AIR
M
arlon Brando loved watching people, a habit that supported a genius for impersonation and characterisation. Though it came naturally, he pursued it with an almost scientific zeal. “The face is an extraordinarily subtle instrument,” he noted. “I believe it has 155 muscles in it. The interaction of those muscles can hide a great deal, and people are always concealing emotions. Some people have very non-expressive faces… In such cases I try to read their body posture, the increase in the blink rate of their eyes, their aimless yawning or a failure to complete a yawn—anything that denotes emotions they don’t want to display.” 62
Brando made a lifelong study of emotions and the differences of personality and culture that inhibited their expression, which he managed to exploit in a remarkable variety of film roles. His interest in human faces went beyond their function as measures of diversity. He was also aware of how they revealed, in profit-driven Hollywood, an actor’s marketability, or the lack thereof. The smiles accorded celebrities by the local cognoscenti were calibrated to their earning power. “You can figure which salary bracket a Hollywood actor is in by the kind of smile he gets. When I first came out here I got USD40,000 a picture. The smiles
people gave me showed two teeth. Now, I’m paid around USD125,000 and more, I get both uppers and lowers, but they’re locked together. The smile goes up at the corners, but the teeth are set. I’ll never get the kind of big fat grins that go with USD250,000 a picture. They only pay that kind of money to cowboy stars.” Brando’s sense of what smiles could expose explains why the characters he played were unaccustomed to happiness. But equally important was his understanding of smiles as indices of vulnerability or manipulation. When he does smile in films, it’s usually compromised in some way – it’s a half-smile, or an ironic smile,
