UPDATE:
There are now more blog pieces in my "Marlon Brando Series":
THE YOUNG LIONS: (read here)
GUYS AND DOLLS: (read here)
THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON: (read here)
THE WILD ONE: (read here)
ONE-EYED JACKS: (read here)
MORITURI: (read here)
*NEW* THE FUGITIVE KIND: (read here)
THE YOUNG LIONS: (read here)
GUYS AND DOLLS: (read here)
THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON: (read here)
THE WILD ONE: (read here)
ONE-EYED JACKS: (read here)
MORITURI: (read here)
*NEW* THE FUGITIVE KIND: (read here)
For all my video chats and video edits, visit my YouTube Channel: Dominque Revue Productions
And for my other Marlon Brando pieces see ALL ABOUT MY STELLA (read here) and MARLON BRANDO (read here).
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The month of February 2018 is a busy one in the film works of Marlon Brando. Aside from the *six* (correction from 5) films that will be featured during 31 DAYS OF OSCAR on TCM:
JULIUS CAESAR (blog post read here) SAYONARA (blog post read here) VIVA ZAPATA! (blog post read here) A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (blog post read here) ON THE WATERFRONT (blog post read here) (... With an additional blog for MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (blog post read here) … Missed seeing this prior to my post (my app doesn't always work properly). Ugh! Alright, I'll carry on ...)
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... This month brings two stage anniversary openings: 'Anitgone' (as the Messenger (1)), opening February 18, 1946, and 'Truckline Cafe' (as Sage McRae), February 27, 1946, as well as two film premieres for Marlon Brando: VIVA ZAPATA! (1952), making its New York premiere on February 7, 1952, then opening in Miami, Florida come February 14, 1952, and Chicago, Illinois, on February 29, 1952; and THE CHASE (1966) with its February 17, 1966, premiere in Boston, Massachusetts and in New York City, New York, February 19, 1966.
I can draw no conclusions about my life because it is a continually evolving and unfolding process. I don't know what is next. I am more surprised at how I turned out than I am about anything else. I don't ever remember trying to be successful. It just happened. I was only trying to survive. Much like a newly fertilized egg, I look now at some of the things I have done in life with astonishment. Fifty years ago, at a party at home, I climbed out the window of my apartment in New York and clung to a balustrade eleven stories above Seventy-second Street as a joke. I can't imagine myself ever having done that. I have difficulty reconciling the boy I was then with the man I am now.
I suppose the story of my life is a search for love, but more than that, I have been looking for a way to repair myself from the damages I suffered early on and to define my obligations, if I had any, to myself and my species. Who am I? What should I do with my life? Though I haven't found answers, it's been a painful odyssey, dappled with moments of joy and laughter. In one of my letters from Shattuck, I told my parents, "In a play written by Sophocles ... the Anitgone, there are lines that say: 'Let be the future: mind the present need and leave the rest to whom the rest concerns ... present tasks claim our care: the ordering of the future rests where it should rest.' These words written two thousand years ago are just as applicable today as they were then. It seems incomprehensible that through the fifteen thousand years since our species came into being, we have not evolved.
—Marlon Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me
By the time 'Truckline Cafe' (written by Maxwell Anderson) came into Marlon's life, he had just turned down going on the road with the Broadway Play 'I Remember Mama', already discovering playing a recurring role for a long period so many days a week, was not for him, and a role—after he read for and got the part, according to his sister Jocelyn—was so nervous, instead of walking out of the door to the room, walked right into the closet by mistake. So embarrassed he was by this, he said he didn't know how to get out, what to do. After a moment, he walked out and asked, "Do I still get the part?" Thus, started the professional stage career for Marlon Brando on Broadway in his debut as Nels in 1944 (October 19th).
It was too during this time, WWII still going on, Marlon, known to those around him to always be a curious mind and soul, emotionally, sympathetically, in constant search and wonder of his own existence and the people around him, wondered, though there was a war going on, what had changed? "... in Harlem black people were still being treated as less than human, there was still rampant poverty and anti-Semitism and there seemed to be as much injustice as before. I was beginning to hear a voice in my head that said I had a responsibility to do something about it and that acting was not an important vocation in life when the world was still facing so many problems." |
Brando had written home while he was in Washington that he had become active in "The American League for a Free Palestine" (by way of the Adlers), and was not only helping raise money, but was also sending practically his whole salary to Europe, and even in that, he felt it was not enough. It was during this time he wrote that he had seen a newsreel showcasing the up rise of the Ku Klux Klan again "en masse," stating his strong desire to wrap up and leave Washington, a place he felt was "strongly anti-Negro and I'm getting awfully mad ..."
The role of 'Truckline Cafe' as Sage McRae, Brando gives credit to Stella Alder (the Stella Adler, his acting teacher) for getting the role.
During the play, Sage (Brando) finds out that what he denies being true, is in fact true. His wife was unfaithful to him while he was gone, in the war. As a result, Sage shoots his wife (off stage) and returns "to the audience" in a confessional breakdown revealing he shot his wife.
Brando's "murder monologue" has been written as witnessed, being one of the most electrifying moments on stage:
“I thought [he was a] guy they pulled in off the street. Too good to be an actor.” —Charles Durning (from 'The Villager: In “Broadway: The Golden Age"' edition read here)
From TCM's 2007 documentary 'brando.':
"We were all sort of standing around, and all of a sudden, I heard this voice, "I killed her, I killed her, I killed her!" I didn't know what to think. I still can't ... I mean ... I still feel it." —Kevin McCarthy (too in the production, who initially wanted to play the role of Sage, also said of Brando's performance "That man, that young man—he was about twenty-one, went out there and ... just ... destructed, destroyed my ideas of how ... what it's all about.")
"When it was over, I never heard so much cheering, and shouting, and clamping, and stomping of their feet, and standing up ... the play couldn't start for about a minute and a half—and that's a long time, but nothing happening. And he stopped the play." —Karl Malden
"I saw TRUCKLINE CAFE—he came on and did a scene about four minutes, and absolutely stunned the audience. And when we were left empty, empty and wounded by this actor." —Eli Wallach
During the play, Sage (Brando) finds out that what he denies being true, is in fact true. His wife was unfaithful to him while he was gone, in the war. As a result, Sage shoots his wife (off stage) and returns "to the audience" in a confessional breakdown revealing he shot his wife.
Brando's "murder monologue" has been written as witnessed, being one of the most electrifying moments on stage:
“I thought [he was a] guy they pulled in off the street. Too good to be an actor.” —Charles Durning (from 'The Villager: In “Broadway: The Golden Age"' edition read here)
From TCM's 2007 documentary 'brando.':
"We were all sort of standing around, and all of a sudden, I heard this voice, "I killed her, I killed her, I killed her!" I didn't know what to think. I still can't ... I mean ... I still feel it." —Kevin McCarthy (too in the production, who initially wanted to play the role of Sage, also said of Brando's performance "That man, that young man—he was about twenty-one, went out there and ... just ... destructed, destroyed my ideas of how ... what it's all about.")
"When it was over, I never heard so much cheering, and shouting, and clamping, and stomping of their feet, and standing up ... the play couldn't start for about a minute and a half—and that's a long time, but nothing happening. And he stopped the play." —Karl Malden
"I saw TRUCKLINE CAFE—he came on and did a scene about four minutes, and absolutely stunned the audience. And when we were left empty, empty and wounded by this actor." —Eli Wallach
A performance that "Truckline" director (and producer only in this production) Harold Clurman and Elia Kazan (the first of many Kazan/Brando collaborations together—the two, in their early beginnings, sizing one another up frequently, without talking, watching each other's moves, feeling the other out) helped Brando tap into.
Kazan, by telling Marlon to run up and down the stairs of the theater in the basement right before it was time for him to make his cue onstage during the play's performances. And Clurman, during rehearsals one day when Clurman insisted Brando read his lines aloud, alone on stage, to break away from his "mumbling"—his inability to get the hurt from within his own self, out. Forcing Marlon to climb a rope that hung above the stage. As this routine played on at Clurman's constant repeating for Brando to yell his lines in motion, once completed (so successfully, a crowd formed in the wings of the stage from the cast members who heard this bellowing yell and watched this "quiet boy" yell in rage while climbing a rope as if it were second nature to him, in awe), Clurman told Brando to then run the scene as normal, but not before seeing Brando's own enraged face, as Clurman confessed later, in thought, that he was about to be hit by Marlon. And as another source tells it, actress Gloria Stroock, who was in the play:
Kazan, by telling Marlon to run up and down the stairs of the theater in the basement right before it was time for him to make his cue onstage during the play's performances. And Clurman, during rehearsals one day when Clurman insisted Brando read his lines aloud, alone on stage, to break away from his "mumbling"—his inability to get the hurt from within his own self, out. Forcing Marlon to climb a rope that hung above the stage. As this routine played on at Clurman's constant repeating for Brando to yell his lines in motion, once completed (so successfully, a crowd formed in the wings of the stage from the cast members who heard this bellowing yell and watched this "quiet boy" yell in rage while climbing a rope as if it were second nature to him, in awe), Clurman told Brando to then run the scene as normal, but not before seeing Brando's own enraged face, as Clurman confessed later, in thought, that he was about to be hit by Marlon. And as another source tells it, actress Gloria Stroock, who was in the play:
One day, Harlod dismissed everybody for lunch. And I was sitting in the wings, and everyone left, and Harold said, 'Marlon. Don't go yet, come here.' And he said, 'Sit down.' And there was an ice cream table that was downstage, center, and he said, 'Start the scene.' So, Marlon started the scene, and within a second, started to get up, and Harlod said, 'No, no. Stay. Come on, come on, come on.' So, he goes on, and a second later, he's getting up and he said, 'No. Stay! Go on. Go on. Come on. Come on.' And he starts to do this scene, and there's so much rage in him, that he starts to pound on the table, beat up the table practically, and I remember that he wrapped his leg around the base of this iron table—it was like seeing a caged, wild animal, but he wouldn't let him move. Then the scene builds, and he was talking about the murder...and I remember sitting there with just chills, and I felt like there was a volcano that I could see just starting to erupt until it exploded, and, when he finished, Harlod said, 'That's it, Marlon. Don't lose it. Now go to lunch.' |
Albeit as brief a run it was—closing after less than two weeks (only 13 performances)—Brando himself speaks of how 'Truckline Cafe' opposite Ann Shepherd (as his wife), and another lifetime friend, Karl Malden, changed his own.
It was from "Truckline" that Marlon was offered the role of "Eugene Marchbanks" ('Candida' by Director/Producer, Guthrie McClintic—husband of stage actress, "The American Duse," Katharine Cornell), opposite Cornell. A role Marlon at first did not want to take on, being a bit overwhelmed by acting with Cornell herself. He'd write of Cornell to his sister, "Frannie" (Frances), during this time, "Cornell is very beautiful but there is a nebulous quality about her acting I find hard to relate to - acting with her is like trying to bite down on a tomato seed." But act the part, he did, and according to those who saw this young poet in scene, he did well.
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The run Marlon had onstage thus far, 'Truckline Cafe' and 'Candida' in particular, brought with it various offers elsewhere. He appeared on television, live, for the first and last time in a pilot run for a show called "Come Out Fighting," playing a boxer. After a ... er ... let's say, offbeat experience, causing him to yell "Jesus Christ!" during the live broadcast—due to the prop man missing his cue for a shower scene where Marlon is to be taking a shower (depressed because he just lost the fight). After standing there, seemingly for an eternity, trying to act his way through no water coming out of the spigot, what Brando said must have been water straight from the "freezing compartment of a refrigerator," came dumping down on him suddenly, sending him straight out of character live, in framed scene.
It was from these types of beginnings we, as spectators, are introduced to Marlon Brando versus just the actor. Someone, I think no one understands completely. But, should we? Is it this complexity that makes him relatable to some?
There was a time, before I knew the depths of his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement when I would watch a documentary on Black history—having no idea he was going to be there, and suddenly Marlon Brando's face would appear, namely a Black Panthers documentary I only came to know about several years ago, A HUEY P. NEWTON STORY (2001) and the more recent THE BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION (2015). And through these conversations with those who were there who are still alive today, you can hear and see that Brando was a welcomed supporter, sincerely wanting to help, wanting to know, what can I do? ... How can I use my being, connected to the race, in a way to improve ... life.
There was a time, before I knew the depths of his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement when I would watch a documentary on Black history—having no idea he was going to be there, and suddenly Marlon Brando's face would appear, namely a Black Panthers documentary I only came to know about several years ago, A HUEY P. NEWTON STORY (2001) and the more recent THE BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION (2015). And through these conversations with those who were there who are still alive today, you can hear and see that Brando was a welcomed supporter, sincerely wanting to help, wanting to know, what can I do? ... How can I use my being, connected to the race, in a way to improve ... life.
Here is where I will leave you, and I hope to see you around during February as I continue to share more on each one of the six days Bud's films will be shown.
Until then, take care of yourselves, Guys 'n' Dolls.
Until then, take care of yourselves, Guys 'n' Dolls.