They don't make them like Marlon Brando any more. Thank goodness, says Donald Clarke, of the divine monster of his age.
At some point in the late 1980s Burt Lancaster appeared on television to speak about his craft. Towards the end of the programme the audience was invited to throw questions at the great man and, perhaps inevitably, somebody asked Burt to identify the greatest actor then living. Lancaster, a man of limited patience, adopted the same aghast look he might wear if asked to name the current president of the United States. "Brando," he replied. "Of course, Brando."
By the time Lancaster made his pronouncement, Brando's career had already been drifting downriver for 30 years. Having ostentatiously sprayed the American cinema with concentrated sexuality in the middle part of the century, Marlon spent his last few decades eating, sitting, talking rubbish and - every now and then - seeking out some unsuitable project at which to fling his dilapidating talent. The history of cinema offers few vistas more bizarre than that of Brando, then the size of a small bungalow, being wheeled about the jungle in 1996's The Island of Dr Moreau. Orson Welles, when reduced to hawking sherry in his latter years, at least looked as if he was enjoying himself. Marlon's Dr Moreau wore the eyes of a man who might welcome death.
That same year, Brando, a lifelong liberal who worked hard for the civil-rights movement, was interviewed on television by Larry King. "Hollywood is run by Jews. It is owned by Jews," he ranted, before going on to discuss the industry's inclination towards negative stereotyping. "We have seen the nigger and greaseball, we've seen the chink, we've seen the slit-eyed dangerous jap, we have seen the wily Filipino, we've seen everything but we never saw the kike."
Given such rants and the quality of his later films, it is unsurprising that an unshakeable orthodoxy has developed which states that, though we may enjoy the midlife renaissance of The Godfatherand Apocalypse Now, the one true Brando is the fellow who appears in A Streetcar Named Desireand On the Waterfront. Those films, released in 1951 and 1954 respectively, offer us the sweaty sex god who, in concert with Elvis Presley, reminded Eisenhower's Americans that they had pink flesh beneath their three-button suits and floral prints.
Anything after 1960 (or so) equates with Presley's work after he returned from the army: often vivid, but never exactly fresh. So goes the official line.
An upcoming retrospective at the Irish Film Institute gives punters the opportunity to test that orthodoxy. As well as A Streetcar Named Desireand On the Waterfront, the season takes in other early classics such as The Menand The Wild One, before going on to showcase later, fatter films such as The Missouri Breaksand Apocalypse Now. The event does not include The Island of Dr Moreau, but it does feature Last Tango in Paris, which, despite its inflated reputation, is just as stupid and considerably more pretentious.
Before his emergence on screen, Brando had already overpowered Broadway with his definitive performance as Stanley Kowalski in the stage production of Streetcar.
BORN IN NEBRASKAto a bohemian mother, Brando spent time at a military academy in Minnesota, but was expelled for speaking disrespectfully to an officer, and, after a spell digging ditches, ended up studying under the legendary Stella Adler at the Actors Studio in New York City.
Adler was the great American evangelist for that intense process of dramatic immersion known as the Stanislavsky System. Over the last 50 years, disputes have raged between followers of Adler and of her friend - and eventual rival - Lee Strasberg as to the true inheritor of Konstantin Stanislavsky. "The Method", as the American incarnation of the Russian actor's system came to be known, was often simplistically characterised as a cult that encouraged actors playing cabbies to drive real cabs and actors playing leprechauns to mend real shoes. Whatever its origins and whatever its demands, the Method did, in the early years of the 1950s, unquestionably inspire a very distinctive style of acting.
The Method's high priests would argue that the performances of Brando and, later, of Montgomery Clift and James Dean emulated human behaviour more accurately than the work of any previous actors.
Is this really so? No sane person would deny the naked charisma of Brando in those early roles. Tennessee Williams, when writing A Streetcar Named Desire, clearly felt that the decline of Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalkski's mentally fragile sister-in-law, should provide the psychological core of the play. It was, however, Stanley - brutish but persuasively vulnerable - who left the most lasting impression on viewers of Elia Kazan's original stage production and his subsequent film.
Brando's characteristic diction, which, though slurred, was never less than intelligible, certainly aped the patterns of demotic speech and his slouched posture made an arresting contrast with the straight backs of the era's more conventional stage actors.
But, from five decades remove, Brando's breakout performances now look spectacularly mannered. Call to mind the low-key, unobtrusive acting of non-professional performers in films by such realists as Ken Loach and Abbas Kiarostami and then set them beside the snorting, shuffling and hair ruffling of Brando, Dean and Clift. You may very well argue that the early graduates of the Method attract the eye more insistently, but there is little doubt which performances do a better job of replicating natural human rhythms. The ease with which any talented comedian can construct a parody of early Method acting stands as evidence of its artificiality.
By the end of the 1950s, the cinema was awash with actors who grunted and mumbled like Brando. It is, perhaps, no wonder that he began to regard the business with something like contempt. Suddenly he looked like little more than the greatest Marlon Brando impersonator of the bunch. Best leave them to it.
By way of contrast, there is nobody quite like the Brando of the middle and later years. When the actor eventually turned up to the set of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Nowhe was vastly overweight, didn't know his lines and had failed to read Heart of Darkness, the Joseph Conrad novella on which the film was based. Yet his eccentricity and stubborn individuality made something utterly singular of Col Kurtz. Nobody else would have attacked the part that way. Nobody else would have wanted to.
The fatter he got and the less attention he paid to his scripts, the more singular his performances became. By the close of his career, when acting in films as terminally unwatchable as The Score, The Braveand, yes, The Island of Dr Moreau, he had, perhaps inadvertently, achieved a quite arresting degree of grotesque originality. An acting oil tanker, beside whom other performers seemed like mere skiffs and dinghies, late Brando was one of the divine monsters of his age.
• The Brando Retrospective begins in the Irish Film Institute tomorrow.
