Cinema: A Tiger in the Reeds

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Nonsense, says Elia Kazan, who directed him in Streetcar and Waterfront. "Brando is just the best actor in the world today." Many experts agree. Not since John Barrymore first hauled on his buskins has a young actor's fire brought such a light to so many critics' eyes. Almost all his Broadway performances have won rave reviews ("our most memorable young actor"), and he has backed the cinema critics into the adjective bin. They have felt in Brando's acting a kind of abysmal reality that not even Barrymore, who in all technical respects was far and away Brando's superior, could plumb. At moments he can vanish into the character he is portraying like a salamander into stone—or a tiger in the reeds. Said one thoughtful playgoer: "The only other place I've ever seen such a terrifying shift of identity is in a schizophrenic ward. But this man has control of what he's doing. He has the power of total camouflage, like a dweller in the third day of creation." A moviemaker sighed last week: "I thought I'd seen everything, but it looks as if we've got a genius for a matinee idol."

The Slob. The realization that the public could go for an actor who was neither beautiful nor dumb shook Hollywood hard. Brando himself was even more of a shock. When he landed in town in 1950 to make The Men, Hollywood stood there with wide-open arms and a dazzling smile of welcome. But Brando, a sullen kid who went everywhere in blue jeans and a soiled T shirt, stubbornly resisted the town's professional charm. He snorted at the "funnies in satin Cadillacs" and told them precisely, in Miltonic periods of incomprehensible jive talk, what to do with their "putrid glamour." He wanted to be left strictly alone, he snarled, and as for that "cultural boneyard" called Hollywood: "The only reason I'm here is because I don't yet have the moral strength to turn down the money."

Hollywood reacted with hurt confusion, and clouds of columnists began buzzing about Brando's head. Day after day, the brightest color in many a gossip column was Brando blood. They called him "the male Garbo," and "a Dostoevsky version of Tom Sawyer." They built up a legend in the public mind that, true or false, is sure to stick. Where Barrymore was "The Great Profile," Valentino "The Sheik" and Gable "The King," Marlon Brando is known to millions who read about Hollywood every day as "The Slob."

The Slob is by no means all he is wisecracked up to be. Two simple examples: he takes his work seriously and he pays his debts. But some of the legends have been so often repeated, even by Brando's admirers, that they are hard to separate from the historical facts.