting was drawing upon one’s own emotional resources. Thus, the actor reached far into personal memories of a childhood hurt, for example, which was then translated into the emotional rhythms of the character being portrayed. Less important than the sanctity of the text was emotional realism, the inner and deeper truths to be communicated. Since emotions were rarely fluid and easily verbalized at their core, the actor summoned them forth, in part, through gesture and stammering, by jerkiness and mumbling, and by beguiling moments of improvisation.

Improvisation was a particular talent of Brando’s, well displayed in both The Wild One and On the Waterfront. The entire production of The Wild One had been plagued with problems—a censored script, fears that the film would celebrate nihilism, and a director that was barely engaged with the production.³⁹ The original idea for the film grew out of a real incident that had occurred on July 4, 1947, in Hollister, California, when a gang of bikers rioted. Producer Stanley Kramer saw the tale as a cautionary one about how society was failing to curb forces that led to dissatisfaction. The film, in typical Kramer style, was against repression and in favor of understanding the sources of social rebellion.⁴⁰ Although the film now seems a tired and tame period piece, at the time of its showing it was quite daring, in part because it depicted a segment of the townsfolk as vigilantes, venting their rage on innocent Johnny. The film concluded with Johnny and his gang—at the behest of an imposing commander of the state troopers—forced to leave town in a cloud of motorcycle dust, without being convicted of any crimes. To satisfy film executives and censors, the film opened with a solemn, almost comical Brando voice-over about the social challenge presented by lost, angry young men such as Johnny.⁴¹

Disgusted with the script and lack of directorial passion, Brando decided to improvise and worked wonders via his silences, hesitations, and mumbles: people “are looking for words [and it] shows on their faces.”⁴² This often threw off the timing of fellow actors. Neophyte actress Mary Murphy, who played Kathy, barely knew how to respond to Brando’s glares, silence, and unrehearsed effusion. Years before, veteran actor Paul Muni had been so frustrated with Brando’s peculiar timing that he said Brando “has pauses you could drive a truck through.”⁴³ But Kazan remarked that Brando’s silences and pauses mimicked the thought process of others and indicated that he was thinking himself into a mood or sensibility, followed unerringly, it seemed, by just the right gesture. According to Kazan, however, Brando’s gestures and silences were “often more eloquent than the lines he had to say.”⁴⁴ Grabbing at a coin on the bar, twirling the trophy, tapping on the counter, and drumming along to the music were, no doubt, ad-libs. But they were also nods to the affectation and style of the bikers that he had hung out with in preparation for the role. Authenticity, it seemed, came via research and listening to one’s own emotions and instincts.

This ability to sink into a role, to appear effortless in his acting and at ease with his body, made Brando a powerful presence. And it helped that Brando identified with Johnny’s inchoate rebellion. “It seemed perfectly natural for me to play this role,” Brando stated. “I related to Johnny, and because of this, I believe I played him as more sensitive and sympathetic than the script envisioned… . He was a rebel, but a strong part of him was sensitive and tender.”⁴⁵

Brando’s improvisation reached its apex in the famous taxi scene in On the Waterfront. The scene—as written by Schulberg, a fine writer with a strong knowledge of boxing and investigative reporting on waterfront corruption—called for Terry’s older, mob-connected brother, Charley, played by Rod Steiger, to threaten Terry with a pistol if he refused to stay mum before a commission investigating waterfront organized crime. Brando balked. He felt that the love (and guilt) that the older brother had for Terry made brandishing a gun unrealistic, emotionally tinny. As revised—“changing it completely”—Brando and Steiger played the scene brilliantly. Huddled together in the back seat, the pistol appears only as a meek accessory, allowing Brando the opportunity to tap it lightly, as if to dismiss its potential lethality. His famous soliloquy that followed, poignant if not fluent, was scripted in part, but mostly ad-libbed. In fact, he had overheard the line about the possibility of being a contender from Roger Donahue, a former boxer, then working as an extra on the set. Like a sponge, and acutely aware of what sounded authentic, Brando stored it in his memory bank and cashed it during the central scene of the film.⁴⁶

Terry knows that the stakes are high. His life, and perhaps his brother’s fate as well, his place in the community, his job, his love for Edie, and his own moral stature are all in play. After the gun incident, Charley speaks of how beautiful and talented Terry was in his boxing prime. Terry grows agitated at this reverie. He realizes that his chance for fame as a fighter had been irrevocably squandered when Charley, along with Friendly, told him to throw a bout with a pug named Wilson. “I’d of taken Wilson apart that night! … So what happens—This bum Wilson he gets the title shot—outdoors in the ball park!—and what do I get—a couple of bucks and a one-way ticket to Palookaville.” Building to an emotional crescendo, Brando points the finger of blame unerringly: “It was you, Charley. You was my brother. You should have looked out for me. Instead of making me take them dives for the short-end money.” Charley defends himself weakly, saying that some real bucks came Terry’s way. But Terry cuts him off, with a perfect hook of dialogue: “You don’t understand. I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve had class and been somebody. Real class. Instead of a bum, let’s face it, which is what I am.”⁴⁷ Brando liked that his revisions revealed Terry’s emerging self-consciousness, his coming to terms with his responsibility to stand up to the mob while at the same time recognizing that he has lived his life like a “bum,” and he refused to delude himself that he would suddenly, or easily, be redeemed.⁴⁸

The die has been cast. Charley accepts his betrayal and pays the price: he is shot to death and hung up on a hook by his former cronies. Terry is now freed from social restraints, and temporarily from love, to seek revenge against those who have done his brother wrong. This emotional roller coaster, however, stops, thanks to various promptings which help to transform Terry into a symbol of goodness and social responsibility. The plot moves dully forward, the symbols mounting ever more obvious, but Brando transcends it all with spirited and complex acting.

Emotional expression became Brando’s signature style, displayed in subtle fashion. But the summoning of the proper emotional state began with Brando mining his own experiences, selecting the one most appropriate for the character and scene. The “raising of an eyebrow, chasing a piece of food around your mouth with your tongue, or making a tiny, fleeting statement by frowning,” were all parts of Brando’s repertoire for capturing emotional states.⁴⁹

It seemed an axiom for the method school notion of “affective memory” that the more emotional experience (joys and hurts) the actor would have to draw upon, the better the performance. There was no scale ranking emotions—childhood beatings versus unrequited love. And, of course, while all actors no doubt have pasts marked by unhappiness, not all actors can draw upon those memories with equal effectiveness. Brando admitted: “In hindsight, I guess my emotional insecurity as a child … may have helped me as an actor, at least in a small way. It probably gave me a certain intensity I could call upon that most people don’t have.”⁵⁰

Brando’s childhood had been flooded with a storm of emotional damage. When he spoke to reporters, however, he went out of his way to emphasize the normal and happy nature of his childhood. In the Time magazine cover story from 1954, his childhood was represented in broad, idyllic strokes—a mother at once encouraging and beautiful, talented and loving sisters, life on a farm where Marlon’s empathy for animals and the downtrodden was apparent (he once brought home a sick homeless woman). Although he was exiled as a teen for a few years of discipline at a military academy—Brando referred to it as “the military asylum”—the upside of the experience was that he had begun acting in school plays. Little in his past, according to the magazine, hinted of darkness and despair.⁵¹

Brando in fact caressed a teething hurt about his childhood. His mother, while beautiful and encouraging, was deeply unhappy—finding escape in a liquor bottle. Many were the times, Brando later admitted, when he and his sisters had been forced to haul their mother, lost in an alcoholic haze, back home to dry out, only to find her soon repeating her disappearing act. His father had successes in business, and he could be charming, but he was restless and often on the road, hooking up with bar floozies or brawling in a barroom. When home, he was distant and competitive with Marlon, trying to make his sensitive son into the type of hardened and hearty fellow that he considered himself to be. Such plans went awry—hence the military school to discipline young Marlon, who already disdained authority. He refused to kowtow to expectations, and prized above all else displays of individuality. Nonetheless, Brando maintained that he had inherited his “instinctual traits” from his mother and his “endurance” from his father.⁵²

But their legacy sometimes crippled him in private, and his personal life in 1954 was unraveling. It was written into his contract for On the Waterfront that he could flee the set, no matter what was happening, when it came time for regular appointments with his psychiatrist, Dr. Bela Mittelman. And he cashed in this get-out-of-jail card at the most inopportune times, for instance midway in the filming of the cab scene. Unfortunately, in many ways Mittelman was precisely the wrong psychiatrist for what ailed Brando. He wanted the love that had been denied him by his parents when he was a child. As Brando sadly admitted, Mittelman was “the coldest man I’ve ever known. I saw him for several years, seeking empathy, insight and guidance, but all I got was ice.”⁵³ Even Mittelman’s office, Brando recalled, was “frigid” in its furnishings.

Maybe Mittelman, paradoxically, was to thank for not resolving Brando’s inner turmoil. He was allowed to draw from the well of his experiences and to translate them into complex characters, men that were uncomfortable with older tradition and sensibility, young men experimenting with their sexual identity and fretting about their moral cores. Harold Clurman, who was married to Stella Adler and a director of great ability himself, put his finger on Brando’s pain and its relation to his acting: “He cannot voice the deepest part of himself: it hurts too much.” But that “innermost core—secret … can find its outlet only through acting. And it is precisely because his acting has its source in suffering, the display of which he unwittingly resists, that it acquires its enormous power.”⁵⁴

Acting, especially in films like The Wild One and On the Waterfront, served as a roundabout means of Brando satisfying his need for love and for expressing his rebellious nature. Brando inaugurated a new “intensity of feeling,” in the words of stage director and critic Robert Brustein. He was a risky, serious actor, upping the Hollywood ante. Now American films, Brustein predicted, might become more artful and daringly realistic, full of deep emotion, as in the films made by Italian directors Vittorio de Sica and Roberto Rossellini.⁵⁵ Brando’s special talent, as critic Pauline Kael remarked, was to “convey the multiple and paradoxical meanings in a character.”⁵⁶

Brando’s emotional sensibilities and style resonated with at least part of the American public. After The Wild One, sales of leather jackets were said to have soared, according to Brando.⁵⁷ Elvis Presley, a huge fan of that film, joined Brando’s look to his blues-infused music to become a superstar. In an era when overblown fears of juvenile delinquency resounded and teenagers were looking for a screen presence that spoke (with studied hesitation—“inarticulation that was so articulate,” according to one critic) to their own inner turmoil, Brando fit the bill magnificently.⁵⁸ His was an aesthetic of emotional range, rebellion, and liberation—transformed, via talent and style—into artistry of the highest order, into a new sensibility.