Brando
Though enemies in ideology, the US and Soviet Union remained bound together throughouth the cold war by three common things:
over-the-top cheesy patriotism, an ever-growing military budget, and....METHOD ACTING!!! Or, perhaps more properly, Stanislovsky's Method. And in this hemisphere, at least on the Big Screen, Marlon Brando may have had no peer in Method Acting. My mom thinks this is because James Dean only had about a year and a half of screen lifetime before spinning out of control on a California highway, but we'll never know for sure.
At any rate, I seem to be amassing quite a collection of Marlon Brando films on DVD. I've already mentioned Apocalypse Now, which I honestly do love, really. Over the past few nights I've been taking in, in chunks, Mankiewicz' "Julius Caesar", in which Shakespeare appears to tell the story of an emperor who is worshipped as a god who some people kill so he can't be crowned a king. Go figure. Anyway, Brando is Mark Anthony (or Antoine, as my French subtitles tell me....I'm doing double duty and practicing French, plus, it helps me understand the Jacobean English). This I'm less impressed with, in part because it's not that ubiquitous as a role, and for a method actor especially he seems especially rigid in it. I got "The Godfather" in the mail from Amazon a few days ago....haven't seen that one in years, but remember being just mesmerized by the big guy's performance in it.
There's such a commanding presence about this guy. Maybe I'm not great at describing it, but it seemed to me Brando really got into the skin of Don Corlione, of Kurtz, of the ex-boxer longshoreman in "On the Waterfront". And yet there was something he brought to each role that put his own stamp on them.
I saw a good documentary on the life of Brando sometime last year in which Brando himself talks about Method Acting and his approach to it. Wish I could remember the cable channel I saw it on, and the name of the documentary. I think it must have been AMC.
over-the-top cheesy patriotism, an ever-growing military budget, and....METHOD ACTING!!! Or, perhaps more properly, Stanislovsky's Method. And in this hemisphere, at least on the Big Screen, Marlon Brando may have had no peer in Method Acting. My mom thinks this is because James Dean only had about a year and a half of screen lifetime before spinning out of control on a California highway, but we'll never know for sure.
At any rate, I seem to be amassing quite a collection of Marlon Brando films on DVD. I've already mentioned Apocalypse Now, which I honestly do love, really. Over the past few nights I've been taking in, in chunks, Mankiewicz' "Julius Caesar", in which Shakespeare appears to tell the story of an emperor who is worshipped as a god who some people kill so he can't be crowned a king. Go figure. Anyway, Brando is Mark Anthony (or Antoine, as my French subtitles tell me....I'm doing double duty and practicing French, plus, it helps me understand the Jacobean English). This I'm less impressed with, in part because it's not that ubiquitous as a role, and for a method actor especially he seems especially rigid in it. I got "The Godfather" in the mail from Amazon a few days ago....haven't seen that one in years, but remember being just mesmerized by the big guy's performance in it.
There's such a commanding presence about this guy. Maybe I'm not great at describing it, but it seemed to me Brando really got into the skin of Don Corlione, of Kurtz, of the ex-boxer longshoreman in "On the Waterfront". And yet there was something he brought to each role that put his own stamp on them.
I saw a good documentary on the life of Brando sometime last year in which Brando himself talks about Method Acting and his approach to it. Wish I could remember the cable channel I saw it on, and the name of the documentary. I think it must have been AMC.