Brando the Oblique

It's interesting how many references I have bumped into in the last couple of days for Sturges' Sullivan's Travels and - even before the last post - it has all put me in mind of Agee's sublime pieces on cinema. I knew of Agee as an undergrad, and directly confronted his famous work with photographer Walker Evans, Let Us Praise Famous Men while a graduate student studying European history and stepping out of field to take a seminar on the American novelist Faulkner. Evans's photographs are justifiably famous; women aged beyond their years by the sharecropping life, their faces a canvas of rivulets - sometimes cupping a child in their arms whose bright and broad unlined foreheads seemed to, nonetheless, carry a gloamy recognition of what was to be their future, one that often mixed the sticky sap of cotton with dust from the local coal mine. The men, similarly aged and stoop-shouldered but possessed of wide hands that bespoke of a lifetime's strength still witheringly powerful enough to crush limestone in their palms. As striking as his photographs are though, it was Agee's accompanying prose that breathed life into their stark, almost binary-invoking, ropey muscled frames. It was only later that I learned of Agee's work as a film critic and I immediately fell into his own muscular but reasoned and finely-tuned work on cinema (more the result of the breadth of his supple - if sotted - mind than his own turn as a screenwriter I would hazard to guess). All that said, and as worthwhile as it all is, I have also been thinking about Marlon Brando since his mention in one of the first posts here. Honestly, how difficult is it to grandly declaim oneself a fan of the man - particularly now that he is dead and his less flattering courtroom appearances in defense of his eccentric family are no longer something to be grappled with - he was, after all, larger [in almost every way] than everyone else. Given his immensity, there is so much that hangs about his image like a fog that there are things for almost anyone to glom onto should they wish and so many of his roles have become, in various pitches, iconic - the angry muscularity of Stanley Kowalski, the muddled strength of Terry Malloy, the stoic and generously pragmatic Don Corleone, the burger-warped and still (even if slightly comically) gravitas-laden Col. Kurtz, or even the giddily kitshy turn as Jor-el father of Superman. Even the more awkward choices have a certain brick solidity to them, even if they come more from the backstory that Brando himself brought to them like those in "The Freshman," (the underappreciated) "Don Juan DeMarco," and the infamously bad "The Island of Doctor Moreau" where according to legend, director John Frankenheimer is reported to have come to Brando and said that he wished he could think of, or offer, a role that would once again engage or interest the actor. In most retellings, Brando is said to have replied simply "you can't" as he dismissed him. His legendary torpor has been said to spread across much if not all that he did - as powerful an actor as he was, there are ways in which he avoided - or at least didn't want to retrod paths already taken - things that pushed him beyond a certain layer of method processes; his two most powerful roles (at least often presumed to be in some quarters) Stanley Kowalski and Paul in Last Tango in Paris were ones that Brando himself said he found difficult and/or even frightening and in the latter representative of an exercise he did not care to undertake again. There are ways that he was unmatched as an actor, so the typical "reading" of him goes, in detailing and revealing the socially intimate. A personal favorite of such does come in Tango but is not the famous butter dish scene, rather it comes earlier where we see the middle-aged Paul - complete with the substantial beginnings of the middle spread for which Brando would soon become just as famous - laying on the floor of the apartment used for the two protagonists' liasons and in mid-exposition fluidly rolls himself back and over and springs to his feet with a lightly-worn athleticism that is surprising in one so large and apparently languid; all leonine and predator, the casual-ness of the exercise belying how difficult such a move is. In that one flip of brusque acrobatics Brando captured the inequality and threat of violence that lays just beneath the surface of most intimacies, the fact that all relations are negotiations of power, and seldom occur between honest equals. But, for all this, that same typical reading generally suggests that he was uncomfortable with, perhaps even incapable of expressing the universal. The same critic's obit referenced above noted, upon the release of Apocalypse Now - Redux, that in Coppola's desire for Brando to improvise "lofty ruminations on the meaning of Good and Evil . . . you can see Brando scraping the bottom of his own banality." Even if I might disagree I need not posit my defense on a different reading of his petulant approach to the role of the good Colonel. There is another which demonstrates Brando's facility with larger themes, even if accidentally; a piece of hotel cinema in fact and the only movie that Brando himself directed: One-Eyed Jacks. Here, with his trusted screen-mate Karl Malden, Brando explored the themes that have been a constant in the construction of an American narrative. Perhaps it was the self-inflicted and presumed granduer of the movie, the tagline for its 1961 release was "The motion picture that starts its own tradition of greatness" after all, but seldom is it even discussed as part of Brando's oeuvre. At notice of his death just short of 4 years ago, I can't remember a single reference to the work (or any of his 3 westerns really) in an obituary/consideration of his cinematic history. Perhaps his own dissatisfaction with the film in the end, the studio had reshot the ending to more clearly make Karl Malden's character - Dad Longworth (to Brando's Kid Rio) - a villian, and stories of his profligate tendencies as a director - shooting/wasting millions of feet of expensive VistaVision film stock - have coupled to leave the film behind despite its modest success among both filmgoers and critics. Whatever the reason for it being overlooked - I would argue that it is here that Brando most completely addressed issues of identity and boundaries and even environment that always dwelt in his work. The most typical "reading" of the film is as an adult morality tale closely tracking a variant of the Oedipal story as (ham-handedly) indicated in the familial-familiar names of the two principle characters played by the two long-time stage and screen friends and colleagues. In brief, the movie seems centered on the relationship between the two partners, Dad and Kid, who find themselves pursued by Mexican authorities after robbing a bank. Pinned down on an alkaline ridge, the only option of the two bandits is to have one ride off alone to fetch fresh horses and return for the other - Brando's Kid contrives to insure that Malden's Dad is the one to go, leaving him to face-down/hold-off the Mexican posse. Once Dad has managed the new mounts he looks briefly off towards where he left the Kid behind and rather than return facing near-certain capture, if not death, he makes the snap decision to head off with all the stolen gold himself. The captured Kid then spends the remainder of the movie looking to find his revenge on the man who betrayed him - Dad, however, has since become a straight-laced sheriff in a coastal California town where he is a respected member of the community (which knows nothing of his past) and has married a prominent Mexican widow whose beautiful young daughter he likely would also like to possess. Upon Kid Rio's arrival, he finds his personal demand for revenge blunted, not by Dad's transformation which Kid dismisses by saying "to these people you are a one-eyed jack, but I've seen the other side" (hence the title!), but his own ambivalence and conflicting desire to marry the stepdaughter and kill the stepfather. With the necessary adustments, the film is said to follow the classic pattern of the Oedipal myth. No doubt this reading to the piece is furthered by Brando's own disgust at the reshot ending which made it a more typical hero/villian tale as it changed the intent that he argued he was pushing for - that no one was inherently evil but that it was always a negotiation of the individual in response to his environment as he both responds to and is molded by the situation. But, there is much more in the movie and it is a negotiation of the entirety of the American psyche and perception of its own identity. What I see in the film is American identity as rugged and exceptional individuals, the wellsprings of which came from the vitality of the frontier, coming to painful grips with the closing of that very frontier as it comes crashing against the limits of the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, it references the fact that the West was never quite the blank slate that is so often the quiet presumption that gives lie to the telling of the great American narrative. While native Americans might not make much of an appearance in the film (perhaps odd given Brando's later political interests) the continual thread of a Mexican presence, and one that is often more refined and civilized than the brutish gringos, does bring the issue of boundaries and borders, not so much geographical as psychic, onto center stage bringing into sharp relief one of the many conspicuous silences that does indeed lay at the heart of the (anglo) American experience. Brando's Kid Rio is Fredrick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis wherein the experiences of the frontier forged an America distinct from its limned European roots and created a pragmatic freedom that in turn brought its own specific idea of civilization that was more violent, more individualistic, more distrustful of authority, less artistic, less scientific, and more dependent on local, situation-specific, organizations formed locally as opposed to the centralized authority of European states. Turner first delivered his provacative and almost immediately popular thesis in 1893. Though it offered a striking argument for the difference between the flabby Old World and the quickly emerging United States based on a rugged self-reliant vitality that contrasted forcefully with the decadent palaces and ill squalor of Europe's crowded urban centers, it also sounded a distressing note for the future as the census report of 1890 had officially noted the "closing" of the frontier as it was now significantly broken-up and settled. The Exceptionalism that had defined the American experience was now significantly compromised if not simply gone. For some, including Theodore Roosevelt, this was not an ending but a new beginning that signaled that the US should continue a westward expansion into the Pacific itself. But for Turner, it meant that the country must now turn to firmly securing the nation's Republic into the bedrock of that vital experience for now it would be the legacy of the Frontier rather than the engagement with it that would mark the next century. But even in this there is recognition that the primary locus of American identity is forced into re-negotiation with itself, it was a period that likely must first wrestle with the fact that the horse, and even the six-gun, was increasingly a remnant of the past as electric and steam-powered America chuffed into the 20th century. John Wayne's final movie, The Shootist, also addresses many of these themes, on a smaller and more obvious scale as the near to elderly John Book, riddled with cancer (as Wayne himself was) and aware that not only his life but his "time" is coming to an end, arranges to go out in a final gun-fight with three other "shootists" of notorious repute - one of whom appropriately arrives at the pre-arranged saloon in a "horseless carriage." Not insignificantly, Wayne's Book survives the show-down, dispatching all three in order, only to be shot down (in the back, no personal honor without the frontier) by the cowardly bartender. Though when the idolizing young son of the woman who owned the boarding house that Book was staying at picked up the fallen man's pistol and killed the bartender and then threw the pistol away as he realized what he had done, the old man shook his head in approval, a nod that indicated he was aware that the time for men like him was past. With Brando's One-Eyed Jacks the project is not made quite so intimate, nor is it so neatly and discreetly summed up as one age passing to another. Though the experience of America is read through one man it is left a messy and confused narrative where competing and incompatible threads tangle and crash against one another. In the California town where the real drama and climax play out, the frontier is literally brought to a close by the equally rugged and beautiful and dangerous Pacific coastline; the crashing waves on the beach demonstrating not only a charged immediacy, but the short, repeated, almost frightend shots of the immense ocean itself, stretching out beyond the horizon, indicated an immensity that dwarfed the frontier itself. Where is one to go now, reinvention is necessary - and a realization of not only the importance of myth but the fact that all is always predicated on such. Brando couldn't do the large, the universal? Bah.