The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (50 page)

Even then, Brando seemed more possessed of power than actually in control of it. Too often, he impersonated characters he had thought out, rather than discover them in himself. Today, for instance, it is hardly possible to be moved by him in
On the Waterfront
for noticing the vast technical trick he is performing. There was a major attempt to uncover the real Brando in the only film he has ever directed—
One-Eyed Jacks
(61), a slow, confused story of revenge, always threatening significance, which only seemed to bemuse its maker the more. Publicly troubled by the world and involved in politics, Brando made only four more worthwhile films in the next decade:
The Fugitive Kind
(59, Sidney Lumet)—and the best screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams, in which Brando is the fallen angel hero; as the sheriff, beaten by the townsmen, in Penn’s
The Chase
(66); loftily original as the homosexual in
Reflections in a Golden Eye
(67, John Huston); and as the gradually disconcerted English aristocrat in Pontecorvo’s
Queimada!
(68).

On the other hand, he was involved in a great deal of nonsense:
Bedtime Story
(64, Ralph Levy);
The Saboteur
(65, Bernhard Wicki);
The Appaloosa
(66, Sidney J. Furie);
Candy
(68, Christian Marquand);
The Night of the Following Day
(68, Hubert Cornfield);
The Nightcomers
(71, Michael Winner); enduring every longueur in
A Countess from Hong Kong
(67, Charles Chaplin); and hopelessly reinventing an English version of Clark Gable in
Mutiny on the Bounty
(62, Lewis Milestone).

Despite so many failed or wrongheaded films, Brando still commanded total respect and attention. Even if his own uncertainty had never allowed him to dominate a whole film, he was capable of moments—like that in
The Chase
when he watches the wild horses pass by in the night—that excused everything. Then in the space of a year he reaffirmed his great talent, and took the disarray of his own career into the heart of a film.
The Godfather
(71, Francis Ford Coppola) permitted him an exercise in grand impersonation, as Don Corleone, the aging Mafia leader. Brando reveled in the careful assembly of an old man, even if he despised the limits of the film and of a Hollywood that could reward him for it with the best actor Oscar.
The Godfather
was always a resoundingly safe film, even if it may have restored Brando’s confidence. There was, on the other hand, great risk in
Last Tango in Paris
(72, Bernardo Bertolucci), an uncompromising portrait of lost middle age, a film that deliberately drew on Brando’s self and that insisted on a unique sexual participation from its actors. It is a tribute to Brando’s unceasing dignity that he has striven to seem a true person on film, not gilded by attractiveness or reputation.
Last Tango
succeeds on many levels, but not least as an accurate and disturbing presentation of the cinema’s most preoccupied actor.

He was less eager to work by now, but he had lost nothing of that power to transform a film and carry a project that needs creative daring. Could
The Missouri Breaks
(76, Penn) have been so rich and strange a movie, so open to whim and digression, so Shandyan, without Brando? His Robert E. Lee Clayton is a man of many parts, voices, and hats—the notebook of an actor, even—but truly frightening in that we believe he could do anything at any moment. Only Brando could have made the shameless pansy so lethal. But scores of other actors could have brought as much solemn, misguided presence to
Superman
(78, Richard Donner), and
Apocalypse Now
(79, Coppola) needed Klaus Kinski or Robert Duvall.

Our loss of Brando has become commonplace by now: he has suffered personal tragedy and family scandal; there was an absurd, yet half-gloating interview with Connie Chung; there is his monstrous size, and the fitful urge to be absent, a memory, an idea only. Yet now and again, whim or money brings him back, and our loss is underlined. He was wasted in
The Formula
(80, John G. Avildsen); he was eccentric in
A Dry White Season
(89, Euzhan Palcy). But all of a sudden he was enchanting and professional in
The Freshman
(90, Andrew Bergman), kidding his Corleone past and as dainty as Dumbo on the ice rink.

If Brando’s status declined even further in the nineties, it had a lot to do with his mean-spirited and shortsighted autobiography,
Songs My Mother Taught Me
, published in 1994, full of his petty stories of stolen advantage. It exposed a small mind in hideous contrast with the overlarge body. There were a few movies, but they were so bizarre and so casual they only underlined the tragedy: as Torquemada in
Christopher Columbus: The Discovery
(92, John Glen);
Don Juan DeMarco
(95, Jeremy Leven), which had moments of charm and fun;
The Island of Dr. Moreau
(96, John Frankenheimer); and then two films that found no theatrical release—
The Brave
(97, Johnny Depp) and
Free Money
(98, Yves Simoneau). In
The Score
(01, Frank Oz)—with De Niro and Edward Norton—he had to stay seated most of the time, sighing between phrases. We know the feeling.

Pierre Brasseur
(Pierre Espinasse) (1905–72), b. Paris
The son of an actress, the father of an actor, Brasseur’s heyday was celebrated by his performance as Frederick Lemaître in
Les Enfants du Paradis
(44, Marcel Carné). In part one of that film, when a feud disrupts the stage performance, Brasseur/Lemaître is into the lion’s skin in a trice, a replacement before the need for one is appreciated, with the droll warning, “Once you get me on the stage, you’ll never get me off.” The early Brasseur is generally inspired by that extrovert panache: a handsome Mr. Punch, always mocking the actor’s need for sham. (
Kean
was written by Sartre for Brasseur.) It was a long career—onstage and screen, as playwright as well as actor—with more than his fair share of worthwhile films:
Madame Sans-Gêne
(25, Leonce Perret);
La Fille de l’Eau
(25, Jean Renoir, sadly, the only time they worked together);
Les Deux Timides
(25, René Clair);
Claudine à l’École
(28);
Quick
(32, Robert Siodmak);
Café de Paris
(33);
Le Sexe Faible
(34, Siodmak);
Vous N’Avez Rien à Déclarer?
(36, Leo Joannon and Yves Allégret);
Pattes de Mouches
(36, Jean Gremillon);
Quai des Brumes
(38, Carné);
Jeunes Timides
(41, Allégret);
Lumière d’Été
(42, Gremillon);
Adieu Léonard
(43, Pierre Prévert);
Le Pays sans Étoiles
(44, Georges Lacombe);
Les Portes de la Nuit
(46, Carné);
Pétrus
(46, Marc Allégret);
Les Amants de Vérone
(48, André Cayatte);
Portraît d’un Assassin
(49, Bernard Roland);
Maître Après Dieu
(50, Louis Daquin);
Les Mains Sales
(51, Fernard Rivers);
Barbe-Bleue
(51, Christian-Jaque);
Le Plaisir
(52, Max Ophuls);
La Tour de Nèsle
(54, Abel Gance);
Oasis
(54, Y. Allégret);
Napoléon
(55, Sacha Guitry);
Porte des Lilas
(57, Clair); then startlingly somber and repressed as the conventional doctor in
La Tête Contre les Murs
(58, Georges Franju);
La Loi
(58, Jules Dassin); as the father/surgeon in
Eyes Without a Face
(59, Franju);
Candide
(60, Norbert Carbonnaux);
I Bell’-Antonio
(60, Mauro Bolognini);
Dialogue des Carmelites
(60, Philippe Agostini);
L’Affaire Nina B
. (61, Siodmak);
Pleins Feux sur l’Assassin
(61, Franju);
Vive Henri IV, Vive l’Amour
(61, Claude Autant-Lara);
Les Bonnes Causes
(63, Christian-Jaque);
Le Magot de Josefa
(63, Autant-Lara);
La Vie de Château
(65, Jean-Paul Rappeneau);
Un Mondo Nuovo
(65, Vittorio de Sica);
King of Hearts
(66, Philippe de Broca);
Les Oiseaux Vont Mourir au Pérou
(68, Romain Gary);
Goto, l’Ile d’Amour
(68, Walerian Borowczyk); and
Les Mariés de l’An II
(71, Rappeneau).

Walter Brennan
(1894–1974), b. Swampscott, Massachusetts
Brennan had been Hollywood’s preeminent “oldtimer” for so long that his real age hardly seemed relevant. But now he has gone the unsentimental way of all Hawks heroes. When he approaches any pearly gates, he may wonder if St. Peter is a cantankerous old man with a shotgun who insists on the password. Three times Brennan won the supporting actor Oscar—for
Come and Get It
(36, Wyler and Hawks),
Kentucky
(38, David Butler), and
The Westerner
(41, Wyler). What, then, should he have won for
To Have and Have Not
(44, Hawks),
My Darling Clementine
(46, John Ford),
Red River
(48, Hawks),
The Far Country
(55, Anthony Mann), and
Rio Bravo
(59, Hawks)? His Stumpy in
Rio Bravo
is the culmination of the loyal, crabby old man he had played for twenty years, the veteran who must improvise a way of sharing in the heroics that occupy the younger members of the circle. It is a performance that has very little to do with old age. Indeed, it is intensely artificial, an Arcadian dream of romance saving man from decline and debility.

He began in films in 1923 after service in the First World War and after having made and lost a fortune in real estate. The decisive impact on his career was an accident in 1932 that knocked out his teeth. Ever afterwards, he had a great asset for any comic support—false teeth—that he removed or restored from part to part. In his last dozen or so years he reclined in children’s films, but from 1930 to 1960 he was constantly in films of high quality. As well as those already mentioned, the list includes:
King of Jazz
(30, J. Anderson);
Man on the Flying Trapeze
(35, Clyde Bruckman);
Wedding Night
(35, King Vidor);
The Bride of Frankenstein
(35, James Whale);
Barbary Coast
(35, Hawks);
Three Godfathers
(36, Richard Boleslavsky);
These Three
(36, Wyler);
Fury
(36, Fritz Lang);
Banjo on My Knee
(37, John Cromwell);
The Buccaneer
(38, Cecil B. De Mille);
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(38, H. C. Potter and Norman Taurog);
Stanley and Livingstone
(39, Henry King);
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
(39, Potter);
Northwest Passage
(40, Vidor);
Sergeant York
(41, Hawks);
Meet John Doe
(41, Frank Capra);
Swamp Water
(41, Jean Renoir);
Pride of the Yankees
(42, Sam Wood);
The North Star
(43, Lewis Milestone);
Hangmen Also Die
(43, Lang);
Home in Indiana
(44, Henry Hathaway);
The Princess and the Pirate
(44, Butler);
A Stolen Life
(46, Curtis Bernhardt);
Centennial Summer
(46, Otto Preminger);
Driftwood
(47, Allan Dwan);
Task Force
(49, Delmer Daves);
Surrender
(50, Dwan); tormenting Kirk Douglas with a song in
Along the Great Divide
(51, Raoul Walsh); and
Bad Day at Black Rock
(54, John Sturges).

George Brent
(George Brendan Nolan) (1904–79), b. Shannonsbridge, Ireland
Warners in the thirties had the market cornered on tough guys and adventurers: Cagney, Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Errol Flynn, George Raft. And they had Muni for prestige. But the best first or second lead they could come up with for their female stars was George Brent. (Gene Raymond and Ricardo Cortez were runners-up.) In less than a dozen years he appeared in eleven movies with Bette Davis (she said he had “an excitement he rarely was in the mood to transfer to the screen”):
The Rich Are Always With Us
(32, Alfred E. Green);
So Big
(32, William A. Wellman);
Housewife
(34, Green);
Front Page Woman
(35, Michael Curtiz);
Special Agent
(35, William Keighley);
The Golden Arrow
(36, Green);
Jezebel
(38, William Wyler);
Dark Victory
(39, Edmund Goulding);
The Old Maid
(39, Goulding);
The Great Lie
(41, Goulding); and
In This Our Life
(42, John Huston); six movies with Kay Francis:
The Keyhole
(33, Curtiz);
Living on Velvet
(35, Frank Borzage);
Stranded
(35, Borzage);
The Goose and the Gander
(35, Green);
Give Me Your Heart
(36, Archie Mayo); and
Secrets of an Actress
(38, Keighley); four movies with Barbara Stanwyck:
So Big
—he was her boyish young protégé, although offscreen he was three years older than she was;
The Purchase Price
(32, Wellman);
Baby Face
(33, Green); and
The Gay Sisters
(42, Irving Rapper); and four movies with Ruth Chatterton:
The Crash
(32, William Dieterle),
The Rich Are Always With Us
(32, Green),
Lilly Turner
(33, Wellman), and
Female
(33, Dieterle). He married Chatterton, too, although she was considerably older and a far bigger star—one of a series of romantic conquests that seems inexplicable today. He later married Ann Sheridan. In his midforties he was still making a big impression—on the very young Jane Powell, who played his daughter in the 1948
Luxury Liner
(Richard Whorf).