“A brute who was all muscle and no mind”: when Marlon Brando’s transformative style was savaged
Two decades after his death at the age of 80, Marlon Brando remains a talking point. To some, he is a titan, capable of knocking out audiences with a single chiselled stare or explosive delivery. To others, he is a tremendous waste of skill, throwing away his talent and good looks in a downward spiral of self-hatred and bad decisions. Regardless of your personal opinion of the man, there can be no doubt that he occupies rarified air in the history of the silver screen
One of the most important things Brando ever did wasn’t a specific role or interview but a technique he popularised. He was one of the first major stars to utilise Konstantin Stanislavski’s school of thought on acting, which would develop into the practice known as the method. Thanks to Brando, actors were now encouraged to fully assimilate with their characters, live their lives as them, and better understand what makes them tick. The practice is still going strong today and is just as divisive as it was in the 1950s.
What made Brando an icon and an inspiration to fellow legends like Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Nicolas Cage, Kurt Russell, and countless more was that he brought something to the profession that nobody had ever done. He was the first of his kind, and as often tends to be the case whenever anything new arrives to upend the established order, not everyone was convinced.
In his feature debut, playing a wounded veteran in the 1950 drama The Men, Brando adopted the naturalism and commitment that would define his career and influence generations. However, because nobody had acted in such a way before, some critics weren’t convinced.
In particular, one Variety reviewer suggested that Brando had “made quite a career of talking if he doesn’t know how to,” a scathing rebuttal issued towards his seminal performance as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, which he played on stage and screen.
Instead of commending his acting, it was suggested that he instead “grunted and groaned” through a performance that painted him as “a brute who was all muscle and no mind,” with his immersive acting techniques waved away as little more than “a symphony of animal sounds”.
Brando’s famous line delivery – Frank Sinatra called him ‘Mumbles’ to wind him up on the set of Guys and Dolls – was praised and detracted in equal measure. When he appeared as Mark Anthony in the 1953 film version of Julius Caesar, many critics found this approach disrespectful to Shakespeare’s words. However, would we have gotten the iconic drawl of Vito Corleone in The Godfather without Brando’s unique approach to speech? It’s hard to imagine anyone delivering “on the day of my daughter’s wedding” in any other way.
They might not have been conventional (or even audible in some instances), but Brando’s distinctive tones have stood the test of time. He has inspired countless legendary performers, and his work remains cherished by his biggest fans, often imitated but never fully replicated.
Without Brando’s influence, there would be no Daniel Day-Lewis or Christian Bale today. Equally, there would have been no Jared Leto on the set of Suicide Squad, but nobody’s perfect.
