Brando Classic Movies

Turner Classic Movies is reairing Leslie Greif's new documentary Brando tonight, at the crack-of-dawn slot from 3:15am, but that's what VCRs and DVRs are for. Like most of its engaging histories (Richard Schickel's current Bienvenue Cannes is another) Brando is more affectionate than probing, but with a runtime of three hours (over two 90-minute parts, both of which will be shown this morning) it digs a little deeper than most, and has the breadth to give an all-star cast of talking heads more time to talk.

Interestingly, actors who worked with Brando, like Edward Norton and Jane Fonda, say little about his actual on-set presence. But a poised and reflective Fonda (has 70 ever looked so inviting an age?) is quite insightful discussing his political activism, and familiar war stories about the likes of The Godfather (pictured) are all the more vivid when co-stars Al Pacino, James Caan, and Robert Duvall are on camera retelling them. The freshest, and best, anecdotes come from less familiar sources. Director George Englund, a long-time friend of the actor, candidly discusses the rupture that occurred when they worked together on 1963's The Ugly American, as ego and laziness clouded Brando's career. (Englund's wife, Cloris Leachman, continued to take his late-night phone calls, which came so late the actor sometimes dozed off between sentences). And Ed Begley, Jr., steals the show when, late in the second part, he relates a hilarious story about one of Brando's environmental whims. It's in Peter Manso's dirt-shoveling 1994 bio of the actor, but Begley's imitation of Brando is dead-on funny. (If only they had brought cameras to Sotheby's New York auction of his personal effects, in 2005; I wandered through the public viewing, which included his cars, furniture, annotated scripts, and DVDs--was he really a fan of Batman & Robin?)

Brando is at its best when its subject is simply observed working, or politely answering and evading, simultaneously, talk show queries. (The Tahitian footage is striking, too.) And the golden era film clips are magnificent; one quibble is that The Men, his undervalued first film, is again short-shrifted when the show moves from the stage and screen adaptations of A Streetcar Named Desire, as if Fred Zinnemann's war veteran picture had never happened in between. Such eloquence when he was on top of his game (see also his own One Eyed Jacks, and Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn!, for further proof his greatness); so much waste when he walked through parts or lent his name to junk.

I had a few words about him in an article that is soon to run on Cineaste's website, about a recently issued box set of his films: "I picked up The Marlon Brando Collection, and was baffled to find that The Formula, produced in 1980, was positioned before 1953's Julius Caesar. I quickly realized that the films were boxed alphabetically, and not chronologically, which offended my delicate cineaste sensibilities. Viewed alphabetically, the five films are a time travel experiment gone horribly wrong, with the bloated, out-of-it Brando pulling rank on the most exciting actor of his generation; the unwary might never get past The Formula, the newest film in any of the collections I viewed, and the worst, with Brando and George C. Scott plodding through murky Big Oil intrigue like two weary brontosaurs. I immediately reshuffled the discs, as any self-respecting movie lover should do, and watched them in date order, where they form an intriguing electrocardiogram of a career. Brando ("from T-shirt to toga," reads the box copy) more than holds his own against the likes of John Gielgud and James Mason in the formal surroundings of the Shakespeare adaptation. The Teahouse of the August Moon, where the actor turns Japanese, is an awkward attempt by the performer to fit into the Hollywood mainstream of the mid-Fifties, but Brando gives his uneasy, stereotyped role something of a pulse. 1962's Mutiny on the Bounty has the actor literally at sea, trying to impose some personality on a heavy-duty epic typical of its time. John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye, from 1967, is a definite spike, one of the best and certainly the most unusual of the films Brando made in the wilderness years before The Godfather. Opposite a brash Elizabeth Taylor, he is constantly surprising as a career office wrestling with his submerged homosexuality. But the jolt wouldn't last. Finally, and sadly, comes the flat line of The Formula, and his immortal offer to Scott: "Milk Dud?"