The Twilight's Last Gleaming





The contrast between the coverage of Reagan's death and that of Marlon Brando's is a little distressing to me. Today is a holiday in celebration of America at its best, and to my mind, there's no doubt which of the above-mentioned best represents that concept.


Look, there's no question that Brando's personal life was a trainwreck for the last decade or two or three...hell, maybe the whole time, when you get right down to it. I have no doubt that the tales of the Final Days to come will be depressing as hell - the news stories that leaked out a few days before his death were already pretty grim, evoking images of the immense Brando sleeping on a couch in a ramshackle bungalow, $20 million in debt. Neither he nor Reagan was ever gonna pick up the Father of the Year award, but hey, Washington and Jefferson had their problems, too. It's their achievements in the public arena we should be focused on, and I'm sick of Reagan getting a free ride while the press dwells on Brando's supposedly "squandered" potential.


I couldn't say for sure when Brando entered my consciousness, but if I had to guess, I'd say it was around the time of Superman. That would have been the first of his movies I'd have been old enough to see, and I know I picked up the big DC Comics treasury edition dedicated the movie and read all the newspaper and magazine articles I could find, and gathered that he was some sort of legend who hadn't been seen in a while and had scored quite a payday for his few minutes of screentime. I don't think he made much of an impression on me as Jor-El, and I probably wondered what all the fuss was about.


The next time I saw him was probably Apocalypse Now and, again, I'm guessing I didn't get much out of his performance. I still don't think it's one of his best, but I'm always baffled when people call it a disaster. At the very least, he was an iconic presence, and he had some chilling moments, like his speech about the snail crawling across the razor and the "errand boy sent by grocery clerks" line. And who can forget the outtake from Hearts of Darkness: "I think I've swallowed a bug." And I really don't get this constant complaint: "He showed up on the set and he hadn't even read the book!" What the fuck? How come I've never heard this about any other actor in history? Does anyone know if Elliott Gould ever read The Long Goodbye? Does anyone give a shit? For that matter, did Brando ever read The Godfather? And if not, did it matter then? Apocalypse Now was a pretty loose adaptation of Heart of Darkness anyway, and why is it Brando's fault that Coppola apparently thought he'd leave it up to the actor to come up with both the character and the ending of the damn movie? (Disclaimer: it's still one of my favorite movies, despite all that.)


Anyway, the mystique of Brando became clear to me through two avenues, which, if I recall correctly, coincided pretty neatly, though I'm not sure which was the chicken and which was the egg. I cannot overstate the importance of Chris Elliott's brilliant Brando character on the old Late Night with David Letterman. He nailed the whacko Brando over a decade before the real thing's notorious Larry King appearance, and the banana dance killed me every time. This was about the time my family got our first VCR, so I was a movie-renting maniac. One night I brought home Streetcar Named Desire and was just blown away by his performance. To put it in context, I had already plowed through a lot of the 60's and 70's movies with the generation of actors heavily influenced by Brando. So even as someone who'd already seen, say, Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy and Serpico, his Stanley Kowalski was still the most electrifying, daring, ferocious, original and deeply weird performance I had ever seen. I can't even begin to imagine how it must have seemed to moviegoers in the early 50's.


I was hooked - I rented every friggin' Brando movie I could find over the next few weeks. His rightfully acclaimed performances, The Godfather, On the Waterfront, Last Tango in Paris, those were all well and good. But I was even more mesmerized by his weirdo tangents - stuff like Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Missouri Breaks. And over the years, his presence alone was enough to draw me to the theater; even if the movie itself looked to be the biggest turkey of the year, I could almost always count on him bringing enough to the party to make it worthwhile. Could he have found a better use for his talent than, say, The Island of Dr. Moreau? Almost certainly. But try to take your eyes off him in that picture. He's not just taking the money and running - he came up with a freakin' concept there, from head to toe, and turned what otherwise would have been an unwatchable mess into an insane cult classic through sheer force of personality.





Squandered talent? Check him out in The Freshman or even a trifle like Don Juan Demarco. What should he have done instead? Stuffy Oscar bait, like Paul Newman's role in Road to Perdition? Shit, he could have done that part in his sleep. It is a shame that he never worked with some of the best filmmakers of recent years - it's too bad that he did, say, the crappy faux-Coen brothers movie Free Money rather than working with the actual Coen brothers. And can you imagine what kind of craziness he and David Lynch could have come up with together? Or how his style might have flourished under Altman's direction? But who knows, maybe they never asked him.


So if you think of it this 4th of July, raise a glass to Marlon Brando. They'll never put him on Mt. Rushmore or the ten dollar bill, but he'll always make my list of great American heroes.