As a young man Brando worked a range of jobs, and only stumbled upon acting when he signed up for university, which he discovered was something of a refuge for Jewish people fleeing from the war in Europe. One of his professors, Stella Adler, noticed him and immediately saw that the then-shy Brando had potential. She taught him to understand himself and how to stand out. During this period of his life, Brando tells of how he would sleep on park benches in New York, with his socks filled with holes. “I used to watch people, I studied the way they looked around, how they moved, things you couldn’t normally see, or only just.” And so the actor was born. He soon moved in with his drama teacher Stella, who helped him grow from day to day and finally make a name for himself.
The late 1960s saw Brando abandoned by the studios after a series of failures. Bitter, he decided to move away from a profession he no longer liked, and began working alongside Martin Luther King in the fight for civil rights. He threw himself into the cause, and received a number of death threats. “I’m not just defending black people, I’m defending the entire human race”, he said. Needing to get away from it all, Brando then moved to the island of Tetiaroa near Tahiti, which he had bought after filming “Mutiny on the Bounty”. “I never felt like I owned it, I just wanted to pay for the right to visit it”, he said in a perhaps exaggerated bout of emotion. After these teary declarations for his island and the Tahiti archipelago, Brando quickly sees sense, and in Riley’s documentary he runs through his filmography with little consideration for those who helped him build it. Although he does speak with a certain lucidity. When talking about French director Christian Marquand’s film “Candy” (a true flop), he says: “How could I have done that to myself? I lost all my pride. I lost my audience!”
Brando quickly became a stage actor, before moving swiftly on to cinema. Despite his relative lack of experience, Elia Kazan offered him both the stage and screen roles of Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire”. This unprecedented triumph saw Brando shoot to international fame, as well as immediately making him a sex symbol. From then on the offers came flooding in. “Viva Zapata!”, “The Wild One”, “Julius Cesar”, “On the Waterfront”, “The Fugitive Kind”, the self-directed “Return to Eden”, “Mutiny on the Bounty”, “The Chase” and “Reflections in a Golden Eye” all make up a prestigious filmography, despite the occasional poor choices and flops.
His career certainly took a turn for the worse, and it wasn’t until Francis Ford Copolla offered him the nowiconic role in “The Godfather” (against the advice of his producers) that Brando began to rebuild his reputation. But in order to win the part, he had to take part in his first ever casting session. “It was so humiliating. I didn’t know if I’d get it or not! An actor’s worst fear is fear itself. The fear of being judged.” He won an Oscar for his performance (although he refused it in a stand against how Native Americans were treated in the film industry), and his career picked up again, all be it à la Marlon Brando. He refused the role for “The Godfather II”, and demanded an astronomical price to appear in “Superman” but didn’t bother to learn his lines, preferring to read them from post-it notes stuck to his co-stars’ foreheads. He finished filming and then refused to allow his scenes to be used in the final cut.
Unruffled by any of his failures, Brando was soon considered to be one of the century’s greatest actors and a model for other actors in his generation, from James Dean and Steve McQueen to Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Everyone respected him, and directors couldn’t book him up fast enough. Yet Brando didn’t particularly like directors, and in “Listen to me Marlon” he explains his dislike for them: “They don’t know how to express emotion. They just know how to be domineering and shout orders.” Further along in the documentary he turns his scorn to all those who were linked to actors: “Agents, lawyers, publicists, it’s all bullshit. All they think of is money.”
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